Hi Reader 👋🏻,
No newsletter last week, huh? What's that about, I was asked. By quite a few of you. And I'm sorry for missing one, but this was a classic example what the great poet Mr. John Lennon once sang about: "Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans".
So yeah...
At least I've got my entire first floor new carpets. I mean there is a silver lining. For me 😅. All this to say, Reader, thank you for being here, and prepare yourself for a long newsletter!
Hope you enjoy it!
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🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
- WP Engine's DE{CODE} 2025 event is around the corner. If you haven't signed up yet, it's an online event fully dedicated to all roles responsible for building digital experiences. This includes brand marketers and agency leaders, in addition to developers. The agenda has already been published, and looks great!
- WordPress Multisite is a powerful mode for WordPress. I’ve been using this mode since it was called WordPress MU. But, what’s unknown is often times feared, right? To help you see its potential, my friends at Human Made wrote an article highlighting its features, benefits, and use cases. Check it out, it's a really good one.
- WooCommerce 9.8 was released this week and offers huge Store API upgrades with it. There's now batching for all endpoints (which is a massive performance boost). There's now a new PUT /checkout for real-time updates, and Brands now finally fully supported in the Store API. Read up on a lot more details about this change.
Make sure you also check out the changes to the Send Order Details Rest API Endpoint!
- I completed my annual WordPress Professionals Survey over at The Admin Bar. Have you?
Slightly related, there's also a tool called WordPress Hooks Extractor.
- ACF 6.4 is now available. This is a major release which brings WooCommerce HPOS support (🥳) to ACF PRO, with other fixes and improvements.
- Switch to better email & SMS marketing with Omnisend. Get the top-rated email marketing platform to convert & keep more customers. Get started today!
Prepare for WordPress 6.8
Since we’ll most likely not be seeing WordPress 6.9 this year, we had better take a real good look at what 6.8 brings to the table. Check out the response from the wp.org Core Commiters here.
This week’s newsletter is highlighting what you should know if you’re building on top of WordPress for 6.8:
More Secure Password Storage with bcrypt
WordPress core now uses bcrypt for password hashing, making your site’s security even stronger. If your site uses any kind of custom authentication, double-check that it’s compatible with this new algorithm.
👉 Learn more about bcrypt in 6.8
Faster Navigation with Speculative Loading
A cool new feature called Speculative Loading uses the browser’s Speculation Rules API to preload pages users are likely to visit next. Want more control? There are new filters you can use to tweak or turn it off for certain URLs.
👉 More on speculative loading
Smarter Block Editor Asset Loading
If you’re looking to keep things lightweight, the new should_load_block_assets_on_demand filter helps avoid loading unnecessary block assets on pages that don’t need them.
👉 Details on this filter and more block editor changes
REST API Gets Menu Access Control
The new rest_menu_read_access filter gives you finer control over what menus, menu items, and locations are publicly available through the REST API.
👉 See how it works
🌍 Internationalization Made Smoother
Good news for plugin developers: if your plugin is built for WordPress 4.6 or newer—even if it’s not in the WordPress.org directory—you don’t need to call load_plugin_textdomain() anymore.
👉 Read about the i18n improvements
🛠️ A Slew of Developer-Focused Enhancements
From shortcode consistency to improvements in media handling, post type registration, and scheduling, WordPress 6.8 is packed with thoughtful updates that make developers’ lives a bit easier.
👉 Check out all the developer changes as well as the Field Guide for 6.8.
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🚀 Performance & Security
My favorite Performance Optimizing tools in WordPress:
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🔆 Within WordPress Highlight
Sometimes you have to highlight good work, don't you? Well, my site was a mess. It was a bad mix of newsletter, podcast, and blog posts. And that's not even mentioning the general design and UX mess. So, I needed clarity and help!
I reached out to Piccia Neri for a full audit, and I’ll be honest, it was one of the smartest moves I’ve made in a while.
You might know Piccia as a UX and accessible design specialist. Her feedback was sharp, to the point, and immediately actionable. More importantly, it’s helped me make the site easier to use, and more effective at getting people to take action. Splitting off everything Within WordPress to a separate domain was one of the easy conclusions.
If you're serious about making your WordPress site work better, converting more, reaching more users, being more inclusive, and easier to use, I highly recommend checking out Piccia's audits. She offers three options depending on how deep you want to go:
- > Quick Wins – a fast video audit of one page or journey, focused on clear, easy fixes (€350)
- > Accelerator – more in-depth, with a discovery session and report to improve UX and flow across key areas (€1975)
- > Transformation – the full package: a deep audit that helps you overhaul your site (and your business) for long-term impact, compliance, and growth (€4475)
You can check out all the audits here. Seriously worth it.
Some of my favorite WordPress tools:
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💡 Interesting Finds
- Found this nifty free tool called Holiday Optimizer that can turn 15 PTO into 53 days off! You put in the days of paid time off you get p;us preferred break strategy, and it plans out when you should go on vacation. Great example of a well-designed, useful side project.
- Just found a seriously useful little tool from Microsoft: MarkItDown. It’s a lightweight Python script that converts all sorts of docs to clean, structured Markdown. I'm using it for Obsidian, but it's also perfect for devs, content folks, or anyone wrangling messy formats, especially if you're working with static sites or need Markdown for WordPress workflows.
- The <select> element can now be customized with CSS</select>. Chrome 135 debuts CSS-styleable select elements, letting developers transform their look with the sleek appearance: base-select property. Now, you can unleash rich HTML content within option elements and tap into new internal styling parts!
- Are you using GitHub Actions? Did you know that GitHub's CI/CD capabilities, commonly used for software development, can also be applied to streamline and orchestrate data pipelines?
- I needed a solution that works with larger files than WeTransfer's 2GB limit and found Swiss Transfer. They let you share up to 50GB for free. No account needed, blazing fast, and your data stays, you guessed it, securely hosted in Switzerland.
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🎁 Bonus
🎙️ For this week's podcast, I sat down with Tadas Pukas from Omnisend. I had met Tadas during the CloudFest Hackathon, and I wanted to learn more from him about email marketing, as he's Omnisend's Product Manager. What followed was a conversation full of email marketing tips, strategies, and insights. I'm sure you'll enjoy this one a lot:
That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!
Best,
Remkus
HOW I CAN HELP
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- Offer you WordPress Consultancy. From advice on how to tackle your next big (performance challenging) WordPress project to actually offering a helping hand. Just hit reply on this email
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