That sentence probably just caused several people to fall asleep or keep scrolling, but hear me out.

I’ve spent a pretty stupid amount of my career around CMSs, DXPs, Drupal, WordPress, headless platforms, agencies, and all the other ways we’ve invented to describe putting content on the internet.

And I realized there really wasn’t a weekly show I wanted to listen to that just covered what actually happened in this industry and why any of it matters.

So I decided to make it.

The first episode is about something I noticed happening across several announcements this week:

WordPress shipped 7.1.
Storyblok plugged into Claude.
Salesforce expanded Headless 360.
Optimizely is giving agents more control inside the CMS.
Contentful is talking about what happens when your website visitor isn’t human.

My takeaway is that we might be watching the CMS get an entirely new kind of user: AI agents. (I know... this might not be news to everyone here... but when I step out of my LinkedIn bubble... I realize there are a lot of people not following the signals)

And that could make structured content, APIs, permissions, metadata, and all the traditionally boring CMS stuff suddenly much more important.

Anyway.

I have no idea if this will become a thing.

But I’m going to try doing it every week, covering the interesting CMS/DXP news, having some opinions about it, making fun of our industry when deserved, and hopefully talking to some smart people along the way.

If that sounds interesting, here’s the first episode:

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-cms-has-a-new-user-and-its-not-human/id6804680238?i=1000785544658
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1FG1olsK8yV0Q0y8LC0FqH?si=0UjSsl2MTgChoT1jRswNCg
YouTube: https://youtu.be/i5YJhz41EKY?si=wGUAStYgos1vH3hv

Would genuinely love feedback, especially from people who actually work in this world.

Including “your take is completely wrong.”

Honestly, that might make Episode 2 easier.

I'm newish with wp and having a somewhat pre setup ish theme is a must.

I'm selling one or two physical products with multiple digital subscriptions.

Thanks!

Hi. I am building a site and testing out booking plugins. BookingPress looks pretty good to me and very promising; it has a wonderful dashboard. However, before I commit to buying the BookingPress plugin. I would like to know how good their customer service is. Trustpilot reviews are mainly about the plugin. If possible, I would like to avoid customer service and my first preference is to ask AI for tech support. But in case I need to talk to a human being, I would like to know how their customer service is.

1. Have you contacted customer service?
   
2. Was there ever a need for you to contact customer service?
   
3. If yes, how was your experience?

I have been using a wordpress plugin to do a security audit of my wordpress-backed website. I am the sole administrator of this site.

One thing I find very strange is that it reports deactivated themes and plugins as problems.

I keep my list of active plugins small, but I've never given a second thought to keeping plugins or themes I no longer use. Am I missing something? Can a malicious actor find some way to use to exploit deactivated plugins or themes?

Bonjour,

J’utilise WordPress avec WooCommerce, Astra Free et Elementor Free.

Sur ma page Boutique, j’ai un très grand espace vide entre la bannière/titre « BOUTIQUE » et la liste des produits (voir capture).

J’aimerais simplement réduire cet espace, mais je ne trouve aucun réglage permettant de le faire dans Astra > Personnaliser > WooCommerce > Catalogue de produits.

Est-ce qu’il existe un réglage que j’ai raté dans la version gratuite d’Astra ?

Je précise que j’utilise uniquement les versions gratuites d’Astra et Elementor.

Merci !

Hello,

I have set up a Wordpress site (www.Magic.Army) and am using WooCommerce to manage my storefront. Everything seems to be functioning great except that I cannot get any emails to work via purchases or the contact form.

I am using WP Mail SMTP (free) along with Brevo (also free). I have followed this guide to set everything up. All of the DNS records have propogated, and I'm getting confirmation on the Brevo site that my domain is verified on every record. I've ensured all of the settings are congruent between Brevo and WP Mail SMTP, to include the 'From Email' field. I have tried generating several new API keys to ensure that wasn't the issue, and nothing changed.

Whenever I go to send a test email, I get the following error:
Action Needed: It doesn't look like the DKIM record required by Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) has been added to your domain. Please check out our step-by-step guide for details on how to add this record to your domain's DNS.

From what I can tell, that error is a bug and will be persistent even if everything is functioning correctly, but I figured it's worth mentioning since everything is not working correctly. That said, the DKIM records are there and can be seen/accessed.

Emails are not going into any sort of spam folder, and there's nothing in my 'Sent' emails folder, either. Any ideas on what could be causing this issue?

Edit: SOLVED
Turns out you're not allowed to use captial letters in your 'From Address'. Switched to all lowercase and everything now works fine.

I spent some time this weekend finding the entrance vector for a site that was getting re-hacked after cleanup. I mean I knew it would get re-hacked since I wasn't finding the the vector in the usual "easy" ways. Turns out it was this: nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-15459

The WPMU DEV Dashboard plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Authentication Bypass in all versions up to, and including, 5.0.0. On sites not yet connected to the WPMU DEV Hub — the default state after installation — the site API key that keys the WDP-AUTH request signature is empty, making the signature verified by validate_hash() trivially forgeable

It's bad enough this plugin adds an alternate auth path to your web site, with full admin control given to some 3rd party you don't know. But I also learned this plugin, wpmudev-updates, is usually stealth-installed with other plugins from WPMU DEV, so users don't know it's being installed. To top it off, it doesn't show up in the plugin dashboard so they don't even know it's there.

In the case of the site mentioned above, I think it was installed with another plugin a couple of years ago, and that plugin was since removed, but wpmudev-updates did not get removed.

Is it just me or is it a little crazy to allow plugins to provide auth bypass for complete admin control of your site by third parties? Is this a common pattern? What other plugins do this aside from the WPMU DEV ones? (I'm talking about the situation where there ISN'T an active exploit in the code ... the intended use scenario is what seems insane to me).

No robot.txt is set, no cloudflare rules are blocking it, we sent the xml file to google console, all seems healthy enough. But for some reason, it won't get indexed at all. Even on the google profile of my client, the site won't be allowed after trying multiple times. Why?

Hello all. I have a webpage that is not the fastest, but not slow either. My WordPress admin, however, is absurdly slow. I use custom ACF fields to create posts that change content based on “level”: beginner, mid, expert. I have more than 50 posts (150 content levels). I have not really had any speed issues until recently. I noticed the speed deteriorated quite a lot after switching from HTTP to HTTPS. Does anyone know if this may be why?

What is the easiest and fastest way? I have some experience with WordPress. Is it better to pay someone on Upwork or subscribe to some AI tool, which one?

I am by no means a web developer or designer, but I have a strong marketing background. A family member needs a new website on a tight budget, and was thinking this would be the perfect opportunity to learn how to build on WordPress with elementor while expanding my SEO knowledge and leveraging Claude.

My plan is to use WordPress + Elementor + RankMath, leaning on Claude. I was watching video by Darrel Wilson utilizing this system (no attachment to him just used for research)

I appreciate any any honest feedback, recommendations, or lessons learned!

...you are logged in as admin in Wordpress and viewing the site. Has anyone experienced this situation? I can't find anything that would point to a permissions issue. This happens on every flavor of browser. Screenshot 1 is regular view, screenshot 2 is WP admin view.

Does anyone know if is WP AdCenter Pro still maintained? There hasn't been any updates in a long time and when you go to contact them, their forms do not go through. It does look like they're still selling the plug-in, but as it hasn't been updated for the last few versions of WordPress, it seems like it is out of business.

I've used the free blogs on WordPress(dot)com way back when (and they're still there), but started up a new one for a project that I want to be around after I'm no longer around (or have hosting, etc).

I'm astounded at just how impossible it is to use Gutenberg with that interface. I now understand all the criticisms from noobs about it.

How someone launched that, used it and thought "yeah, this is great" is beyond me.

Unfortunately, all the old themes are gone, and there is no way to turn off Gutenberg (as far as I can tell)

If you book meetings with clients have you tried embedding warmcal before

Same as title. Noob here

I was told to take a look at [Anthologize](http://anthologize.org/), a plugin that it turns out has been discontinued.

Is there a replacement or a source for that?

Or is there an equivalent tool?

Thanks.

Honest question for agency owners and devs: how do you actually get everything you need before starting a build?

Every project turns into this scavenger hunt. Chasing down high res logos, brand guidelines, some random Google Drive link, copy docs, domain and DNS logins, analytics access, you name it.

Right now it's always a mix of scattered emails, half empty Notion pages, and WhatsApp messages, and I'm honestly tired of it.

Is there an actual clean workflow that clients stick to, or is this just something we all have to live with? Curious what your setup looks like for this.

Don't know if anyone has discussed this here, but a few days ago WP Rocket caused a fatal error for its users. Their X post:

To all

w/wp_rocket users: we've identified a compatibility issue with WordPress 7.1 that can cause a fatal error on your site. We're working on a fix! We suggest not updating to WordPress 7.1 until it's released.

Please contact us if you are already affected so we can help you to fix the issue.

My take? Sorry to drag AI into this, but there's gonna come a day in the not-to-distant future where you won't have to wake up on a random day to see that your site's down due to a plugin. And btw, WP Rocket telling all of their users not to update to 7.1? Pure gold.