This post on the make blog retrospectively looks at performance improvements gained in WordPress 6.3 over 6.2. Some good progress on mobile and desktop. Note that the discussion about the emoji loader script just means it has gotten more efficient. If you don’t need to add emoji support there is still a performance boost to disabling it.

A quick tutorial on how any shortcode can be turned into an editable custom block. Shortcode options are mapped to block attributes. The process is done with minimal coding using Pinegrow Web Editor and exported as a standalone WordPress plugin.

In the unexpected department, the WP Tavern is adding forums. They will be using bbPress and have topics to continue discussions started in article comments.

The Openverse project won an award recognizing it as an open education resource.

If ever you needed convincing to write for people and not search engines, here are more reasons. Google removed FAQ rich schema display for most sites and How-To rich schema display for all sites from search results. Many sites added schema for these in the hopes of having their content highlighted.

This article has a few interesting design tips, such as ways you can leverage browser features to improve user experience.

If you are thinking about setting up an ecommerce site and are wondering about payment options, then this article might be useful. It has a ton of information about online payment methods. Note, if is from the SureCart team, so part at the end discusses SureCart.

There is a lot of work and dedication that goes into a WordPress release. This is a nice article that looks at the experiences of three of the 6.3 co-leads.

Recently there have been headlines that malware scanners are worthless. WordFence published an article describing how they see malware scanners as part of a layered approach to security and they also discussed their new command line scanning option.