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 6.9 update stripped the styling off a client’s product grids and stopped their order emails. Notes on ticket #64354, the PHPMailer bug and the adjacent post infinite loop, plus the plugins that bridge the gap until 6.9.1.
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.
Notes puts editorial comments on the editor canvas, the Abilities API replaces scattered capability checks for automated workflows, and classic themes finally load block styles on demand.
Gutenberg 22.2 lets you define button hover and focus states in theme.json instead of a separate stylesheet, and it accepts YouTube or Vimeo embeds as Cover block backgrounds.
Notes from a slow 80k-post news portal and what WordPress 6.9 changes about it: consistent cache keys for query groups, the new block processor and HTML API, and the Abilities API.
Twelve editors on one set of long-form guides, with feedback spread across Slack, email and sticky notes. Block-level notes and the hide and show toggle in 6.9 move that conversation into the editor.
Hiding a block used to mean display: none and a browser that still downloaded every asset. WordPress 6.9 leaves hidden blocks out of the rendered HTML, and a short filter stops clients from hiding your structural containers.
Core heading styles used to outrank theme CSS inside the editor, which is how a stylesheet ends up full of !important. WordPress 6.9 changes how those styles are injected, and RC3 is out now for testing.
WordPress 6.9 deprecates the core-data media entity, lets setAttributes take an updater function, and moves SelectControl class names to the root element. Each one can break an existing custom block.