A client wanted a Pinterest-style WooCommerce gallery, which used to mean Masonry.js or fragile grid math. The CSS Working Group settled on display: grid-lanes instead, and it is still rolling out behind flags.
A 30,000-line stylesheet taught me that BEM cannot outrun global scope. Web components and the Shadow DOM can, and the idea goes back to a 1998 proposal for HTML components.
My niece walked into the office and asked what I was typing. Explaining HTML as bricks and CSS as paint was harder than I expected, and it showed me where I had gotten sloppy in my own work.
A WooCommerce homepage carousel was wrecking Core Web Vitals. Dropping the JS slider for CSS animation-timeline and view() cut the script weight and pulled the LCP score back into the green.
WooCommerce 10.4 makes the Interactivity API mini cart the default, lazy-loads two REST namespaces, and takes HPOS caching out of experimental. Here is what to test before you update.
A client wanted the cycling word effect from a SaaS homepage. A custom block would have meant migrating their existing headings, so I extended the paragraph block instead using the Format API, WP_HTML_Tag_Processor and the Interactivity API.
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.
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.
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.