WordPress 6.9 and the heading CSS specificity fix
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.
Category: Development
Adding automated unit tests to a WordPress plugin
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.
WordPress 6.9 release management: when to update
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 gives fonts their own settings page
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.
The 2026 WordPress release schedule: three majors again
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.
What an AI builder leaves you to fix on a WordPress site
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.
Speeding up WordPress without breaking your block CSS
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.
Growing your website’s audience is a technical problem
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.
WooCommerce developer documentation and the cost of guessing
A VAT fix hardcoded into a core file vanished on the next WooCommerce update. Thin docs are how that happens. Includes the hook-based way to add a cart fee, and what the December office hours cover.
Standardized AI features and the plugin mess they fix
A client’s admin was three AI plugins deep, each with its own API key and settings page. The AI Experiments plugin v0.1.0 offers a registry and a base class instead, so features get built once against a standard API.