Tech Issues — Cloudflare went down

You might have noticed that half the internet stopped working on Tuesday 18th 2025. Some sites stopped working entirely, others lost functionality. One of my clients was affected as we’d adopted Cloudflare’s Turnstile system to defend against bot orders on their WooCommerce website.

Ironically, Cloudflare’s own login page was unusable as they also used Turnstile to defend against bot sign ups.

It dos beg the question — do we rely on these services too much? And do we take into account the impact that these services failing might have on our businesses?

Project Management Tools — Have you ever used Miro?

I used Miro for the first time last year while I was working with Entity and I absolutely loved it. If you’re managing your day-to-day tasks, any old task manager will work for you great, but when you’re sharing in a creative process, those rigid systems can be stifling.

Miro isn’t like that — it’s an infinite collaborative whiteboard that lives in the browser. It’s jam-packed full of features, but you can use it however you choose.

While we were developing the branding for Entity, Miro proved fantastic. It didn’t slow us down, we could present ideas quickly, the whole team could leave notes and feedback, and the learning curve was next to zero.

WordPress Updates — What’s new in WordPress and should we care?

As part of my monthly retainers, I take stock of the changes across each of the different WordPress plugins installed on my clients’ websites — as well as WordPress Core.

Many of the plugins are the same on each site, but for each client, I ponder the question “How could this update help this client?” to see if there’s anything new we could add or update to make the client’s site better or their lives easier over the coming months.

ACF 6.6 introduces ACF Blocks V3

As a user, the major change you’ll notice is that the block editor now has a dedicated panel. Instead of toggling between preview and edit modes and fiddling around in a small space, you get a bigger, easier-to-use edit screen for all the block fields.

It means work for me as I’ve created many blocks already and each one will have to be upgraded to use V3 manually in order to receive any of the new benefits that V3 offers. When WordPress 7 is released next year (2026) the new v3/iframe blocks will become mandatory.

New Plugin Template Registration API

Yeah, so what?

I know it sounds technical. It is. But as I’ve switched my development practice towards plugin creation (as opposed to baking features into the theme) this new feature is really welcome. In a nutshell, it means that I can include templates for making new pages via my plugin code.

This separates concerns and makes sites better as they are less prone to knock-on effects of code changes. When I’m developing a plugin to add in a new FAQs section, I can also package up a template for the FAQs page so that’s ready to roll right out the box.

The big picture is that it makes the entire WordPress system more robust and the experience more uniform — developers don’t have to use hacks to achieve basic goals.

WooCommerce Stores Get Accurate Profit Calculations

Thanks to something named COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) — they love an acronym — WooCommerce store owners can now provide the cost of goods. So if a product costs you £10 and you sell it for £30, WooCommerce can let you know that you’ve made £20 profit when you make a sale.

WooCommerce can now be integrated with AI

It’s still in beta, but WooCommerce MCP (Model Context Protocol) is available for testing. It means that AI assistants can now interact directly with WooCommerce stores… let your imagination run wild.

YouTube Video — I talked to myself

In 2014, I spoke at MK Geek Night (I was going to link to my “5-minute talk” but the link’s no longer live) and I really enjoyed it.

That was the first and last day of my speaking career.

But I did really enjoy it, and various people have told me I’d be a good speaker. So last Thursday, first thing in the morning — and very clearly pre-coffee — I challenged myself to talk to camera for 10 minutes about how I do and don’t successfully “vibe code”, how website design is boring (yes, I said it) and about working alone.

This was the result — no editing, no stopping, no restarts.

Of course, it wasn’t 10 minutes. Just like in 2014, I went over by 15+ minutes. And if I had realised just how bad the Macbook Pro camera was beforehand, I would have used my iPhone.

Industry NewsWhen was the last time you used CSS?

Interested article about CSS and Tailwind: https://dev.to/elvissautet/tailwind-css-won-the-war-but-were-the-losers-4877

Work in progress — What have I been up to?

My client’s SEO agency requested that we add FAQs to the category pages on their WooCommerce site. They asked for a copy and paste job and said that they would likely be adding more FAQs as they optimised additional pages. So, instead of taking the easy route, I chose empowerment. Now, on every category page, they can choose which FAQs to display from the FAQs custom post type — which saves duplication — and not just that, I used Yoast’s Graph API to generate the correct Schema for FAQs automatically.

One of my longest-standing clients requested a new WordPress Block this month — they want to be able to insert a block that links to some popular LLMs and autofills a user-defined prompt (a bit like the social sharing blocks that you see at the end of blog posts). I’ll share how that turns out when it’s live next month.

As a side-project, I’ve continued work on my Media Library Explorer plugin — I’ve identified almost 4GB of media that’s a complete waste of space(!!) on my client’s WordPress website and I’m prepping the plugin to safely delete it. The site’s entire storage is 9GB, so those extraneous files account for almost 50%!

As ever, I’ve been working on this site, but hey — that’s not news, is it? Oh, and I’m busy planning out some custom development for a new client who is planning to launch their business in early spring next year. More on that next time.

Cool, well that’s a wrap on November.

Adios,
Sii Cockerill

P.S. I’ve got room for 1 new project starting January/February 2026.