The Kadence team has launched a marketplace for templates, child themes, and design libraries, as well as an experts directory.

Breakdance 1.6 beta is available. There are a number of enhancements, for example, the ability to duplicate and toggle on/off templates as well as new features for the search element to limit search to Custom Post Types or WooCommerce products. Provisional support for PHP 8.2 and a number of other fixes and small enhancements are also included.

Here is Jamie Marsland’s top picks for AI tools for WordPress.

This is an interesting interview with Thomas J. Raef on protecting your website and the state of WordPress security. Great interview. Very clear discussion.

Bricks 1.9.1 was released. New features include compatibility with WPML and the ability to write your own WordPress query arguments using PHP. You can also now use hook locations to place Sections, there is support for ACF nested groups, and the “root” placeholder keyword when adding CSS has been replaced with “%root%”.

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.