Happy Birthday Month and Several Plugin updates
Date: 2 August 2026
Hi Reader π,
Two months since the last newsletter, and most of that time went into shipping rather than writing. Four plugins have had feature releases since early June, and one of them changes how you navigate a large knowledge base.
Happy Birthday month - get 44% off
I turn 44 this August. To celebrate it, I'm offering a 44% discount on the first year across all my plugins.
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Contextual Related Posts v4.3
Released 18 July. The free version gets a new Clear cache when a post is trashed or restored toggle under the Performance tab, so lists stop showing trashed posts with broken links until the cache expires. Related posts with identical relevance scores now come back in a stable order, using post date and post ID as tiebreakers. Pro adds lazy loading of related posts, a Keyword setting on the Related Posts block and the CRP Query Loop block, and Cart Related Products for WooCommerce, which shows related products on the cart page when the subtotal sits below your free shipping threshold. One caveat on lazy loading: search engines may not index those links, since they are no longer in the initial HTML.
βRead the CRP v4.3 release post ββ
Knowledge Base v3.1
Released 11 July, and GitHub Integration in Pro is the part I am most pleased with. Push a commit of Markdown docs and a webhook creates or updates the matching articles, with YAML frontmatter carrying the metadata and the Markdown body converted to native blocks. Your documentation lives in version control, with pull requests and history, while readers see a normal WordPress knowledge base.
Pro also ships Documentation Layout Mode, the three-column docs layout with a sticky section tree on the left, the article in the middle, and an on this page rail on the right, along with article export and import as a Markdown ZIP, SQL dump, or XLSX. The free version gets the Plugin Importer for BasePress, BetterDocs and Echo Knowledge Base, settings export and import, and one-click sample content. You should not have to pay to move your own content. v3.1.1 followed with search across the settings tabs.
βRead the Knowledge Base v3.1 release post ββ
Top 10 v4.4
Released 22 July, and the lazy loading work went straight from Contextual Related Posts into Top 10 Pro. Lazy load popular posts under Settings Β» General renders a placeholder and fetches the real list over the REST API when it is about to scroll into view, so a sidebar or footer list adds nothing to the initial HTML. If your list sits above the fold, you will not notice much. If it is buried further down, or you run a page cache, this is the setting to turn on first. The new Features tab switches off the parts of the plugin you do not use, and their code stops loading rather than just its output.
There is also a Tracking method setting under Counter/Tracker: Funnel tracking stays the default, but if WP-Cron is unreliable on your host and counts stop updating, Legacy tracking writes straight to the count tables the way Top 10 worked before v4.3. The settings page itself now has vertical tabs, toggle switches, and a search box that looks through setting names, descriptions, and internal keys. v4.4.1 fixed the Exclude Front page and Posts page setting, which did not affect widget, block, or shortcode output.
βRead the Top 10 v4.4 release post ββ
Better Search v4.4
Out today. Better Search was loading every optional feature whether you used it or not, so v4.4.0 adds a Features tab: turn off the widgets, shortcodes, block patterns, or live search you do not use, and that code stops loading entirely. Every toggle starts out matching what your site already does, so updating changes nothing until you turn something off. Pro adds Did you mean spelling suggestions on zero-result searches, drawn from your own search log first, and search redirects that send chosen keywords straight to a post, page, or URL. Earlier maintenance releases fixed phrase searches on quoted terms and hyphens in compound terms such as b-26. One note for Pro users: this release adds a FULLTEXT index on post_excerpt, so run the update at a quiet time if your site is large.
βRead the Better Search v4.4 release post ββ
WebberZone Snippetz v2.4
Released 6 July. Inserting a snippet into a post used to mean remembering the snippet ID and typing the shortcode yourself. The new Insert Snippet button sits next to Add Media above the Classic Editor, opens a dropdown of your published snippets, and writes the [ata_snippet id="12"] shortcode for you. The block editor has had a picker in its block for a while; this brings the same convenience to the Classic Editor. Nothing to configure; the button appears after you update.
βRead the Snippetz v2.4 release post ββ
Code Block Highlighting v1.1
From 10 June. There is now a server-side highlighting mode powered by highlight.php, so code is highlighted before it reaches the browser with no JavaScript involved. All 21 Prism themes render identically in both modes, and a Plain Text option gives you the theme styling without any highlighting.
βRead the WebberZone CBH v1.1 release post ββ
From the blog
I wrote up how I set up syntax highlighting on this site, covering both highlighting modes, per-block controls such as line numbers and highlighted lines, and why I extended the core code block instead of replacing it.
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New pricing is live
The new Pro rates took effect on 7 June, and I published the reasoning behind them along with a commitment: no further increases for at least two years. Existing subscribers stay on their current rate.
βUpdated pricing and a two-year commitmentβ
Next up is the tutorial backlog. The plugins are ahead of the documentation at the moment, which is a serious problem.
Keep on publishing!
P.S. Have questions? I am always happy to help!
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