This week: WP Migrate, WebP format, Atarim Web Agency Summit, a new era of WordPress themes, and much more.
Felix is a Developer Relations Engineer at Google and a WordPress core committer from Germany, currently residing in San Francisco, California. He is the lead engineer for the Site Kit plugin for WordPress and has been a regular contributor to WordPress for several years.
Outside of the web, he spends his time hiking, producing music, learning Spanish, and drinking Mountain Dew.
Just a few months ago, a WordPress performance team was formed, with the ambitious task of tackling performance in WordPress core and the ecosystem at scale. I’m very passionate about this team, and I think there is lots of room to look outside the WordPress bubble to learn about enhancing and measuring performance from other platforms on the web. The articles linked below all focus on performance on the web and also CMSs more specifically.
Something that is inherently important both before and while making performance decisions is to define and gather metrics, first to define an approach and then to validate that it actually brings the intended improvements. This article is already a couple years old, but still a great place to get started.
Of course it would be great if we could always use the latest and greatest web technologies in our projects, especially since many of them allow us to develop more efficiently and thus boost performance. However, we also must not lose touch with reality, where not every user is using a platform which supports all of those modern capabilities. I highly recommend this article that provides an in-depth description of the state of web performance in 2022. It can be quite bleak to read sometimes, but it is important to be aware of these baselines we have to build for, especially for a distributed CMS like WordPress, which is used by millions of different sites and users with different circumstances.
With already two articles looking at performance on the web, it’s time to narrow the focus on CMSs and WordPress. The Web Almanac provides a ton of notable metrics around CMS usage and performance across different segments of sites. The following article is a great resource to see where WordPress and other CMSs (whether open-source or proprietary) stand in terms of performance, based on real user metrics (“field data”).
Eric Karkovack instructs how to convince potential store owners to use WooCommerce. It might be difficult sometimes since arguments of being a true owner of all data and using an open-source solution will not always suffice.
Overcoming the Challenge of Selling Clients on WooCommerce
Rich Tabor explains how Gutenberg and Full Site Editing have changed WordPress themes. Seemingly, it’s a dawn of ‘a new era’.
Kevin Hoffman from Delicious Brains has announced that starting from version 2.3 WP DB Migrate will change into WP Migrate. Rightly so, as the plugin has long allowed migrating, more than databases.
LearnDash is taking cutting-edge e-learning methodology and infusing it into WordPress. Trusted to power the learning programs for major universities, small to mid-size companies, startups, entrepreneurs, and bloggers worldwide.
Adam Silverstein proposed that WebP be the default image format in WordPress 6.0. Quite a few doubts appeared in the comments, but in the end, I think it’s a good idea.
GutenbergHub offers a great tutorial on creating a Lorem Ipsum generator for Gutenberg.
Roger Rosweide shares how pandemics spurred his company’s transformation from SaaS through customer orders to a startup.
A list of speakers and presentations has appeared on the Atarim Web Agency Summit website, many of which I can’t wait to see.
Jonathan Bossenger describes how to configure PHPStorm to facilitate debugging of React, JS, and PHP.
David Bisset summed up a discussion about the Patchstack report on WordPress security.
The Gutenberg Examples repository has reached version 1.1.0, offering plenty of new products.
Ross Wintle has shared some interesting statistics on the naming of functions in WordPress. It’s fascinating that there is a function, whose name consists of eleven elements.
Sal Ferrarello has gathered a lot of useful tips for intermediate git users in one place.
Block Patterns directory is up and running.
WordCamp Asia 2023 will take place in February. If you want to help organize this event, here’s your chance – Call for Organizers has just been launched.
Convesio has just announced a partner program for agencies and service developers.