The screenshots gallery on WordPress.org plugin pages now renders core Gallery and Image blocks with the standard lightbox, while the masonry part stayed out of core. Here is what shipped, why core turned the masonry down, and how I would build the same thing.
Scroll effects in CSS come as four separate features, and they ship at different times in different browsers. I go through which one fits a progress bar, a sticky header, a reveal, and a page fade, and where the fallbacks still need JavaScript.
WooCommerce 10.9 puts color swatches in core behind a feature flag, but only block themes see them, and only inside the Add to Cart + Options block. Here is how I check a store, enable it, and move swatch data off an old plugin.
Antoine Villepreux removed the last JavaScript from a CSS pie chart on CSS-Tricks. The trick worth taking isn’t the missing script, it’s putting the values on the parent and computing slice offsets there. Here’s how I’d do the same loop in PHP so every browser gets the chart.
Gutenberg 23.3 quietly moves the editor to React 19, and that is the item most likely to break a custom plugin. This post covers which legacy patterns were removed, how per-block responsive styles affect themes, and what stays behind an experiment flag.
The thumbnail-to-hero morph dies the moment a product renders twice on one page. Here is how I’d name elements on a WooCommerce grid, either from the template or at click time, and how to keep the CSS down to three rules.
Custom media queries let you name a breakpoint once and use it everywhere, but native @custom-media support is still limited. This is how I compare the browser rule against a PostCSS build step before putting either on a WordPress or WooCommerce site.
::search-text lets you style what Ctrl+F highlights, but the browser default is hard to beat. Here’s how I compare it with ::selection and the Custom Highlight API, and what I’d ship on blogs, stores and docs sites.
The fly-to-cart animation on most WooCommerce stores drags in a whole JavaScript library for one curve. CSS offset-path does it in a few lines, if you handle two traps: dead motion-* properties from the old spec, and pixel-based paths that break on small screens.
The week after WordPress 7.0 shipped, the dev chat agenda quietly listed the field guide, three dev notes, a PHP clarification and unicode email support. I run the same four-pass triage on every agenda like this before touching a client site. This is the checklist.