For developers and power users – this article by Tom McFarlin discusses how anonymous functions work in WordPress.

Related to large WooCommerce Stores – This article talks about the benefits and potential gotcha of using custom tables for Woo orders, now called High Performance Order Storage. A big gotcha is to ensure that all of your plugins are compatible with the use of the new custom table option.

Gutenberg 17.4 has been released. There are not as many new features or big features as in the past, but there seems to be attention being put on data views and style revisions. This version of Gutenberg is set to be included in core 6.5 in the March release.

I was looking at Jerry Gamblin’s compiled stats about vulnerability reporting in 2023 across all software (the report is not WP specific). It was interesting to note that PatchStack was the top reporting agency. Congrats to Oliver Sild and his team.

Adam Lowe has started a video series about building block themes. The first video has a nice walk-through of the Site Editor and overview of block themes. This series looks to be a great resource for people interested in the Site Editor and block themes. Highly recommended.

This is an interesting 2023 retrospective by Thomas J. Raef looking at hacks by vector. One of the take-aways is to get in the habit of logging out of your sites and not just closing the browser window.

David Vongries, the creator of the Ultimate Dashboard plugin, has released a plugin Swift SMTP. In addition to being able to set outgoing SMTP mail settings, the plugin also allows you to customize the default WordPress emails. This must have been an acquired plugin as it has more thank 10k active installs and a name change.

Joost de Valk suggests that there is good value for WordPress developers to connect with open source start-ups.

Imran Siddiq released a video showing a number of ways to optimize your WordPress page loading times. I know he worked hard on this one and there are a plenty of tips, including code snippets. He optimizes an Elementor site, but includes versions for non-Elementor users.