I almost sold a client a custom Python bridge between OpenAI and WordPress, then State of the Word 2025 made it pointless. Notes on what the Abilities API and the WP AI Client actually change for developers and site owners.
A store was throwing random 500 errors at checkout because a deleted flash-sale product was still sitting in customer carts. WooCommerce 10.3.6 fixes that class of crash, along with a PHP 8.4 failure in the Helper updater.
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.
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.
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.
A WooCommerce shop doing 500 orders a day broke at 2 AM under a stack of decoration plugins and a 14-second LCP. Which holiday plugins are worth keeping, and how to limit where their scripts load.
A client’s custom React admin broke on every core update, so I rebuilt it on what WordPress 6.9 ships instead: DataViews, the wider Fields API, the Abilities API and Block Bindings. Notes from that job.
A Trac ticket listed the bug under 6.8, so I ruled it out. It had been introduced earlier and only found in 6.8. The WordPress 6.9 release comes with a wording fix for exactly that confusion.
A client’s checkout threw a fatal error right after they updated to 6.9, and core wasn’t the cause. Notes on staging updates, and on Trac switching to the version a bug was introduced in.
Hard-coded breadcrumbs wrecked a client site, which is a decent argument for using the core block instead. The parts of 6.9 I plan to use: breadcrumbs, the Abilities API and theme.json pseudo-classes.