Big-bang redesigns of legacy systems usually end in a blown budget and a broken database. What works instead: mapping dependencies, measuring the slow paths, and choosing a migration strategy that keeps production up.
Ten block themes I tested for personality without the performance hit, from the Afrofuturist Sankofa to the halftone lo-fi of Punk. Includes a CSS clip-path snippet for custom image shapes.
Smashing Magazine’s April 2026 wallpaper collection is out, calendars and all. I picked out a few, then got sidetracked by the asset side: dozens of resolutions per design, and how you would serve them in WordPress without hardcoding links.
Any plugin can claim a top-level spot in the WordPress admin menu, so after 40 installs the sidebar is a junk drawer. A Core proposal wants hierarchy and pinning. Here is what I use in the meantime.
Products drift when nobody writes down what they stand for. How Dieter Rams’ principles helped me kill an upsell on a WooCommerce checkout, plus the workshop and the CSS variables I use to keep principles in the code.
WordPress site search punishes users for not guessing your exact wording. Here is how I fix it: a synonym map through the posts_search filter, a controlled vocabulary for metadata, and a four-step audit of zero-result queries.
Native @mixin is under discussion, an SVG favicon can follow the user’s color scheme on its own, and object-view-box has been cropping images in Chrome since 2022. Notes on what each one replaces.
Gmail’s Mic Drop button and Stack Overflow’s Stack Egg are the two April 1st pranks worth studying: one ignored user intent, the other shipped a whole execution layer for a 24-hour gag.
A decade of explaining why WordPress sites don’t feel like apps, and what 2026 changes: blocks described to an AI instead of scaffolded by hand, the Interactivity API handling state without page reloads, and theme.json holding the design system.
GenUI promises an interface generated per user in real time. The accessibility side is not there yet, from the criticism that met Figma Sites to Jakob Nielsen’s claim that individualized interfaces will fix a11y on their own.