Hi there ✌️
Already three weeks since we are back home after three fantastic weeks in Italy. I finally found some time to sort through my reading list of the past few weeks.
A lot has happened since we’re back. We started a new little dev-log blog for picu, where we share things we’re working on, which feels great and gave us some space to explore ideas in the open. Apart from that, we released a few bugfix releases and decided that selling images in picu should finally be possible and I’m looking forward to build this.
Also, after scouring the web for the right model (that I could also afford) for months, I fell in love and finally bought this lovely, fully manual espresso machine and now I’m trying to learn the very basics to become a somewhat decent home-barista myself.
Frontend Development
⚡️ if()
conditionals in CSS? Yes, please!
Lea Verou wrote two posts about a resolution by the CSS Working Group to add if()
inline conditionals to the CSS standard in the not all too distant future. The first is a general overview of what this means and the second is pretty technical with a long list of nasty hacks that can be used to achieve something similar, today.
Lea Verou: Inline conditionals in CSS?
Lea Verou: Inline conditionals in CSS, now?
WordPress
❤️ WordCamp Europe 2024 impressions
Andrea Gandino shared his experience as a first-time organiser at WordCamp Europe on his personal blog. He also mentioned how this year he attended the least amount of talks, but made much more and much better conversations and connections instead, which is exactly what I felt as well. Also, thanks for the shout-out, Andrea. It was a pleasure to meet you, too!
Andrea Gandino – WordCamp Europe 2024 impressions
🍕 Haptiq @ WordCamp Europe 2024 in Turin
I wrote a small recap post (in german) of our own experience attending this years WordCamp Europe on our agency blog.
Haptiq Studio – WordCamp Europe 2024 in Turin (german)
🧐 Section & Nested element Block Style Variations in WP 6.6
WP 6.6 will let you do much more in terms of Block Style Variations (or Block Styles for short), for example we’ll be able to style elements and blocks depending on the block style of their parent group blocks, as I understand it. This will allow to do a lot of stuff right from theme.json that wasn’t possible previously and while I’m still feeling much more comfortable to write such things in CSS, I can see the benefits of this.
👍 The Future of WordPress Themes: What to Expect?
In his newsletter, Fränk Klein shared his thoughts on what the future of WordPress Themes could look like. I really like his view, which takes into account both the views of agencies like us, building stuff for clients, but also of more end-user facing products like for example WordPress.com.
WP Development Courses – The Future of WordPress Themes: What to Expect?
🚀 WP_Query optimizations
Joe Hoyle from Human Made published this short video with some optimization tipps for WP_Query. I knew one or two of them already, but the rest was new to me. Great format, definitely something I would watch regularly if he would make this into a video series.
Joe Hoyle @ twitter – WP_query optimizations (8min video)
Other
🤭 Bing threatens to delist your website for “Prompt Injections”
After banning large language models (LLMs) using robots.txt
or .htaccess
from your website turned out to be harder than expected, some have suggested injecting prompts into their websites to confuse or downright “hack” into the AI-bots consuming your content.
I don’t have too strong opinions about AI, right now. But I found it somewhat amusing that it seems to be so hard to teach the most sophisticated language models available today to ignore such attacks, that even a big player like Microsoft sees no other option than to threaten with de-indexation.
Search Engine Roundtable – Prompt Injection Added To Bing Webmaster Guidelines
Have a great weekend ✌️