WordPress for Developers: What Actually Matters?

I was troubleshooting a client’s site last week—a big multisite network, maybe 500+ subsites—and the main dashboard was timing out for super admins. A total mess. After digging around, I found the culprit: the default WordPress News widget. It was using fetch_feed() on every single dashboard load, for every site, creating a massive bottleneck. These are the kinds of obscure problems that drive clients crazy, and honestly, they’re not fun to debug. My first instinct was to just dequeue the widget entirely. Quick and dirty. But that felt like a hack, not a solution, especially since the client actually liked seeing the news updates. This is a perfect example of the small but significant WordPress 6.9 developer changes that just dropped.

How WordPress 6.9 Quietly Fixed This Mess

Here’s the kicker. In WordPress 6.9, fetch_feed() now uses site transients instead of single-site transients on multisite installs. For a non-dev, that sounds like jargon. For me, it means the feed is fetched once and cached across the entire network. The problem I spent an hour diagnosing is now solved at the core level. And that was it. No custom code, no hacky widget removal. Just a clean, smart fix. These are the kinds of updates that don’t get much press but make a huge difference in the real world. The full list of miscellaneous changes is over on the official WordPress dev blog, but a few others are worth pointing out.

Finally, Sane Taxonomy Templates

We’ve all been there. You build a beautiful custom template for a category, like taxonomy-product_cat-new-arrivals.php. A week later, the client decides to rename “New Arrivals” to “Latest Gear.” They change the slug, and your template breaks. Total nightmare. WordPress 6.9 introduces a much more robust way to handle this by allowing term IDs in the template name. The new format is taxonomy-$taxonomy-{$term->term_id}.php. It’s not sexy, but it’s stable. And stable is what clients pay for.

<?php
// Old way, breaks if 'new-arrivals' slug changes
// taxonomy-product_cat-new-arrivals.php

// New way in 6.9, rock solid.
// taxonomy-product_cat-123.php
?>

A Few Other Gems for Your Toolbox

A couple of other things stood out. First, WordPress now includes polyfills for PHP 8.5’s new array_first() and array_last() functions. It’s a small thing, but it lets you write cleaner, more modern PHP without worrying about breaking sites on older versions. Second, and this one is big for plugin developers, is the new validate_plugin_requirements hook. You can now programmatically prevent a plugin from being activated if its dependencies aren’t met—like a required PHP extension or a minimum version of another plugin.

<?php
add_filter( 'validate_plugin_requirements', function( $requirements, $plugin_file ) {
    // Only run for our specific plugin
    if ( 'bbioon-plugin/bbioon-plugin.php' !== $plugin_file ) {
        return $requirements;
    }

    // Check if the cURL extension is loaded
    if ( ! extension_loaded( 'curl' ) ) {
        $requirements['php_extensions']['curl'] = [
            'name' => 'cURL',
            'required' => true,
        ];
    }

    return $requirements;
}, 10, 2 );
?>

So, What’s the Real Takeaway?

Major features get all the attention, but these under-the-hood tweaks are what separate professional developers from hobbyists. Knowing that a new hook or template format exists can save you hours of work and prevent you from building a fragile, custom solution. It’s about knowing your toolset, inside and out.

Look, this stuff gets complicated fast. If you’re tired of debugging someone else’s mess and just want your site to work, drop my team a line. We’ve probably seen it before.

What small core change has saved you the most time on a project?