There are some good insights in this thought piece by Chris Lema. Code abstraction is nothing new. Do you want to be in the front driving, or in the back complaining?

Does CSS Grid seem too complex? Kevin Powell shows some ways to keep it simple.

Here is a very interesting report of what happened when some large WooCommerce stores were moved to Shopify. It exposes some characteristics of the Shopify platform that might not be obvious.

Ovidiu Maghetiu, the creator of WP Code Box, has been working on a new project, PhantomWP. It is an editor and site building framework for creating headless WordPress sites using Astro. It has a lot of features built in, including Git deployment. Here is a video overview.

WordPress 7.0 will require all blocks to be at Version 3 in block.json. This is coming very soon, so Ronald Huereca updated his guide on Version 3, along with a few examples of how to resolve third-party script issues. If you’re a block developer, now is the time to opt in and test your blocks.

This discussion on WP Product Talk is very relevant given the recent push back on the Bricks 2.2 beta. Melissa Love started as an add-on developer for Divi and now develops for the Kadence ecosystem. Zack Katz is the creator of GravityKit, an add-on for Gravity Forms. Katie Keith from Barn2 creates add-ons for WooCommerce. They touch on pretty much all angles related to building on top of another product, well worth a watch.

Core contributors, Matt, and Mary had a meeting to brainstorm ideas for WordPress 7.0. They are listed in this post. It gives an idea of what ~might~ be in 7.0. I was interested to see that the possibility of creating blocks with PHP is on the radar.

A challenge for developers is how to market and sell their plugins. In this interview Nathan Wrigley speaks with Dave Grey, the author of Nag Me Not. In the podcast they talk about a sponsorship model, which might be a good option for certain types of plugins. If you don’t want to listen, there is a nice summary on the page.

The WordPress AI team is going to release an AI Experiments plugin to expose some new AI features being added as well as to enable several experiments: the generation of excerpts, images, and image alt text.