In recent weeks, the suspension of the WordPress update infrastructure for WP Engine, a WordPress hosting company, has been the dominant topic in the WordPress community. In this context, decentralized update options have gained renewed attention in public discussions. The plugin Git Updater is far from new but more relevant than ever.

Since the beginning of the Full Site Editor, the next generation of themes has been waiting for its moment to rise. In addition to the old themes, which we now call Classic Themes, there are the modern Block Themes. These are characterized by the fact that, unlike classic themes, they are primarily based on HTML, CSS, and a little JSON. Today’s plugin Create Block Theme is designed to help anyone interested in starting their own block themes.

WordPress and various plugins schedule certain events for the future. Be it the check for new updates, the execution of a backup, or the website status check. The WP Crontrol plugin by John Blackbourn lets us look behind the scenes.

My school was pretty progressive and had a relatively extensive website, even back in the day during my school years. The principal created it using pure HTML. He updated it several times a week. Over the years, thousands of posts had accumulated. Sporting a significant number of photos and illustrations. Then, one day, a legal notice arrived. The entire website had to be taken offline because it was no longer clear where the many images came from or whether the respective creators had consented.

It was a simpler time. Today, we have the luxury of not manually building websites with pure HTML anymore (you still can, and it’s great fun, though). We have tools like WordPress for that. For anyone building a more complex website, a CMS like WordPress makes it much easier to keep track of all image sources and, most importantly, their licenses. That’s where Image Source Control comes in.

Everyone who runs a website or even a blog would like to know if people are actually consuming their content. If you don’t want to go overboard and use a tool like Google Analytics, you’ll need to opt for one of the more minimalist solutions. Koko Analytics is one such option.

I am a big fan of small plugins that run quietly in the background of my websites and make them better. And today’s plugin, Fewer Tags, fits perfectly into this category.

Since the decline of Twitter, the social media landscape has become much more fragmented. While I have been happily active in the Fediverse for several years and plan on keeping it like that, I still have an eye on developments at Bluesky and Thread. I focus on new ways the cool kids post updates, newsletters, and podcast episodes these days.

To facilitate posting on Bluesky, Daniel Post has developed a small experimental plugin called Autoblue.

While preparing for this series of posts, I asked for plugin recommendations in a post on the fediverse. As expected, there were some real surprises among them. One of those is today’s featured plugin: Find My Blocks.

The plugin’s name, likely inspired by Apple’s “Find My” feature, hints at its purpose: helping you locate specific blocks within the content on your website. Developed by Morgan Hvidt, the plugin makes finding and managing any blocks in your site’s content easy.

For years, I used Limit Login Attempts on all my websites to make it harder for potential attackers to brute-force their way into my login page. The original developer discontinued the plugin, which was forked and continued as Limit Login Attempts Reloaded. Over time, the plugin became increasingly intrusive, constantly drawing attention in the WordPress admin area to advertise paid add-ons.

What I really wanted was a plugin that prevents brute-force attacks by adding a delay after several failed login attempts. After growing dissatisfied with Limit Login Attempts Reloaded, I decided to build my own plugin to do exactly what I needed: Protect Login.

Every text string for WordPress core, plugins, and themes must be translated if an admin decides to run a non-English website. For the WordPress core and the vast majority of plugins and themes, all strings are initially in (US) English. If someone uses WordPress without any language packs, that’s exactly what you’d see.

In most European countries, however, using WordPress in a language other than English is common. To accommodate this fact, WordPress downloads language packs in the background created by volunteers. If a language pack is incomplete or a specific plugin doesn’t have one, WordPress automatically falls back to displaying the (usually) English original.

This is where Pascal Birchler’s Preferred Languages plugin comes into play.