WordPress 7.0 drops PHP 7.2 and 7.3 support
The January 2026 Dev Chat confirmed WordPress 7.0 will drop PHP 7.2 and 7.3. Here is what that frees up in core, where the filter extension argument stands, and how to get on the release squad.
Category: Development
CSS relative colour and OKLCH for WordPress themes
Hand-calculated HEX palettes break the moment a base color changes. This walks through CSS Relative Colour and OKLCH in WordPress themes, and how @property lets you animate one channel at a time.
Historical data analysis when MySQL runs out of room
Running decades of data through wp_postmeta will take your server down. Here is how I structured a 500 million row temperature dataset as an OLAP schema and queried it with MDX instead of raw SQL.
What 2025 changed about WordPress Playground
WordPress Playground spent 2025 getting 42% faster and reaching 99% compatibility with the top 1,000 plugins. Here is what changed in Blueprints and database support, and why it now works for real testing.
Transformer high-norm artifacts and the Softmax bottleneck
High-norm spikes in Vision Transformers come from Softmax, not from bad training data. Here is why the sum-to-1 constraint turns background tokens into attention sinks, and what registers, sigmoidal gating and self-distillation actually do about it.
Human-centered data analytics starts with a decision
Most reporting tools get built because someone asked for data, not because anyone had a decision to make. Here is how I pick which metrics are worth building, why clarity beats accuracy, and where ethics fits in before the first line of SQL.
Enterprise financial models in Power BI need a star schema
A flat Excel sheet dropped on the canvas does not survive real financial reporting. Here is what I do in Power Query and the model layer instead: profile the columns, reference rather than duplicate, build a dynamic date table, and keep relationships single-direction.
CodePen slideVars turns CSS variables into sliders
CodePen slideVars reads the CSS custom properties on :root and builds a slider panel from them, so an interactive demo no longer needs hand-wired range inputs. Covers slideVars.init(), the config object for scoped variables, and the decimal-step bug I hit.
Semantic Models date filtering that doesn’t leak future data
Budget and prior-year lines running past today make a report look broken. Here is the Date Filter table I build in SQL, plus the cross-filter setting it needs, so a single slicer switches future data on and off.
Product designer career paths that aren’t a management ladder
Career debt is as real as technical debt. What an annual retrospective, a skills matrix and a translator-style horizontal role look like for a product designer heading into 2026, and why management is not the only way up.