A Friday night emergency on a site I had not touched in six months cost me two hours of MAMP wrangling. WordPress Studio blueprints and selective sync are what I use now to keep client environments consistent.
WooCommerce 10.4.3 patches guest order data exposure in the Store API, throttles HPOS sync-on-read during heavy jobs, and restores the cart undo link that 10.4.2 broke.
A deleted product used to take down order history with a fatal error. WooCommerce 10.4.2 adds the null check, along with PHP 8.4 transient validation and support for the renamed WordPress 6.9 Abilities API hooks.
A client’s customer opened their account dashboard and saw a stranger’s guest order. It was not the cache. GHSL-2025-129 affects WooCommerce 8.1 through 10.4.2, and Automattic backported the fix across 23 releases.
The 6.9 update turned a client’s custom blocks into ghosts and I nearly wrote a core override for it. The December dev chat notes had the answer already: hotfix plugins now, official maintenance release in January 2026.
How automated unit tests fit into WordPress plugin work: scaffolding a suite with WP-CLI, choosing what to assert about a custom post type, and the regressions that manual click-through testing keeps missing.
A store was throwing random 500 errors at checkout because a deleted flash-sale product was still sitting in customer carts. WooCommerce 10.3.6 fixes that class of crash, along with a PHP 8.4 failure in the Helper updater.
A WooCommerce client hit editor errors after updating to 6.9, with the official fix scheduled for January 2026. Why rolling back was the wrong call and what we filtered instead.
A 6.9 update stripped the styling off a client’s product grids and stopped their order emails. Notes on ticket #64354, the PHPMailer bug and the adjacent post infinite loop, plus the plugins that bridge the gap until 6.9.1.
A WooCommerce store’s next-product links kept reloading the same page after an update. The cause was the WordPress 6.9 tiebreaker in get_adjacent_post(), plus a filter that only swapped the date out of the SQL.