How WordPress 6.9 fixes email reliability
A client’s WooCommerce order emails kept landing in spam, even with SMTP set up. WordPress 6.9 fixes the deeper causes: the sender address mismatch, garbled encoding, and a 17-year-old multipart bug.
Author: Ahmad Wael
I'm a WordPress and WooCommerce developer with 15+ years of experience building custom e-commerce solutions and plugins. I specialize in PHP development, following WordPress coding standards to deliver clean, maintainable code. Currently, I'm exploring AI and e-commerce by building multi-agent systems and SaaS products that integrate technologies like Google Gemini API with WordPress platforms, approaching every project with a commitment to performance, security, and exceptional user experience.
The new WordPress Abilities API, explained
A client wanted the same URL list on an admin page, a homepage block, and an external API. The old way meant duplicating logic. The WordPress Abilities API lets you define the feature once and reuse it everywhere.
Why great code isn’t enough to sell your plugin
A developer with a clean WooCommerce plugin sold almost nothing in six months. The problem wasn’t his checkout or his code. Nobody knew who he was, because he kept writing for other developers instead of the people with the problem.
Why the WordPress singleton pattern can burn you
A reporting plugin built entirely on the Singleton pattern served stale inventory data across a client’s site. Here’s why singletons hide global state in WordPress, and the static init() method that keeps your classes testable.
WordPress 6.9: what matters and what’s just noise
A rundown of what’s worth caring about in WordPress 6.9: the new Block Processor for faster block parsing, experimental PHP-only blocks, a theme.json fix for Gallery aspect ratios, and why it pays to wait for 6.9.1.
WordPress 6.9: styling forms with theme.json
WordPress 6.9 finally lets you style core form elements from theme.json, treating textInput and select like buttons and headings. It doesn’t cover focus states yet, so here’s the hybrid theme.json plus CSS setup that works today.
Adding Schema.org microdata to Accordion block FAQs
A client needed FAQ rich snippets from the native WordPress Accordion block, without switching to a plugin’s custom block. This shows how to inject Schema.org FAQPage microdata server-side with a render_block filter and WP_HTML_Tag_Processor.
The WooCommerce CSV import bug a dot release fixed
A client’s bulk product import kept flattening their brand hierarchy. It turned out to be a WooCommerce importer bug, and the 10.3.5 dot release fixed it. Here’s what happened, plus the other fixes that shipped with it.
I built a custom WordPress block with AI in five minutes
A client wanted an auto-updating copyright block they could edit in the Site Editor. Instead of a full React build, I tried Automattic’s Telex and had an installable plugin in about five minutes. Here’s how it went and where the tool fits.
Replace WP-Cron with a real server cron job
A client’s inventory sync kept missing its schedule because WP-Cron only runs when someone visits the site. Here’s why that happens and how to move critical jobs to a real server cron job with a standalone PHP script.