One blogger had 30 days to save 5,000 posts and nearly 10,000 images from Typepad. The built-in importer could not finish the job, so we rebuilt it around WP-CLI and an image sideloading script. 3,684 blogs came across in the end.
A client’s plugin came back rejected three times and he blamed the reviewer. The review is largely automated now: more than 220 checks, AI screening plugin names for trademarks, and the Plugin Check tool expected to run before you submit.
WordPress 6.9 is at RC3 with a launch set for December 2nd. The heading specificity fix, the Post Editor iframe and the new DataViews all change what a custom theme has to do.
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.
The December 10 dev chat pushed 6.9.1 planning into the new year, which says something about how 6.9 is holding up. Here is how I stage a major core update for client sites, and why the Gutenberg 22.2 labels matter.
Gutenberg 22.3 pulls font management out of the Global Styles panels and into its own Fonts page, makes the core Grid block responsive when columns are set, and stops the image cropper from losing your aspect ratio.
WordPress goes back to three major releases a year in 2026, on a four-month cycle. What that changes for maintenance, plus a small logger that catches deprecation notices before the next update lands.
A law firm got a WordPress site out of an AI builder in ten minutes, then came back two weeks later with a broken contact form and no search traffic. How I treat AI output as scaffolding instead of a finished build.
A 15k-product WooCommerce store had red LCP scores and broken layouts after stacking speed plugins. What actually helped: enqueueing block styles properly, plus the Safari LCP support and Compression Dictionaries work from the core performance chat.
A client was publishing three articles a week and getting no traffic. The cause was five sharing plugins, two SEO suites, and a three-second TTFB. Notes on what I stripped out, plus adding Open Graph tags through wp_head.