Quick public service announcement; Autoptimize 2.9 is almost ready to be released but given the planned release of WordPress 5.8 (July 20th) and the risk of support requests mixing up WordPress core update related issues with the Autoptimize update related issues, Autoptimize 2.9 will probably be released one week after WordPress 5.8, so on or around Tuesday 27th.
If you’re eager to use 2.9 (with better image optimization, improved JS optimization and per page/ post Autoptimize settings) you can off course download the beta here immediately.
wordpress core
Of bugs, inconsistencies and tag soup in (future) core
In general i rarely bother looking into WordPress core code or what’s on the horizon. The last month or so however I came across 3 problems that were due to core.
1. Shortly after pushing Autoptimize 2.3.x out, a subset of users started complaining about a flood of “cachebuster”-requests bringing their site to a crawl. It turned out all of them were using Redis or Memcached and that due to a longstanding bug in WordPress core Autoptimize did not get the correct version-string from the database, triggering the update-procedure over and over, purging and then preloading the cache. A workaround -involving a transient featuring my wife and daughter- was introduced to prevent this, but “oh my gawd” what an ugly old WordPress core bug that is! Can someone please get this fixed?
2. A couple of users of WP YouTube Lyte noticed their browsers complaining about unbalanced tags in the Lyte HTML output (which is part of the_content). It took me a lot of time to come to the conclusion that WordPress core’s wpautop was messing things up severely due to the noscript and meta-tags in Lyte’s output. As wpautop has no filters or actions to alter the way it works, I ended up disabling wpautop when lyte’s were found in the_content.
3. My last encounter was with the ghost of WordPress Yet-to-come; Gutenberg … To allow WP YouTube Lyte to turn Gutenberg embedded YouTube’s into Lyte’s, it turned out I had to dive into the tag soup that Gutenberg adds as HTML-comments to the_content. I have yet to find documented functions to extract the information the smart way, so regexes to the rescue. But any plugin that hooks into the_content better be aware that Gutenberg (as part of WordPress 5.0) will potentially mess things up severely.
Although I cursed and sighed and I am now complaining, I felt great relief when having fixed/ worked around these issues. But working in the context of a large and successful open source software project and depending on it’s quality can sometimes almost be a pain as much as it is a joy. Almost … 😉