Weston Ruter

It's been a long road, but I think the WordPress core patch to eliminate script/style concatenation is ready to ship in 7.2! Goodbye load-scripts.php & load-styles.php (and all the headaches they have caused). This one PR will close 10+ Trac tickets: github.com/WordPress/wo...

It's a big day for @wordpress.org core PHP contributors and the overall quality of the core codebase: PHPStan is now part of the core development workflow! Changeset: core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/61...

I’ve wanted this for a while: A way for the Post Date block in WordPress to automatically append the modified date, but only when it differs from the publish date. Finally published a writeup and a plugin to implement this:

I used WordPress Playground for the first time in a support forum reply to try to reproduce a bug report. Super nice! I made a test plugin in a gist, within which I included a blueprint.json to self-install and set up the test case to repro with 1 click: wordpress.org/support/topi...

WordPress 6.9 includes so many performance improvements! Scripts with fetchpriority, increased inline CSS, minified theme styles, on demand block styles in classic themes, the template enhancement output buffer, and much more! Check out the field guide:

Personal reflection:

Worked nights and weekends (and days) to get these performance improvements landed! Getting 6.9 out the door on December 2nd will be a great relief. Hoping for a >20% boost to Largest Contentful Paint for Christmas! 🎄

I'm working on a Dev Note for all the performance improvements, but in the mean time here is a gist of what's included: gist.github.com/westonruter/...

I love this new post from Speed Kit. They divide up the 2.5-second “Good” threshold for LCP into two additional thresholds: Instant (300ms) and Fast (1000ms), while the current Good threshold becomes merely “OK”.

Just landed in WordPress trunk: scripts and script modules can be registered with a `fetchpriority` arg, and the Interactivity API script modules and comment-reply script use `low` by default. This can improve LCP by ~7% when the LCP element has an image: core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/60...

I've published a new WordPress security plugin: Strict CSP. It helps mitigate cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities on the frontend and login screen (but not yet in the WP admin):

To be compatible, themes and plugins must not print <script> tags directly. Instead, they must use the proper APIs: wp_enqueue_script(), wp_add_inline_script(), wp_localize_script(), wp_print_script_tag(), wp_print_inline_script_tag(), wp_enqueue_script_module() and the like.

I've been enjoying Gemini Code Assist for GitHub. It is a very helpful AI code reviewer! I just learned it supports configuration via a .gemini/ directory, allowing you to provide a style guide. I've put together an initial one for my WordPress plugins: github.com/westonruter/...

If you're using Additional CSS (Custom CSS) in the Customizer and have a Block Theme active, you may have noticed that live preview hasn't been working. This will be fixed in the next version of Gutenberg (21.4):

If you've liked Speculative Loading with prerendering, you'll like this: The new “No-cache BFCache” plugin for WordPress enables instant back/forward navigations, particularly while logged in.

I've also just proposed an opt-in so that authenticated pages can also be prefetched/prerendered when using the Speculative Loading plugin. Sites which primarily have logged-in users should be able to take advantage of instant page navigations…

Do you like instant navigations on the WordPress frontend? Speculation rules! What if speculative loading was also in WP Admin? Check out this new experimental plugin that adds prerendering with moderate eagerness for links in the Admin Menu and Admin Bar: