Monthly journals are updated weekly, as each InfluenceWP Weekly newsletter drops.

Partner Spotlight

WP Security Ninja

WordPress sites face attacks every day, yet many site owners still feel stuck when security tools get too technical. That gap is where WP Security Ninja has built its name. It presents WordPress security in a way that feels usable, practical, and far less overwhelming for normal site owners, agencies, and busy professionals.

Visit WP Security Ninja on InfluenceWP to learn more about the brand and the plugin, watch the first look video, read video companion posts, and get an exclusive deal.

InfluenceWP Updates

Partnerships

New and Deepended Partnerships 👇

• EventKoi—Fast, Modern Events Plugin Built for Today’s WordPress. 20% off
• The wpWax team has deepened their partnership with InfluenceWP for their Directorist solution—the most complete WordPress directory plugin. Directorist is an AI-powered, all-in-one solution to build any type of directory or classified website with ease.

FREE Giveaways 🎉

InfluenceWP ran viral giveaways for the following partners. Want to do the same? Great! Please submit your giveaway using our simple form, and we’ll take care of the rest.

• Termageddon (IWP Deal) protects websites from over 120 privacy laws, rules, and regulations. Plus, the policies auto-update as laws change or new laws go into effect, making it a fantastic set-it-and-forget-it option for web designers and agencies with multiple clients. Now’s your chance to protect two websites with the most comprehensive website policies and cookie consent solution on the market.

Updates From Our Partners

• SEOPress v9.7 (IWP Deal) is a major update that brings their first React-powered settings screens—designed to deliver a smoother, faster, and more intuitive user experience, even better URL redirects, author schema improvements, two new endpoints (automatic schemas and SEO alerts), and a ton more improvements and fixes.
• WP Umbrella v2.22.1 (IWP Deal) brings improved broken link checker crawling, backup scan performance for large sites, redirect router performance, and a support page redesign with data counts, as well as some fixes.
• Fluent Forms v6.2 (IWP Deal) brings improvements to the internal framework for better performance and PHP 8.4 support, Stripe payment confirmation security, data export security, database query performance for reports, and overall plugin security and stability, as well as a filter hook for conversational form extra inputs.
• Coupon Affiliates for WooCommerce v7.6 (IWP Deal) brings a new SMS Notifications feature, a “Send Notification Email” checkbox to the Add New Affiliate and Add New Coupon admin forms, and performance improvements, as well as numerous fixes and improved security.
• uiXpress v1.2.21 (IWP Deal) is a small but meaningful maintenance release focused on stability, polish, and a handy new settings option, bringing smarter hover submenus, dashboard tab reordering, and dark mode polish, as well as numerous bug fixes. For those not familiar with this plugin, it completely modernizes the WordPress dashboard.
• Independent Analytics v2.14.7 (IWP Deal) adds URL filters to the User Journeys report, integration with the Complianz plugin, form validation to Campaign Builder, WordPress 7.0 compatibility, and numerous other enhancements and fixes.
• Infinite Uploads v3.2 (IWP Deal) is a massive update, bringing full folder management, improved filtering, sorting, and enhanced search to the WordPress Media Library—unlimited nested folders. drag-and-drop files, color coding of folders, folder support in the media picker for popular page builders, and more.
• ShutterPress v1.8 (IWP Deal) brings new features such as a lightbox plugin and icon filter hooks for extending LightGallery integrations, gallery container and lightbox item data attribute filters for custom integrations, “like” icons now available directly in the lightbox with synced state between gallery and lightbox views, image counts on the gallery admin page, and significantly improved performance for large galleries. ShutterPress is a WordPress gallery plugin built for photographers.
• NeetoRecord (IWP Deal) recordings now support comments — you, your team members, and viewers can share feedback, ask questions, or start a conversation right on the recording, without needing email or chat. You can also now request a screen recording from anyone — no account or installation required on their end. Share a link, and the recipient records their screen in their browser and sends it directly to you. NeetoRecord is my go-to solution for videos as a replacement for Loom.
• FluentSupport v2.1 (IWP Deal) brings Agent Groups to organize support teams and enable smart ticket distribution, an Agent Signature option for support agents, Agent-Initiated Tickets (agents can create tickets on behalf of customers), a new email template for Agent-Initiated Tickets, file upload integration with Cloudflare R2 and Amazon S3 (Pro), and more, including performance optimizations and numerous fixes.
• WP Umbrella v2.22.3 (IWP Deal) brings request trace breadcrumbs for update diagnostics and support for SiteGround cache as well as improvements to the update state machine to prevent race conditions during rollbacks. WP Umbrella is what I use within my agency to manage all sites under management.
• Perfmatters v2.6.1 (IWP Deal) brings adjustments to the code snippets error handler initialization logic to avoid unnecessary handling if no relevant code snippets are active, additional plugin UI style adjustments for WordPress 7, and further refinements, as well as numerous fixes. This plugin goes on every website under my management.
• Virfice v1.2.2 (IWP Deal) brings the option to add contacts manually, an individual contact overview with editable fields, custom fields for contacts, a contact import system with proper data mapping, and the ability to export contacts as a CSV file, as well as other improvements and fixes. Virfice is a self-hosted email marketing solution for WordPress.
• Coupon Affiliates for WooCommerce v7.7 (IWP Deal) is a big update that brings a completely rebuilt Admin Reports & Analytics page with a more modern design, admin reports that now include additional statistics such as a trends chart, traffic sources, top performers, activity log events, and more, a PDF download option for the admin reports that generates a PDF version of the report, and a new affiliate group filter to the admin reports to only include statistics for affiliates in a specific group, along with numerous improvements, tweaks, and fixes.

Other WordPressers Not to Be Overlooked

• Mike McAlister (X) announced an intuitive and unobtrusive way to bring responsive controls to your typography, margin, padding, and alignment styles within the WordPress block editor when using OllieWP. I’m using OllieWP on more and more sites, and I highly recommend giving it a try. ThemeSwitcher Pro (IWP Deal) makes it easy to switch from a classic theme over to a block-based theme like Ollie.
• Two Factor v0.16 (Changelog) brings new features such as a dedicated settings page for plugin configuration in the WordPress dashboard, support links filter so consumers can customize contextual recovery/help links, and a refreshed backup codes UI styling/behavior, as well as a breaking change with the removal of legacy FIDO U2F provider support and numerous developer updates and bug fixes. I use this powerful (and free) plugin on every website under my management.
• Per Soderlind (X) announced the free Virtual Media Folders—Migrate plugin (GitHub), which allows you to import folders and file assignments from other media folder plugins like FileBird, Enhanced Media Library, Real Media Library, HappyFiles, and more.
• Mahdi Khaksar (X) announced the free Conditional Payment Gateways for WooCommerce plugin (Changelog) that allows you to hide certain payment gateways based on criteria like cart totals, shipping destination, coupons applied, and more.
• ACF Pro v6.8 (Announcement Post) brings three powerful features: WordPress Abilities API integration, automatic structured data, and new WP-CLI commands for managing ACF JSON—all working together to make your ACF content discoverable, interoperable, and ready for the next generation of AI tools and search experiences, with improved developer workflows to match.
• Auto-Close v3.1.0 (Changelog) brings taxonomy-based exclusions, automatic comment reopening when you update a post, and email notifications after each scheduled run. This free plugin allows you to close comments, pingbacks, and trackbacks automatically in WordPress.
• Simple CAPTCHA Alternative with Cloudflare Turnstile v1.38 (Changelog) brings a “Refresh Timeout” option to the advanced settings, and the Cloudflare health check (used by failover mode) is now cached for 2 minutes to prevent repeated HTTP requests, as well as numerous fixes, dev notes, and security enhancements. This plugin goes on every website under my management.
• FluentCart v1.3.17 (Release Post) brings a visual PDF invoice customizer, saved filter views, e-invoice support (ZUGFeRD / Factur-X), a fees API, shipping country include/exclude, filterable frontend asset loading, plus a solid round of fixes covering stock handling after test order deletion, bulk product duplication, downloadable file editing, Turnstile verification, decimal support in shipping fees, Paddle recovery links, checkout summary block consolidation, and pagination sync.
• Query Monitor 4 (Changelog) brings a new timeline view and switches from rendering its panels server-side in PHP to efficiently rendering them client-side in Preact, providing several performance benefits.
• Dr. Jaime Alnassim (X) announced his new WP WAF plugin to deploy battle-tested Cloudflare WAF rules for WordPress, manage DNS, monitor analytics, purge cache, block IPs, and route email. As a heavy Cloudflare user myself, I find this plugin to be a super interesting product. It’s completely free if you’re willing to manually apply updates yourself, but the Pro version has extremely generous pricing.
• Danny van Kooten (X) announced Koko Analytics version v2.3 (Changelog), which brings a handful of user-facing improvements to the dashboard and several under-the-hood changes to improve database performance and reliability. If you’re looking for privacy-friendly statistics for WordPress, give this one a look.
• Kevin Batdorf (X) released Code Block Pro v1.28 (Changelog), bringing modernized tooling: swapping ESLint/Prettier to Biome and Cypress/wp-env to Playwright + WP Playground. This is the plugin I use on my sites where I need to display code for documentation and sharing purposes.

WordPress Tidbits

EmDash announced itself as the “spiritual successor” to WordPress. The WordPress block editor finally gets responsive controls, kind of. I was on the WP-Tonic podcast talking about WordPress plugins in the world of AI.

EmDash

I stay out of the “business” side of WordPress. EmDash, or at least the discussion of it falls into that category. Instead, I concentrate on areas where I can potentially make a positive impact.

So, when I was asked on the WP-Tonic podcast about my thoughts on EmDash, I really didn’t have any, other than to draw attention to a wonderful article I read from Brian Coords (X) right before the show, by mere coincidence. As I told Brian, “It’s refreshing to read content where folks really try to see both sides and not blanket-bash WordPress or emDash, in this case.”

Honestly, I have zero desire to look deeper into EmDash. I bought a .com domain from Cloudflare (my recommended registrar, by the way) related to EmDash as an investment play. I own Cloudflare stock. That’s it.

The WordPress inner circle, which can influence its direction, appears to be paying attention to EmDash, and that is what really matters. Let’s take the good from the technical side of EmDash and learn from it. As a community, they can’t touch WordPress.

AI & Product Support

AI recently helped me get around a terrible support experience. Long story short, a theme made a change that was breaking Select2 in certain cases.

I submitted a support ticket to the theme vendor. Two weeks later, I finally received a response, along with a non-working code snippet.

The theme company blamed a plugin. The plugin company blamed the theme. You know the dance.

What I initially observed with a specific plugin was merely a small part of a larger problem. The issue was more widespread and impacting other areas.

After a follow-up with theme support, I was then ghosted for a month.

It’s not like I was asking for a new feature that only I wanted. This was a bug that was impacting a lot of people using this theme.

So, I set up a test site with the theme and the plugin that initially showed me the signs of the issue, connected to the site with Cursor, and told it the issue.

As a non-dev, I had the solution in two minutes. Two minutes!

Here’s the thing. As a vendor, if people are paying you for software that includes both support and updates, AI can help you reduce support tickets, especially if your documentation is on point. All good there.

However, if you’re a vendor who provides free updates while trying to monetize off of support only, you might want to think about things differently.

Self-support is only going to get easier for non-developers, and those support contracts/agreements/subscriptions/etc. will start to fall off over time.

Additionally, this trend extends beyond support issues.

I recently created an add-on for a plugin using AI, rather than submitting and waiting for a feature request that would likely never come. Think about that. Feature requests help shape products, but what happens if they dry up too?

Anywho, some things to think about.