Malcolm Peralty from Pressable has been blogging for over 20 years, since before WordPress 1.0! He was perhaps the first WordPress news blogger. He's written books.
But in 2026 Malcolm isn't writing 5,000 word blog posts by himself any more. He's now the conductor, and AI is the orchestra.
You get complete control over who can edit posts on your WordPress site: wordpress.org/plugins/pres...
- Everyone in user role X can edit the post
- 3 extra people can edit the post
- Every logged in user can edit the post
We've been working hard to make that easy with PublishPress Permissions. Bright, clean, modern settings. Dead simple access control.
Who can edit posts on your WordPress site?
1. The person who wrote the post
2. Administrators or Editors
That's it. Those are normally the only two options in WordPress.
What happens if you want advanced options? For example ...
In the next release of MetaSlider, we're working on better options for vertical slideshows.
We find that people really like vertical for mobile displays. It feels natural to flick through with these slides with your thumb.
Make your WordPress site feel like IG or TikTok.
A couple of years ago, there was a whole new approach to translating WordPress plugins.
Do I know anyone who has tried to implement the new .l10n.php translation files in plugin?
This approach would replace the .mo and .po files with .l10n.php files.
make.wordpress.org/core/2024/02...
It turned out that Cloudflare's firewall had been triggered by Stripe, but only on this one site.
Stripe doesn't send notifications for failures 😢
So we need to do two things now:
1. Add a Cloudflare rule to whitelist all Stripe webhooks
2. Build a tool to alert us to failures
We ran into a big Stripe issue today.
Some Easy Digital Downloads accounts had missing data. This was on one of our smaller plugin sites so it was easier to miss.
After digging in, we found that Stripe's events were often being blocked with a 403 error message.
Check out the whole interview with Malcolm: www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNyd...
See Malcolm's writing at peralty.com
Can you use AI to help write a book?
Malcolm Peralty has been writing with WordPress for over 20 years.
Malcolm's also an author and he tells us about his experience writing a book while relying heaving on AI tools. Would he do it again?
You can make it really easy for visitors to see how your stories connect and browse through the whole series.
And there's lots of advanced options. For example, Series Categories.
- Series Category: Star Wars
- Series: Original Movies, Prequels, Sequels
wordpress.org/plugins/orga...
Most publishers have one-off posts, but also end up writing series of stories:
- Investigations on a topic
- Reviews of each episode of a TV show
- Recipes from a particular cuisine
- Game reports from a team's season
Doing this in WordPress? You'll love PublishPress Series
Chris Reynolds has been in the WordPress community for close to 20 years. He has a new podcast called "Community + Code" that focuses on the people building our open source software.
I got to be on the latest episode 😁 🎙️
communitycode.dev/episodes/epi...
"Google Tag Manager can be a nightmare to set up and a big pain in the butt."
@derekashauer.bsky.social doesn't mess around in describing his experience setting up Tag Manager on WordPress sites.
It probably got the same UI designers who worked on Google Analytics 4 😜
It would cost only a few cents per plugin.
You could skip any translations already done by humans.
This would just be filling in the gaps where no translations currently exist. And then humans can correct any mistakes.
Unpopular opinion: there are areas where the WordPress community could immediately lean heavily into AI.
For example, why not open the door to AI-generated translations?
We could have every WordPress plugin and theme available in the world's 100 most popular languages.
This is a nice touch with the new real-time collaboration feature in WordPress 7.0.
At the top of the screen is a list of all the users editing the post. If you click a name, you'll be take to exactly what the user is working on.
This feature and the video are courtesy of Max Schmeling
If you do it right, your website can send back the conversion data to Google or Meta and they'll automatically optimize your ads for you.
Check out the full episode: youtube.com/watch?v=j8Lk...
See more about Derek's plugin: conversionbridgewp.com
How do people drive paid traffic to WordPress sites?
@derekashauer.bsky.social helps people optimize their ads with conversion tracking and his answer is "Google and Meta". Any other sources of paid leads are far behind.
Looks like the delay in WordPress 7.0 is now confirmed and it's probably the right call. A lot of changes are still going on in to get 7.0 ready.
Check out the full episode: www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8Lk...
See more about Derek's plugin: conversionbridgewp.com
What are alternatives to Google Analytics for WordPress users?
Google Analytics 4 is hard to use. It's not privacy-friendly.
@derekashauer.bsky.social runs Conversion Bridge which can connect your WordPress site to over 20 different analytics platforms. Which ones does he recommend?
You can block those words easily with the new "Prohibited words" feature in the PublishPress Checklists plugin.
Enter your list of prohibited words and nobody will be able to publish a post with those words: wordpress.org/plugins/publ...
Do you have a list of words that you don't allow in WordPress posts?
- Over-used words
- Rude words
- Common mis-spellings
- Rival company or product names
IMHO, it seems pretty likely that the WordPress 7.0 release will get moved back from April 9.
This release is really now big and feature-packed, so there's a lot of edges to smooth off. Done right is better than done fast ✅
Without looking, can you guess the most popular non-English language used for WordPress sites?
Are any of you distributing AI-generated translations for your free plugins?
With Pro plugins you can distribute them from your site.
But the WordPress Ployglots team won't accept AI translations yet.
Has anyone found a workaround (short of adding the files to your plugin)?
I've attached "before" and "after" screenshots. We converted several old-looking metaboxes into one metabox with much more modern look. You can now control the viewing and editing access for all your posts directly from this single metabox.
1. In the sidebar (Default Gutenberg)
2. Inside a metabox (ACF)
3. Inside a modal window (Lots of page-builders)
We went with choice 2 for a big update of our PublishPress Permissions plugin. Metaboxes are best if you're also supporting the Classic Editor and page-builders.
