June 2026 Newsletter

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

Partner Spotlight

Introducing Unblock for WordPress

Tired of hitting the walls of the block editor? Unblock removes the boundaries so you can build exactly what you envision, right inside Gutenberg.

At its core is a single, incredibly powerful block that can transform into any element you need. Combine real HTML structure, custom CSS styling, JavaScript behaviors, and dynamic data—all without writing PHP or managing separate files.

Learn more about the brand behind Unblock, which is also the brand behind the extremely popular WP Grid Builder plugin.

InfluenceWP Updates

First Look Videos

These videos are our first look at products from our partners and the WordPress community. We experience these solutions for the first time, just as a new customer would.

• Unblock—Whether you’re a designer aiming for pixel-perfect builds, a developer who wants full control without compromises, or a builder who prefers speed and flexibility, Unblock gives you the complete web-building toolkit inside the native WordPress editor. No bloat. No lock-in. Just unlimited creative freedom. Check out the video.

YouTube Companion Posts

Any videos we produce for our partners, such as First Looks and Extended Looks, are accompanied by posts that direct viewers back to their listings on our platform.

• Directorist—an AI-powered, all-in-one solution that allows you to easily build any type of directory or classified website. Packed with a wide range of extensions, themes, and monetization tools, Directorist helps you launch, customize, and grow your directory platform faster. Check out the post.

FREE Giveaways

InfluenceWP ran the following viral giveaways. Want to do the same? Great! IWP Partners can run a giveaway for free as part of their membership, and anyone can run a giveaway for a small fee. Fill out a simple form, and we do the rest.

• NeetoRecord, a Loom alternative, is a screen and webcam recording tool that helps you avoid unnecessary meetings. You can record your screen to create demos, presentations, tutorials, feedback, and more.

Updates From Our Partners

• ToggleWP v1.2 (IWP Deal) brings a selection of improvements to integrate AI page reviews with the content health monitor. You get a Manage Sites tab redesign with a filter bar (All / Alert / Pending), inline site name search, and improved per-site action layout, AI Review on Publish (Content Health Monitor can now trigger an automatic AI content review when a post is published or updated), AI review email with an overall score, plain-English summary, and per-section breakdown of issues and suggestions, a configurable review cooldown to prevent minor saves from triggering repeated reviews and consuming unnecessary AI tokens, and more.
• NeetoRecord (IWP Deal) now allows you to undo and redo while editing a recording, brings a fresh new look and take on video tagging, summaries, and thumbnails, and now show comments in the progress bar (NeetoRecord allows viewers to leave comments on recordings, making it easy to share feedback, ask questions, or have a conversation directly on the recording—without needing a separate channel like email or chat.)
• Bit Flows v1.22 (IWP Deal) brings 61 new triggers and 80 new actions for Heffl CRM, weDocs, Creator LMS, Zoho CRM, WPLoyalty, and SureDash, cURL import for custom app actions, and some fixes.
• Perfmatters v2.6.3 (IWP Deal) brings an option to select the editor theme for code snippets and global scripts (10 themes included) and a shortcode option when choosing a location for HTML code snippets (generate a shortcode you can use anywhere you need to run the code), as well as a number of improvements and some fixes.
• Glow (IWP Deal) dropped a huge update, bringing safe updates (automatically take a snapshot of your site before running any plugin or theme update, then verify the site is still healthy after—if anything breaks, it rolls back automatically (or manually in one click), a brand new dashboard, a new server tab (surfaces PHP version, memory limits, error logs, and other critical server details for every site you manage), the ability to search plugins across all sites, and is now fully responsive to manage sites from anywhere.
• PatternsWP (IWP Deal) “Happy May Patterns Day” is here with new patterns (19 pricing patterns, 10 feature patterns, 8 statistics patterns, 7 page templates, and 18 more miscellaneous patterns).
• WinDen v3.3 (IWP Deal) is a big update that brings an improved editor experience, performance and reliability enhancements, a simplified scale calculator to the wizard, and numerous bug fixes. Winden provides Tailwind CSS for WordPress—compiled directly in your browser. No Node.js. No setup. One click to production CSS under 20 kb. Works with Bricks, Oxygen, Breakdance, Gutenberg, classic themes, and every major builder.
• MailPoet v5.28.1 (IWP Deal) brings a per-newsletter archive visibility setting, a newsletter embed shortcode and block, and subscriber engagement badges now identify dormant subscribers with no recent email activity.
• SEOPress v9.9 (IWP Deal) is a significant update, bringing a brand-new SEO dashboard and admin header, a fully redesigned setup wizard, a smarter SEO box (double-click your target keywords to edit them in place, Google keyword suggestions with autocomplete as you type, and clicking “Update” in the Block Editor now saves every section at once), new content quality & structure checks, video schema that’s auto-filled from the first YouTube video found in your post, a big accessibility upgrade across the whole SEO admin, and a ton more features and fixes.
• WP Activity Log v5.6.4 (IWP Deal) adds four new event IDs (6081 to 6084) to track the WordPress 7.0 AI connectors (AI connector connected, AI connector disconnected, AI master switch enabled/disabled, and AI plugin feature enabled/disabled), along with many other improvements and fixes.

WordPressers Not to Be Overlooked

For any free plugins mentioned, check out ChangelogWP, where you can view and track their changelogs and optionally get notifications in your inbox.

• Milo Subscriptions (X) has launched as a free, modern subscriptions plugin for WooCommerce, built from the ground up on the WordPress of 2026. If you’re familiar with Rémi Corson‘s (X) work, this product is something to pay attention to since he’s the founder of it. WooCommerce Subscriptions should definitely be paying attention, as this solution poses a real threat if it does what it says on the tin. Imagine getting the core features of WooCommerce Subscriptions for free, wow.
• Elementor v4.1 (Free) introduces the Design System panel for managing Variables and Classes in one place—Atomic Editor, Angie in the Editor to help generate and modify Atomic layouts, Components, Forms, Classes, and Variables—Atomic Editor, Markdown rendering as an Alpha experiment to improve how content is structured for AI systems and numerous tweaks and fixes. IWP Note: If you happen to be using a plugin like SEOPress, they provide a feature to globally help with Markdown rendering. Whether it’s SEOPress or another solution that provides it, I recommend this approach instead of configuring settings for individual solutions.
• David Perez (X) announced that Plugin Check v2.0 (Free) brings AI false-positive detection. After running all checks, PCP now uses AI to review the results and filter out noise—so you only see real issues, not phantom warnings. The update also brings WP functions compatibility (flags usage of functions unavailable in your declared minimum WP version), write file check (detects when a plugin saves data in the plugin folder instead of uploads or DB), CTRF export for check results, and error count summary.
• Simple Cloudflare Turnstile v1.40 (Free) brings integration with WooCommerce’s Account Details form, stops keyboard submissions on some forms until Turnstile completes, a mobile performance fix, and several small bug fixes.
• Joost de Valk (X) launched The Website Specification (Direct), a platform-agnostic spec of what a good website does: SEO, accessibility, security, agent readiness, performance, privacy, and i18n. Every claim cites a source. Ships with a checklist, LLMs.txt, MCP server, and agent skill. Free. Open Source.
• Chris Jones (X) drew inspiration from the Squoosh app and created his own. Image Horse (Direct) converts and annotates images at native speed. A browser-based photo studio that crops, filters, draws, and re-encodes on your own machine. Built in Rust, shipped as WASM — your pixels never leave the tab. Fun fact—I used Chris’s app to add the Unblock Partner Spotlight image to this newsletter. I dig it!
• Maciej Bis (X), the developer behind Permalink Manager (IWP Deal), has released WPLIA (Direct), a self-hosted WordPress plugin that scans your database directly to extract internal and external links, count them, and flag orphan pages. It runs directly on your server, with no crawlers, tokens, or subscriptions.
• Danny van Kooten (X) announced Koko Analytics v2.4.9 (Free), which brings safer database imports, better filtering of non-human traffic, and code hardening to prevent excessive resource usage by non-authenticated users when your dashboard is publicly available.
• Simon Dickson (X) announced the Alpaca Issue Tracker (Free) plugin, a powerful yet simple issue tracking system that lives inside your WordPress admin. Built with the WordPress philosophy in mind, it provides a Trello-like kanban board interface for managing bugs, feature requests, and project tasks.
• Emre Erkan (X) announced WP Stage Sync, providing live-to-staging sync as easy as it should be. Sync live WordPress to staging with smart WooCommerce filtering and anonymization, and promote specific themes and plugins from staging to live with automated backup and atomic restore.
• Haktan Suren (X) announced HandL AI Connector Access Control v1.0.4 (Free), with which you can now see much more than “an AI call happened.” Know which plugin made the request, the provider + model, the operation, the prompt preview/exact prompt context, the timestamp, the URI, and the user. This matters for AI governance in WordPress: you can control which plugins are allowed to use the AI Connector, then audit what they actually sent.
• Alexander Gilmanov (X) announced IvyForms v1.0 (Free), which provides full form-building functionality to WordPress with new form styling options, forms import/export, Elementor integration, Angie AI (Elementor AI agent) integration, and more.
• Torsten Landsiedel (X) announced Plugin Report v2.2.3 (Free), which brings a good set of code enhancements across the plugin. In case you didn’t know, this plugin provides detailed information about currently installed plugins on your site—spot plugins that are no longer maintained, get a quick overview of the “plugin health” of your site, provide clients with a detailed report, right from their own dashboard or as a CSV spreadsheet, and find plugins that are no longer active on multisite installs.
• Simple History v5.29 (Free) is a big update that brings the plugin together with WordPress’s built-in privacy tools: a person’s activity log is now included in personal-data exports (Tools → Export Personal Data), and a new “Privacy & Data” settings tab explains how it works. Plus: overview action links across user, plugin, post, and media events, and action links on core update and privacy events for quicker navigation.
• Austin Ginder (X) created Dismissed—a database of WordPress admin-notice spam. “Every plugin thinks its nag is the important one. We catalog the worst offenders — license beggars, version naggers, telemetry opt-ins, and the ones that hijack every single screen — and pin each to the exact line of code that does it.” IWP Notes: It’s wild that a WordPress performance optimization is the top offender, but as I’ve said for many years, that particular plugin is as much about marketing as it is about performance. One of our partners cracked the top 20, and hopefully they will adjust their approach.
• Keystone (Direct) by Sean Davis (X) is a plugin that brings your team’s internal knowledge base directly into WordPress and it has been undergoing rapid development since its initial release in April of this year. “Keystone organizes what your team needs to know, makes the knowledge available to the right people, and ensures it was actually received. Keystone requires no external services or member fees.”
• Dr. Jaime Alnassim (X) announced WP WAF Manager v1.0.16, which brings two new profile systems (Rule Profiles and Domain Profiles) designed for agencies managing multiple client sites. Save named presets of your WAF rule configuration and your zone selections, then restore either with one click. IWP Notes: This solution offers a very generous free plan—you only need to pay if you want priority support or the added convenience of automatic plugin updates. If you’re a Cloudflare user like me, I highly recommend checking the plugin out.
• WPLIA Link Analyzer by Maciej Bis (X), the creator of Permalink Manager Pro (IWP Deal), is a WordPress plugin that scans your database to extract internal and external links, count them, and flag orphan pages. It runs directly on your server, with no crawlers, tokens, or subscriptions.

RandomTidbits

• Tolaria (Direct)—I heard about this tool for developers on a podcast and thought I’d share. “A second brain for the AI era. Free forever. Organize your notes as Markdown files, with native relationships, Git, local agents, and direct AI model providers.”

Multilingual WordPress

As an agency, I often get asked which solution is best for serving up WordPress websites in different languages, and I can honestly say this is one thing I don’t have an answer for.

I posted about it on X, and it seemed to pique the interest of many folks. I’m no closer to having an answer, as there is no clear winner in space if you simply go by the responses.

• Polyang (6-7 mentions)
• TranslatePress (5 mentions)
• Multisite (5-6 mentions)
• Weglot (4 mentions)
• WPML (4 mentions)
• Universally (3 mentions)

WordPress is supposedly going to bring multilingual capabilities to core, but as I mentioned in last week’s newsletter, there is no publicly available roadmap for us to follow, and all we have is something that doesn’t resemble a proper roadmap.

With the collaboration feature left out in WordPress 7.0, perhaps multilingual support leapfrogs it in line, and we will receive it sooner rather than later. If so, what does it look like? Does it put all current multilingual solutions out of business, or do they simply need to adapt to offer functionality that WordPress core doesn’t or won’t? We’ll see.

Master Class on Repurposing Viral Content

Katie Keith (X) posted about a generation gap with AI, and it went viral. What she did next was a master class in repurposing viral content.

She published a blog post (Direct) on the Barn2 website (her company that creates plugins and apps), summarizing all the comments and conversations that went on within the viral social media post. I just love the whole concept, and I’m definitely taking notes.

• Summarize comments and conversations
• Shout out all who commented
• Put the comments into buckets and show stats via a graph
• Provide an option for folks to embed the graph on their own website (brilliant)

Sharing Some Plugins From Me

I coded these for me. I don’t have time for the whole Git dance or to collaborate on these particular plugins, so I’m just sharing that they exist.

== AI Disclosure ==

• These plugins are 100% vibe-coded, and the code has not been reviewed.
• WordPress coding standards/rules have been followed to the best of my knowledge.

Kinsta Backup Manager

The ability to kick off and manage backups/restores from the WordPress dashboard is a feature I’ve asked for from Kinsta for years. Kinsta Backup Manager (GitHub) to the rescue.

FluentCart Checkout Login

As I posted to the FluentCart community, the ability for guests to log in during the checkout process is missing, and this feature is a deal-breaker for some because it’s a conversion killer. FluentCart Checkout Login (GitHub) to the rescue.

Frustration

When I woke up Monday, June 8th, I was ready to apologize for a light newsletter that week and hit send. My feeds were quieter than normal, possibly due to WordCamp Europe.

But, then, I saw this post from Rino on X, and I started feeling all sorts of ways. My emotions ranged from frustration (not at Rino) to sadness. To be clear, his post accurately reflects what I’m hearing as well as part of operating InfluenceWP.

“The biggest threat to WordPress isn’t technical, it’s economic. People are talking about plugin sales being down.”

The above quote is what I hear constantly, and while it saddens me, it’s also where I get frustrated.

InfluenceWP (IWP) exists today to help WordPress product creators reach more customers with an approach you typically don’t see—no affiliate commissions. Product creators reach more customers and retain 100% of their sales, while the WordPress community gets to save money on products and get unbiased information.

IWP positions itself in the middle, between those who are just out for affiliate commissions and higher-ticket agencies that specialize in marketing. Product creators need that middle ground, as each one can be at a different stage in their business. Or so I’ve been told.

But here’s the thing. I’ve tried my damndest (and will continue to do so) to connect product creators with new customers, but the fact is that many product creators do little to help themselves.

In case you haven’t heard me say it, I’ll say it again. The moment IWP goes away is the moment I make way more money and have a lot more time on my hands.

I’m not doing this for the money. I’m doing this work to help product creators and give back to WordPress. If I weren’t, I’d be charging a hell of a lot more, and then it becomes more like a job and less about passion.

The below will sound like a sales pitch. It’s not. It’s frustration. It’s passion. Folks need to stop complaining about WordPress not doing this or that or providing this or that if they aren’t willing to help themselves.

Communication

Before WordPress, I was in the corporate world, holding titles like “Senior Systems Engineer” and “interim CIO.” Now, I could give a shit about titles, but I held these positions at companies where tons of money changed hands and professionalism was paramount. Communication was not optional—it was a major contributor to holding onto the job.

Frustration: I’m just going to be super blunt here and say that communication from product creators is abysmal. Folks should be embarrassed. There is a lack of urgency that would never fly in the corporate world I knew. We want others to take us seriously as a community, and communication is a big part of that. As with any relationship, as soon as communication breaks down, there’s not a relationship. I’ve experienced emails not being opened, emails not being thoroughly read, products being discontinued without notice, IWP partner points of contact losing their jobs without any transition communication, and the list goes on and on.

Community

I started a new community in September 2024, when IWP was just getting started. While the timing may not have been right, I still firmly believe in its unique mission and approach, which I’ll hold tightly to the vest, as I’m thinking it might be time to try the community again.

Product creators told me they loved the unique approach to the IWP community, but most who said that never showed up. Most who did show were only there as a username.

Frustration: Someone builds what you’re asking for, and you never show up. The only person that shows up (me) is the person who stands to benefit the least and who foots the bill (software, time, etc.), only to be talking into an echo chamber. These same folks do show up in other communities whose sole purpose is to sell you something while prohibiting you from promoting your own business. Truly baffling.

Deals

As I mentioned earlier, IWP takes a unique approach with a non-affiliation policy. Since IWP is not double-dipping into the pockets of product creators, this allows them to offer bigger deals to the WordPress community than they typically would/could.

While I recently gave up my “vocal” fight against fake deal websites, the fight lives on, and that’s made possible by the deals offered on IWP. The idea is to create the single source of truth for deals in and around the WordPress ecosystem so fake deal websites think twice about existing.

Frustration: Some product creators would rather not offer a deal, and those who do list deals on IWP more often than not hide those deals from their communities. Yet, those same product creators are willing to pay upwards of 30% commissions to affiliate link farmers that do nothing more than drop a link on a page. Does it make more sense to bring everyone together under one source of truth for deals, or does it make more sense to pay significant chunks of money to randos who don’t give two shits about your business?

What if we stopped encouraging affiliate link farmers by rethinking affiliate programs? What if you switched to a credit-based program? How many affiliates do you think would remain if they were required to use your product? What if you parlayed affiliate program changes while leaning more into IWP?

I’ve had people tell me that offering deals is a nonstarter because they feel it “cheapens their brand.” Really? In what world does offering deals cheapen your brand more than paying affiliates up to 30% on a recurring basis? That will never make sense to me. If folks are concerned about making fewer sales, perhaps fewer sales without those big affiliate payouts would help level things out or at least help. With a credit-based system, you are encouraging folks to use your product, which results in more meaningful product reviews, tutorials, etc. People (or at least I do) see right through the bullshit. It’s easy to spot content whose sole purpose is to drive affiliate sales. As an example, I literally will not click on a YouTube video if the thumbnail is of someone who looks like they just had a stick shoved up their ass. Likewise, I won’t read a listicle blog post that clearly belittles other products.

Giveaways

IWP runs free giveaway campaigns for its partners, and non-partners can have a giveaway run for them at a stupidly low cost. To run a giveaway, all you need to do is offer the prize; IWP takes care of the rest.

Frustration: Product creators are not taking advantage of this opportunity. Also, like deals, some who run giveaways want them contained only to the IWP crowd, so as not to alert their communities. IWP is providing the software and doing 99% of the work, so it blows my mind how few are taking advantage and how those who do want to intentionally hinder their reach.

Videos

IWP records videos for partners and posts them on the YouTube channel, and non-partners can have videos created, at, you guessed it, a stupidly low cost.

Frustration: Product creators are not taking advantage of this opportunity. Again, IWP sits between those chasing affiliate sales and the folks who specialize in marketing. Are the videos created for the sole purpose of generating affiliate revenue? No, they are raw, unedited looks that highlight the good and the bad in unbiased fashion. I often hear this approach is way more valuable than the alternative because I almost always find things that can be improved with the product, identify errors, etc.

Gist

I’m sure there are many more things I could bring up here, but I do need to get some actual work done this morning. My main point is that product creators are failing to do even the basic things, so sympathy about sales being down will be harder and harder to find.

I hope everyone understands that everything I’ve said here comes from a passion for helping everyone in WordPress. My door is always open.

Protect The Shire

WordPress.org is introducing a temporary 24-hour delay before it automatically distributes plugin and theme updates. This creates a window for security reviews, including AI-assisted tools, across the 78,000+ items in the directory and aims to improve stability and catch issues early through phased releases.

Deactivate & Delete

I’ve always wondered why we need to deactivate plugins before we can delete them, using the WordPress dashboard. I posed the question on X, and there was some constructive discussion around the topic.

Now, it’s not a huge deal to have to deactivate plugins first before deleting them, but as someone who provides website care services, I’m often onboarding clients and having to clean up plugins from years gone by. Being able to simply delete a plugin from the UI is one of those quality-of-life improvements I’d like to see in WordPress.

In my opinion, deleting a single plugin should be as simple as clicking a delete link or, at most, checking the box for the plugin and using the dropdown to delete it. For multiple plugin deletes, we could go straight to the dropdown using bulk actions and choose delete. Behind the scenes, WordPress first deactivates the plugin(s) and then deletes them, giving the plugins the opportunity to clean up after themselves.

Yani Lliev (X) was kind enough to create a Trac ticket for this topic, and he laid out the scenario quite nicely. I’ve added my comments to the ticket and will be watching the discussion to follow.