WordPress sites carry more digital weight than they need. This post covers dark-first themes, lighter image formats like AVIF, and trimming the “digital fat” that slows sites down and drains batteries.
Amy Kamala and Jb Audras take over as WordPress core team reps for 2026. The job is administrative: run Dev Chat, move updates between teams, keep the release cycle predictable. No vote was needed this year.
Thomas Walichiewicz proposed a :near() selector so CSS can react when a pointer gets close to an element. It would replace the usual pointermove distance math, though the CSS Working Group is still weighing the fingerprinting risk.
Notes from the WordPress 7.0 product review meeting with Matt Mullenweg: a CSS-level admin refresh, a customizable dashboard, real-time co-editing over a pluggable transport, the AI Client and its settings UI, and PHP-only block registration.
A text vortex where every character animates on its own, built with CSS sibling-index(), sibling-count() and scroll-timeline. The only JavaScript left is the bit that splits the string into characters.
Conic gradients make a pie shape but leave screen readers with an empty box. This build keeps the data in the markup, places labels with cos() and sin(), and uses a few lines of JS for the slice offsets.
Mental health apps need more than clean code. This is the empathy-centred UX framework I use: progressive onboarding, low-stimulus interfaces, and a retention system that does not punish a missed day.
The contrast-color() function only works in Safari and Firefox so far, so dynamic text colors still need a workaround. Here is the OKLCH lightness trick I use in block themes and WooCommerce stores: one declaration, no JavaScript.
WordPress 7.0 makes the post editor always iframed, which breaks editor JavaScript that reaches for the global document. Also here: native viewport-based block visibility, per-instance custom CSS, and the Studio 1.7.0 CLI updates.
Chart libraries are heavy for four bars. Here is a CSS Grid bar chart that uses sibling-index() and attr() to read its values straight off the markup, plus the PHP helper I use to render it in WordPress.