The WP Awards 2025 result is out, check the top winners. Also, tracking the latest WordPress 6.9 release and State of the Word 2025 event. Plus, the final stash of new WordPress plugins as we close on 2025.
The WP Awards 2025: The Top 5 Winners are: ACF Pro, WooCommerce, The Admin Bar, Elementor, and RankMath SEO. See Full Result with top 3 winners from each category. Powered by Gold sponsors: Fluent Cart, 20i Hosting, GoDaddy, Pressable, Amelia, Sucuri, and Pagely. Supported by: Search & Filter & Element Pack Pro.
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What’s Buzzing in WordPress 💖
- Black Friday Promotion Trends… WordPress plugin promotions during this Black Friday, Adi Spiac made a few observations (LinkedIn) like a strong push to increase average order value & LTV, higher renewal prices with deeply discounted first-year offers are gaining popularity, and a surprising gap in the multilingual space.
- Plugin & Theme Stats… Pavel Ciorici shared (Links X) ‘a cool and underrated tool’ called WPMonitor .dev that helps you keep track of active installs of your free WordPress themes & plugins hosted in the WordPress repository. Just click on a specific plugin name and see full statistics.
- New OpinionCamp… Istiak Rayhan, co-founder at DotCamp, has released the OpinionCamp poll Block for WordPress users. It promises to be a simple, modern, block-based Poll plugin focused on engagement, not complexity.
- Posts to eBooks… Naweed Chougle has launched the eBook Crafter WordPress plugin that turns posts into eBooks. It allows authors to pull content from existing posts, edit everything to give it a fresh perspective, and export it as a PDF eBook.
New Updates: MailerPress, SureForms, & WPCafe
MailerPress + New Updates… the first update, 1.1v of MailerPress, is now available, bringing a completely redesigned dashboard, enhanced contact management with built-in statistics, support for custom fields in the contact manager, and a new navigation mode.
SureForms + New Integrations… 2.1.0v update has introduced new integrations for HubSpot, MailPoet, and WP Fusion 3.47.3v. Also, updates to email notifications, payment detail buttons, and help text for the upload field.
WPCafe + New UI… 3.0v of WPCafe is live now with a brand new onboarding guide, redesigned dashboard for a comprehensive view of your restaurant’s performance, and separate real-time lists for food orders and reservations.
Free Plugins: Placeholders, CSS Styler, & Form Finder
Advt Placeholders… Jake Spurlock has released a free Placeholders plugin that promises to make wireframing and prototyping ad layouts easier. This provides 14 Gutenberg blocks for the most common advertising sizes, which you can add to your layouts.
Neurogenesis Style… Andrei from Mentholinc has released a free Neurogenesis Styler plugin in the repo. This lightweight tool adds Pro CSS controls to all core Gutenberg blocks, promising ‘no bloat and no lock-in’.
Finder for Ninja Forms… Faisal Ahammad has released (LinkedIn) a free Form Finder plugin for Ninja Forms users. It allows you to scan pages to find where a specific Ninja Form has been used, making it easy to delete or replace forms spread across various pages on your WordPress website.
More Plugins: Customizer Backup & Email Changes
Customizer Backup & Reset… Pavel Ciorici shared (Links X) about adding the new Create Backup button to save backups without resetting customizations made through the WordPress Customizer in the free Customizer Backup & Reset plugin.
User Email Changes… Pavel Ciorici has vibe coded a plugin (Links X) that tracks changes to the email ID of a user registered on your WordPress website. User History (GitHub) maintains a searchable log to quickly find any user and the email ID information.
Extended WordPress Buzz 🔥
- Remembering Harshad Mane… Aditya Kane has shared (Links X) about the passing of Harshad Mane (Links X). He added, “Haven’t really been able to process that Harshad Mane, a two time WordCamp Nashik organiser, has passed. He had been unwell for a while”. Read More on Aditya Kane’s blog.
- Hide Blocks in WP 6.9… Aki Hamano shares the new in-built WordPress 6.9 feature to hide blocks. You can use a code snippet to disable this hide blocks feature when not needed in your setup.
- Woo Performance Boost… Tomzur shared (Links X) about the performance boost for WooCommerce. It was noted, “WooCommerce experiences a substantial performance improvement when upgrading from PHP 7.4 to modern PHP versions, with PHP 8.2 delivering about 23% higher throughput than PHP 7.4”.
- Gutenberg Update… Birgit Pauli-Haack shared about the Gutenberg 22.2v update that adds the option to use embedded videos (like YouTube or Vimeo) as background videos in the Cover block. Also, there are enhancements to the Breadcrumbs block and styling options for the Math block.
- Playground 2025 Review… Adam Zieliński published the 2025 review of Playground, highlighting key things like 99+% of WordPress Plugins are supported in Playground. It got faster this year, “Enabling OpCache alone cut the average response time by 42% – from 185ms down to 108ms”.
- CloudFest Hackathon 2026… Carole Olinger shared (LinkedIn) about the official announcement of the 9th edition of the CloudFest Hackathon, scheduled for March 20-22, 2026, in Europa-Park, Germany. “We’re looking for 10 not-for-profit, interoperable, open-source projects that will shape the future of the open web”.
- WordCamps Bhopal & Nepal… WordCamp Bhopal 2025 (India) is happening in a couple of day on December 21, 2025, check the speakers list, and a chance to grab exclusive student discount offer. The call for Emcees is open until December 20, 2025, for WordCamp Nepal 2026, scheduled for January 23, 2026.
WordPress 6.9 ‘Gene’ – Update Time!
WordPress 6.9, code-named ‘Gene’, honors the American Jazz pianist Gene Harris, has been released – time to update your websites. Here is the neat looking WordPress 6.9 landing page showcasing all the key features and enhancements.
This release brings the Notes feature for collaboration at the block level, Command Palette throughout the dashboard, new fit text to container, the Abilities API, accessibility and performance improvements. Video preview (YouTube) of WordPress 6.9 features by Matias Ventura.
- More on WordPres 6.9
- Note: Non backward compatible WP change for (Links X) JavaScript.
- WordPress doesn’t send emails after 6.9 update, thread on Reddit.
- Mumtahina Faguni’s recap of WP 6.9 features from non-coder eyes.
- Create Woo Product Category Image Block, WP 6.9, by Brian Coords.
- From State of Word 2025
- Watch the session from (YouTube) State of the Word 2025 event.
- Nicholas Garofalo on SOTW 2025, innovation shaped by community.
- Rae Morey recap SOTW 2025, ‘Holding Steady, Rollercoaster Year’.
- James LePage on how this year WordPress became AI-Native.
WordPress + MCP: JetEngine & Fluent Products
JetEngine + MCP… 3.8.0v of JetEngine brings MCP server support for automating tasks and displaying content. Here is how you can connect JetEngine MCP Server to VS Code and GitHub Copilot. Check the video preview (YouTube).
Fluent + MCP… Spencer Forman has launched FluentMCP solution for AI powered automation via 100+ AI tools with Fluent family of products. Note: This is a third party solution, not from the official Fluent products team.
Quick Bits 👍
- Bookmark: Visual Roadmap for becoming a WordPress developer.
- Wowstore with Style Mart, new pre-made template for your store.
- Terence Eden share, a big list of things I disable in WordPress site.
- Devin Walker previewed (Links X) post social share flow in Jetpack.
- Coding Standard Proposal: Allow the use of the PHP short echo tag.
- Jamie Marsland on what unique happened, creating smooth scroll!
- Future: Tech predictions for 2026 and beyond, by Werner Vogels.
- WordPress on YouTube
- WP Performance Playbook they never teach you, Remkus de Vries.
- Paul on why he moved (YouTube) from Circle to FluentCommunity.
- People of WordPress
- Why I’m optimistic about the Jetpack’s Future, by Devin Walker.
- Mukesh Panchal’s milestone of Noteworthy Core Contributor.
- Luminita Ciobanu joins WP .com as a DIFM Solutions Architect.
Buzz: 20i Widgets & GoDaddy Airo App Builder
20i + New Widgets… users of 20i Hosting can now customize their My20i home page with the new My20i widgets. You can use widgets for specific information, like mailbox usage, security events, CDN performance, analytics, and more.
Airo App Builder… Michael Roehricht shared (LinkedIn) about the availability of the Airo App Builder (beta) from GoDaddy. Start by describing your idea and this Agentic AI will build for you – with instant deployment with domains, hosting, and infrastructure already in place.
20i Managed WordPress Hosting. Embrace traffic spikes with dynamic autoscaling built for always-on, always-fast performance. Easy migration, any time.
Platform InMotion with high performance servers for serious WordPress websites, comes with hassle free deployment tools and expert support.
Cloudways This Black Friday, experience 65% faster hosting + 50% off for 3 months. Plus, 50 free migrations. Scale unlimited sites on top cloud providers.
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