What happened last week - issue #107

This week: Regression testing, CMS and more

What happened last week

I felt that lately, I had a minor writing block. I had two articles in progress and I couldn’t finish them. During the weekend I finally did it 💪 And there are a few more ideas in the back of my head, so I think it will only get better and better.

Also, I spent a while experimenting with Claude - I’m impressed by how much this model knows. It’s not perfect and it still needs your help, but together we were able to build a working prototype for a link paste/replace in Statamic in a matter of hours versus many months of me thinking about how to even start.

My list of conferences at which I will be speaking is growing - I will also be a speaker at WordUp Gdynia in April. So this year I’m already sure about speaking at 6 conferences 🤯 and another 6 are still in progress.

Interesting links

How we removed (almost) 1000 plugins from the official WordPress repository — Maciek Palmowski

Finally, I wrote about the October bug bounty that resulted in closing around 1000 plugins in the official repository. It was quite an event and being a part of it was something truly amazing.

The last step in updating to Tailwind CSS 4 — Maciek Palmowski

When I migrated my blog from TW v3 to TW v4, of course, I didn’t test it thoroughly. So, learn from my mistakes and add regression testing to your flow. In my article, I show you how to create the simplest test that will help you.

Exploring CMS Options Beyond WordPress ft. Maciek Palmowski — Brian Coords & Maciek Palmowski

I had the pleasure of talking with Brian about other CMSs because WordPress is not the only way and it’s not a perfect tool for every job. Sometimes using other tools might be a better choice. Also, don’t forget to subscribe to Brian’s podcast - it’s amazing.

A Million Little Secrets — Josh W Comeau

Josh created a landing page lately and it’s amazing. There are so many cool animations and secrets hidden there. I don’t remember if I ever had so much fun playing with a landing page. In this article, he shows us how those animations were made.

Creating a WordPress Plugin With Cursor — Mike Davey

Mike shares how using AI can help when creating WordPress plugins. He also mentions when human intervention is highly recommended. My experience is very similar to Mike’s - AI is amazing for creating 98% of the code, you just need to focus on a few critical parts.

Talking with Jack McDade — Jack McDade & Michael LaRoy

Great interview with Jack. Just listen to it - I won’t spoil anything :)

Why California State Avoided WordPress for Emergency Websites — Darren Kolakovic & Mojtaba Seyedi

A great case study explaining why WordPress (and most dynamic CMSs) might not be the best choice for Emergency Websites. We saw it during COVID - static sites were better at handling the traffic websites got at the beginning of the pandemic.

How to Build a Serverless Astro.js + Google Sheets = Auto-Updating CMS! — Abhinav Jain

This great guide shows how to use Google Sheets as a CMS together with Astro. The coolest part is how to use triggers in Sheets to automatically update the website, but only if we stopped editing the content.

Simply Static Studio for Agencies — Patrick Posner

I’m a huge fan of Patrick’s plugin, but Simply Static Studio might me love his plugin even more. Simply Static Studio will be a center for agencies to manage multiple websites from one place. It looks amazing and I can’t wait to get an invite to start testing this.

Moving on from 18F — Ethan Marcotte

For those who don’t know 18F is/was a digital services agency within the U.S. General Services Administration that helps federal agencies improve their technology and digital services. It got butchered lately and Ethan shares how it looked from the inside.

And how was your week? Did you learn something interesting? Don’t hesitate to press the reply button or share your thoughts in the comment section.

Cheers,

Maciek