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.
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 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.
A client updated to WordPress 6.9 the day it shipped and broke their landing page. Here is why I hold major core updates until the first maintenance release, and the filter I use to keep them in staging.
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.
A client pushed WordPress 6.9 RC3 to a live WooCommerce store and lost checkout inside ten minutes. What broke, why my first quick fix made it worse, and where release candidate testing actually belongs.
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.
A magazine site moving off an emoji subdomain came apart under wp search-replace. WordPress Importer 0.9.5 rewrites URLs during the import instead, using the block markup parsers in core to tell a real URL from a lookalike string.
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.