Hello ☀️
After some pretty rainy weeks in July and early August, we’ve got a serious heat wave going on in Switzerland right now, which can make work – or actually pretty much everything that doesn’t involve being in water – quite challenging at times. Especially if you live in an attic apartment, like we do 🥵
Possibly related to the heatwave frying my braincells, I managed to accidentally destroy my local dev setup – again – by updating node & npm. As this didn’t happen for the first time, and I don’t have time to investigate for hours every time I want to update something like node, I started looking for other options to my current setup. I spent a lot of time this weekend tinkering, and think I found a solution that works quite well and is much easier and less error-prone than my old setup. Will blog about it once I’m done.
Apart from all that, last week was also the last week of child care for my daughter, who’s starting Kindergarden this coming week. Crazy how time flies.
Frontend Development
🏄🏼♂️ Let the web do normal web things
Great post by Heather Buchel about the normal web things that webapps should support, but these days often get prohibited or made impossible. I’ve seen every single example from her list out in the wild, and it’s always annoying if those normal web things are not working as expected. Couldn’t agree more.
Heather Buchel – Just normal web things.
🌶️ Spicy takes on current Web Development
Chris Ferdinandi – the vanilla JS guy from Go Make Things – shared some of his “Spicy Takes”. I fully agree with every single one of them, except the pronunciation of GIF.
WordPress
🔥 WordPress 6.3
With the recent release of WordPress 6.3, it’s a good time to collect the best articles and more about this release, which was packed with new features and optimizations. I’m still reading through many of them as we speak.
WordPress 6.3 performance improvements
Image performance enhancements in WordPress 6.3
Registering scripts with async and defer attributes in WordPress 6.3
New in 6.3: Rollback for failed manual plugin and theme updates
🎨 Admin Redesign Incoming
This one deserves its own mention, as it will impact pretty much what WordPress is. I’m looking forward to the changes, even though I’m still way too unfamiliar with React and still fear the learning curve involved to truly develop for / in it. But at the same time I’m looking forward to the possibilities it brings for our plugin as well as client sites. And if the whole development around Gutenberg and WP core so far is any indication, whether you liked the changes or not – the thought that went into backwards compatibility and making sure nothing breaks constantly is impressive.
🎭 Modify theme.json Data using server-side filters
Nick Diego shows how you can filter the theme.json data using the wp_theme_json_data_... filters.
How to modify theme.json data using server-side filters
Other
🛑 Rescind the invitation to Google
Jeremy Keith reminds us that it is entirely possible to rescind our invitation to Google (and others) to our own corners of the web, if we feel this invitation is being taken advantage of.
Jeremy Keith (adactio) – Permission
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