Hi
This month, we tried something new: Florian is working on picu full-time while I’m mostly managing the rest of the agency work and also helping out with picu development.
And we’ve got a lot of things done this week: Version 1.8.0 was released just now with some small-ish, but much anticipated features, we started working on merging our pro modules into one single Pro plugin (which is long overdue) and Florian even managed to record a new introduction video, which is great!
AI
🤖 Why Chatbots Are Not the Future
Amelia Wattenberger on why she thinks that chatbots are not a good way to interact with large language models. She’s probably right, that the future will bring out much better interfaces to interact with LLMs in a much more direct way. On the other hand, talking (or writing) to a computer in natural language, and especially it answering in natural language, is a much better interface than many we had before which is why it can feel almost like magic.
Amelia Wattenberger – Why Chatbots Are Not the Future
Frontend Development
🔐 Google Chrome to remove the lock icon to indicate HTTPS sites
Looks like the lock icon to indicate https connections will be removed soon, at least in the Chrome browser.
Google Chrome – An Update on the Lock Icon
🤩 Stripe Sessions
The Website for the Stripe Sessions Event features a lot of nice and interesting details. Jhey Tompkins also showcases how some of it can be built using only CSS and som :has() magic!
🔥 New to the web platform (March & April)
I always love those posts by Rachel Andrew, summarizing all of the new stuff that came to browsers during the past month. While most of this is still experimental in the sense that it’s only available in one or maybe a few browsers, it’s still a good idea to keep an eye on those new features, and to start playing with them.
New to the web platform in March
New to the web platform in April
🌱 Image Carbon
Estimate the impact of your images and their optimization on the carbon emissions from your site with this online tool.
WordPress
✌️ Feature Plugin: Preferred Languages
The Preferred Languages Feature Plugin by Pascal Birchler is looking for testers. The Plugin makes it possible to define fallback languages. Right now, if a plugin doesn’t feature a translation in the set language, it will fallback to English. With this plugin, you define a set of fallback languages, so let’s say the plugin wasn’t translated into de_CH (German Switzerland) it makes a lot more sense to fall back to de_DE (German) instead of English, if this is available. Long overdue for this to be merged into core!
Preferred Languages Feature Plugin Needs Testing
🧰 Plugin: Admin and Site Enhancements
This plugin adds a ton of options to a WordPress site. I prefer to do most of this stuff with code and we keep a collection of code snippets that we re-use regularly, but on sites where we didn’t build a custom theme or plugin, or when you just need a quick customization, this plugin gives you a lot of options.
WP.org – Admin and Site Enhancement
✌️ Cheers