If January is any indication, 2026 is going to be a busy year.
The momentum from the work I started over the holidays carried straight into January. Between a major release on New Year’s Day, a hackathon, and some deep dives into community contributions, my commit history was been pretty green last month.
Here is a look at what shipped, what’s pending, and where I want to go next.
The Releases
Block Accessibility Checks
I used the holiday downtime to give my primary open source project, Block Accessibility Checks, the attention it deserves. Accessibility is central to my work in education, so I prioritized a cleaner, modern design for the January 1st release.
This wasn’t just a facelift; Version 3.0 is a massive overhaul. I re-aligned the three validation methods to ensure rock-solid consistency for external block integrations. These improvements were shaped by feedback from WordCamp Canada 2025, with a special shout-out to Mike McAlister. His insights were instrumental in refining the look and feel of the inline notifications and the settings page. He is absolutely someone you should be watching in 2026.
Read the full breakdown of version 3.0 here
Priority Plus Navigation
I recently dove head-first into block themes with the goal of moving away from hybrid themes entirely, at least in my personal work. However, one aspect that kept bothering me was the lack of functionality in the core Navigation block. While there are some great tools out there, I’ve always been a fan of the navigation we use at the university; it handles responsive navigation elegantly without having to add media queries or break to a mobile menu earlier than desired.
My answer is a new block variation that implements the Priority Plus pattern. Instead of hiding everything behind a hamburger icon immediately, it detects available width and intelligently moves overflow items into a customizable “More” dropdown.
Grab version 1.0 of the plugin now!
Block Finder
For anyone who has ever lost track of a specific block inside a massive post, I pushed out a solid update to Block Finder. Version 1.0.7 brings a cleaner UI, better performance, and the ability to filter by Innerblocks.
Planned Outage
To wrap up the month’s releases, I shipped Planned Outage. It’s a straightforward maintenance mode plugin specifically for block themes. You just create a template named “maintenance,” activate the mode, and your site stays on-brand while you fix things behind the scenes.
The Hackathon: ReadEase
I also jumped into my first “blockathon” this month and participated in PluginJam!
I built ReadEase, a text resizer plugin aimed at block theme builders. It’s not quite ready for the official directory yet, I have a few more features I want to polish, but it was a great experience overall and I’m definitely going to dive into the next one towards the end of February.
Community Contributions
Beyond writing code, I made time to contribute to the WordPress Developer Blog by reviewing and providing feedback on some excellent articles. If you haven’t read them yet, they are well worth your time:
- How to use Dataform to create plugin settings pages by Róbert Mészáros
- Streamlining Block Theme development with WordPress Playground and GitHub by Birgit Pauli-Haack
Works in Progress
In addition to the shipped work, I’ve been heavily focused on a few other projects in the background.
Smart Media Replacement
My Smart Media Replacement plugin is getting some love. I’m currently working on adding support for document revisions with an easy rollback feature. This is huge for multisite users who need to replace files without breaking external links (since the year/month URL structure won’t change).
Storybook for Block Themes
I dusted off an idea from back in September involving Storybook.js. The goal is a configuration that supports not just React and Next projects, but adds a layer specifically for block themes and custom blocks. Working with enterprise component libraries daily has convinced me that I can build a better tool to support all these approaches.
The “Mystery” Project
Finally, I’ve been spending my nights working on something… different. I can’t share the title just yet, but let’s just say I’m trading standard PHP functions for a bit of world-building. It’s an adventurous undertaking, I’m mapping out new territories and crafting some deep lore. The “fate” of this project is still shrouded in a bit of fog, but I can’t wait to pull back the veil and show you what I’ve been creating.
A Huge Thanks
None of this open source work happens in a vacuum. A massive shout-out to Kinsta for their continued sponsorship and support. It makes it much easier to dedicate time to these tools.
If you find my plugins or contributions useful, please consider sponsoring me. Every bit of support helps me keep shipping!