Best of WordPress — December 2025

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   Article

   Laravel Dev·15w

   PHP Is Alive But No Longer Strategic

   PHP remains functional and profitable but has lost its strategic position in modern development. Laravel and WordPress sustain the ecosystem, yet GitHub activity shows declining innovation. Full-stack JavaScript offers superior development speed through unified language usage across all layers. The PHP user base skews toward older developers maintaining legacy systems. While PHP continues serving existing applications, it no longer drives modern architecture patterns like distributed systems and event-driven design.

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   Article

   roadmap.sh·18w

   NEW ROADMAP: WordPress

   A new learning roadmap for WordPress has been released on roadmap.sh, providing a structured path for developers to learn WordPress development. The roadmap was created with support from Melapress.

   63

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   Article

   Charity·17w

   Moving from WordPress to Substack

   A developer announces their migration from WordPress to Substack after a decade of blogging. The move is motivated by frustration with WordPress and the desire to join the more vibrant tech writing community on Substack. The author is working on the second edition of "Observability Engineering" and plans to share insights from that process. Email subscribers are being migrated, but comments cannot be transferred, and the original site will remain accessible to preserve existing links.

   60

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   Article

   Codrops·17w

   Spain Collection: Evolving a Luxury Website into a Digital Ecosystem

   A detailed case study of redesigning Spain Collection's luxury travel website into a comprehensive digital ecosystem. The project evolved from a single-purpose site into a platform managing 100+ experiences across trips, stays, weddings, and VIP services. The design approach emphasized editorial aesthetics inspired by high-end fashion, implemented through a modular WordPress system with 50+ flexible components. Technical implementation included ACF Flexible Content for content management, GSAP and TaxiJS for animations and transitions, and a custom WebGL/Three.js petal rain effect for the weddings section. The architecture solved complex UX challenges through smart filtering, modal-based navigation, and content correlation across multiple service categories while maintaining visual consistency and scalability.

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   Article

   Make WordPress Core·18w

   Planning for 7.0

   WordPress 7.0 development is underway following the 6.9 release. Core contributors are focusing on Phase 3 collaboration features, including improvements to the Notes feature with better diffing mechanics and change reconciliation. Navigation workflow simplifications are planned to make menu management more intuitive. The team is exploring streamlined editing experiences for composite blocks and design patterns, plus more intuitive page navigation in the site editor. Additional blocks and tools are being added to expand capabilities for theme builders.

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   Article

   CSS-Tricks·17w

   Search CSS-Tricks Raycast Extension

   Jelte Lagendijk created a Raycast extension that enables quick searching of CSS-Tricks articles directly from your desktop. The extension fetches content from the WordPress REST API and provides real-time search results with summaries and browser links, offering a faster alternative to searching the site directly.

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   Article

   Make WordPress Core·19w

   Coding Standard Proposal: Allow the use of the PHP short echo tag

   WordPress proposes allowing the PHP short echo tag (<?=) in its coding standards. Since PHP 5.4, this tag is always available regardless of configuration settings, making it safe to use. The proposal allows but doesn't mandate its use for single statements in template files, requiring no immediate changes to existing WordPress core code. Projects wanting to maintain the restriction can configure PHPCS accordingly.

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   Article

   ACF·18w

   ACF PRO 6.7.0.1

   Advanced Custom Fields PRO version 6.7.0.1 fixes several critical issues with V3 Blocks, including clickability problems for InnerBlocks, crashes caused by script tags in render templates, browser tab crashes with Inline Editing enabled, incorrect field value updates in parent blocks, and field value update failures when quickly closing the expanded editor.

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