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WordPress 6.6 & WooCommerce 9 Readiness + Live Page Building Learnings

Hi Reader 👋🏻,

Here in the Netherlands we've had a short week with Monday being a day off. But even if there were only 4 days, there's still plenty of stuff happening this week for me to share.

Let's jump right in, shall we?

🗞️ Within WordPress News

Here’s what I saw happening this past week:

• The May edition of "What’s new for developers?" has been published on the WordPress Developer Blog. Especially with 6.6. coming up.

Good reminder on what's going to be added to 6.6 was published here, btw.

• Kevin Geary and Brian Coords did a very insightful live page building session on YouTube, hosted by Matty Eastwood. Lots to learn from the two very different approaches both take in building what they build. Very insightful.

• Pattern Overrides are coming to WordPress, if you haven't learned yet. Jonathan Jernigan wrote about it and how they will make WordPress even more powerful inside the Block Editor.

• WooCommerce 9.0 is up and coming as well. Get a first look at what's coming.

• Felix Arntz created a fun library called WP OOP Plugin Lib. It's provide classes around WordPress APIs, to be used for example in object oriented WordPress plugins.

• WordPress 6.5 brought us the Interactivity API, as mentioned in previous newsletter editions. Ryan Welcher took it upon himself to create what any developer years to create with any API. And that, of course, is a todo app 😅

All jokes aside, a great example that demonstrates one of the many purposes of this wonderful new API.

• Jonny Harris shared some changes to WordPress Multisite mode coming up. He's committed some updates to a 12 year old ticket that adds support for custom ports in URL, like localhost:8889. Which, I believe, will allow us to have multisite in WordPress.com's new local dev environment called Studio as well.

Have you played with Studio yet?

• It looks like there's a team from WordPress VIP ready to work on block-level comments as can be seen on this GitHub issue: Explore inline block commenting.

• One of my favorite performance related tools is Perfmatters. I particularly like their Script Manager which allows you to stop loading all kinds of scripts from certain pages where they don't belong. This has now seen a wonderful update to allow inline JavaScript to be deferred 😍 with version 2.2.9.

• This CSS Specificity for WordPress 6.6 issue is an important discussion to read up on if you build or maintain WordPress themes. The goal is to make it easier to style blocks and block themes. Share your thoughts on the approaches suggested in this issue!

• Daisy Olsen has recently published her course, "Introduction to WordPress Block Themes" on LinkedIn. This course takes you from beginner to expert in 17 lessons and quizzes. It covers the use of the Create Block Theme plugin and guides you on making design choices through the site editor and stylebook.

• ACF, and specifically ACF PRO is one of my favorite tools in WordPress. In fact, I think it's so good that it should've been in WordPress Core, if I'm honest. Anyway, it got even better with version 6.3 this week. Block validation rules for fields is probably my favorite new feature!

🚀 Performance & Security

• Just a very solid reminder that doing performance is not a checklist​
• content-visibility: the new CSS property that boosts your rendering performance​
• We're gonna nerd out here a bit on compression technology, but this is a fun read: Choosing Between gzip, Brotli and zStandard Compression.​

🔆 Within WordPress Highlight

• We have a new great FSE theme available to us now. The Grey Block Theme is now available on the WordPress theme directory. It's built wonderfully, but more importantly, it's fully Accessibility ready.

💡 Interesting Finds

• Over the past few years, numerous new CSS features have been developed to create more "intelligent" styles that activate under specific conditions, often tied to responsive design. How does this affect the use of media queries? According to Juan Diego Rodriguez on Smashing Magazine, media queries remain crucial for responsive layouts.
• Chrome devtools added a new “Selector Stats” pane! It’ll tell you exactly how long the browser spent trying to resolve CSS selectors.​No more debates around the performance of the wildcard (*) selector.

That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!

Best,
Remkus

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Tjongervallei 10, Oudehorne, Fryslân 8413 CS
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