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#296 – New WP Endpoint Debate, DreamHost Data Breach, State of Woo Ecosystem Survey

Issue #296   |   November 10, 2026   |   Reading time: 16 mins

Hello!

This week on The WP Week Newsletter, we cover the new /random/ endpoint coming in WordPress 7.2 and the community debate on it, the data breach at DreamHost, multiple survey results, along with new projects and more.

Submissions are now open for Black Friday 2026! Share your deals on plugins, themes, hosting, WooCommerce tools, SaaS, and more.

Don’t forget to subscribe and listen to the podcast version of this newsletter, where you can hear more details and discussions about these topics and more.

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See you next week!

Team WP-CONTENT.CO

🙌 This weekly newsletter is kindly sponsored by ProfilePress, HireZoot and AccessMate

ProfilePress – Create membership sites & sell subscriptions on WordPress Check it out  →

Create a career page and start recruiting talents in a few minutes Check it out  →

Scan, understand, and fix accessibility issues without the complexity. Check it out  →

🗣️TALK OF THE TOWN

The feature redirects visitors to randomly selected published posts, with support for category, author, taxonomy, and custom post type archives. Site owners can control which post types are eligible, customize the selection through existing query hooks, or disable random redirects entirely.

The announcement has drawn largely negative feedback from the community. Joost de Valk, Olli Kousa, and Daniel Iser raised concerns about unintended exposure of content, while Ryan McCue and Rene Hermenau highlighted potential performance issues with the ORDER BY RAND() query, including increased server load on large sites.

📰  WORDPRESS & AROUND

All the updates around WordPress and its closely related technologies

The attack began in August, allowing hackers to steal customer emails, files, credentials, and session tokens by exploiting an undisclosed file manager vulnerability. The breach affected well under 10% of its customers and was disclosed following a multi-day outage and customer password resets.

🔧 TIP OF THE WEEK

Don’t Use Global Selectors for Block JavaScript

❌ Avoid:

$(‘.testimonial-slider’).slick();

A block may appear 5 times.
Prefer:

document.querySelectorAll(‘.testimonial-block’).forEach((block) => {
initTestimonial(block);
});

Now each block controls its own instance.
Think:
Block JS should operate on the block instance, not the entire website.

💵 INVESTMENTS, ACQUISITIONS & PARTNERSHIPS

  • Awesome Motive acquires Drip and Sleeknote: Drip is an email marketing and automation platform, and Sleeknote is a conversion optimization tool. Mogens Møller, CEO of Drip, and Patrick Moog, CTO of Sleeknote, will continue leading both businesses alongside their existing leadership team.

👥 COMMUNITY NEWS

Updates and News from the WordPress Community

The survey conducted by Commercegurus saw 107 respondents and found that 77% cited site speed as a WooCommerce challenge, followed by plugin bloat at 58%. The findings also show that 75% use Elementor, 60% expect to use WooCommerce more in the next year, and 68% identified checkout enhancements as a product priority.

🚀 NEW PROJECTS
“The easiest and most productive way to check a website’s accessibility is through the browser. I tried more than 20 accessibility add-ons, and while they all work well, I felt there was room for something simpler, friendlier, and faster. That’s what we set out to build with AccessMate: an accessibility add-on that people would actually love to use“

Aravind Ajith about creating Accessmate.
  • AccessMate Accessibility Checker add-on for Mozilla: With this, users can scan web pages for accessibility issues against WCAG 2.2 AA standards. It identifies problems such as missing image descriptions, unlabelled controls, poor colour contrast and heading structure issues, while offering screen reader inspections, vision simulations and suggestions for fixes. All checks run locally in the browser, with no account or sign-up required. 
  • WordPress for Writers: A plugin by Andrei Draganescu that replaces wp-admin with a calm, three-pane writing app inspired by Bear.
  • AgentedSEO: Developed by Joy Chetry this is a new SEO plugin with built-in MCP support that lets AI agents such as Claude, Cursor, and Codex handle SEO tasks, including writing metadata, generating schema, creating drafts, and managing redirects.
  • StaleWP – A new project by Abhishek Deshpande and Nikita Sawarkar that tracks the WordPress plugin directory and tells you which plugins have gone quiet, which are falling behind, and what to do about them.
  • Runlight: Developed by Jon C. Phillips this is a free, open-source analytics tool that lets website owners track traffic, visitor activity, conversions, and referral sources directly within their own applications. It stores analytics data in the website’s own database, and requires no cookies.

🔖 INTERESTING READS & PODCASTS

More posts and podcasts from the WordPress Community you don’t want to miss

  • Steve Mosby joins Bud Kraus on Seriously, Bud? to discuss his personal life, career journey from NHS finance to WordPress-based accounting software, and his involvement in the WordPress community.
  • On The Melapress Show, Robert Abela speaks with MailChannels founder and CEO Ken Simpson about common WordPress email delivery issues, the role of sender reputation and email authentication, and ways to troubleshoot missing emails and improve deliverability.
  • Adam W. Warner recently migrated a WordPress website from Nexcess to a new hosting provider, only to discover that several Nexcess-specific files and integrations remained on the server.
  • Dave Foy explains how he built his new website without WordPress or a page builder, using Astro, Claude Code, Git, and Cloudflare.
  • Anne McCarthy explores how upcoming WordPress features, including Notes enhancements, Suggestion Mode, and the Presence API, could improve collaboration and introduce safeguards against accidental publishing.
  • WP Engine has introduced new traffic management measures to prevent automated bots from exhausting PHP worker capacity and causing 500 errors. The changes reserve at least 20% of available PHP workers for human visitors.
  • Miriam Schwab explains how the growing use of AI agents is changing the way websites are accessed and why sites need to become “agent ready.”
  • Brad Vincent describes how his AI coding agent, Bender, spent 18 days and more than 1.74 billion tokens working on a single plugin feature without delivering a working solution.
  • WordCamp Sylhet 2026 brought the WordPress community together in Bangladesh for a two-day event focused on knowledge-sharing, contributions, and community connections, with organizers and sponsors choosing to go swag-free.

🛠 GUIDE ZONE – HOWTO’S and MORE

Handpicked fresh guides from WordPress circle

📆 SAVE THE DATES

Do not miss a WordPress event ever again

🎁 WORDPRESS DEALS OF THE WEEK

Again, these are the best deals of the week, handpicked by yours!

Running a Black Friday deal? Share it here.

EXCLUSIVE DEALS
  • 4 Months free offer on hosting plans of WP Engine (Coupon Code- FREEDOMTOCREATE)
  • 10% off on monthly & annual plans at SureTriggers (Coupon Code- WPCONTENT10)
  • Up to 84% off at Hostinger (Code NYSALE for an extra 10% off)
  • 15% off yearly plans at Videvo (Coupon Code – WPV15)
MORE DEALS

This weekly newsletter is kindly sponsored by awesome WordPress Companies 🦸‍♂️🙌

ProfilePress – Create membership sites & sell subscriptions on WordPress Check it out  →

Create a career page and start recruiting talents in a few minutes Check it out  →

Scan, understand, and fix accessibility issues without the complexity. Check it out  →

Last but not least, updates from WP-CONTENT.CO 👇

Awesome Motive Acquires Drip and Sleeknote, Plans Further Product Integrations

Awesome Motive has acquired Drip, an email marketing and automation platform, and Sleeknote, a conversion optimization tool. Mogens…

Read more

Feature Notifications Proposed Design Rethinks How WordPress Handles Admin Notices

A new design exploration for Feature Notifications proposes a centralized notification panel accessible through a bell icon across…

Read more

WP Engine Cites Nominative Fair Use and Laches in Summary Judgment Bid Against Automattic’s Counterclaims

WP Engine is also seeking summary judgment on all counterclaims brought against it by Automattic in the ongoing…

Read more

WordPress AI Team Outlines Four-Part Plan for Native AI Agent Support in 7.3

The WordPress AI Team has outlined plans to make WordPress natively compatible with AI agents, allowing users to…

Read more

Team WP-CONTENT.CO

Issue #296   |   November 10, 2026   |   Reading time: 16 mins

This weekly newsletter is kindly sponsored by ProfilePress, HireZoot and AccessMate

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