WordPress 6.9 is here, and with it come features that set the stage for the future of content collaboration and AI-assisted workflows inside the world’s most popular CMS.

We’re proud to share that 15 Fueled team members are credited with contributions to the 6.9 release, with 4 recognized as Noteworthy Contributors: myself (VP of Open Source Initiatives), Director of Editorial Engineering Fabian Kaegy, Lead Engineer Peter Wilson, and Senior Engineer Mukesh Panchal. Our 10up WordPress Practice continues to shape the features that matter most to modern content teams and organizations.

A Focus on Collaboration Begins: “Notes”

The most impactful new user-facing feature in WordPress 6.9, especially for teams collaborating on content operations, is Notes: a commenting system for the WordPress editor. Fueled led the project management and contributed to the engineering work on this feature.

Notes brings native, in-context communication to the content editing experience. Editors and stakeholders can now leave comments directly within the editor, enabling asynchronous feedback and approvals without leaving the CMS or relying on disconnected tools.

Read the full blog post on the Fueled blog. 10up is now the WordPress Practice of Fueled.

Our SiteWatch program delivers proactive, premium maintenance for WordPress-powered sites. Every update passes through version control, peer review, and structured QA. This process ensures reliability at scale. And now, we’ve added a new tool to make that process even smarter: an AI-powered Visual Regression Testing (VRT) platform that knows when something looks different but isn’t actually broken.

Read the full blog post on the Fueled blog. 10up is now the WordPress Practice of Fueled.

As part of a larger effort to improve the accessibility of WooCommerce, the flagship open source eCommerce solution for WordPress, Fueled helped deliver over 140 accessibility improvements, impacting the 7 million+ websites that WooCommerce powers. This achievement comes after a year-long initiative in partnership with WooCommerce and Equalize Digital, bringing WooCommerce Core into compliance ahead of new regulations like the European Accessibility Act (EAA). The result is a more inclusive shopping experience and a WooCommerce Core that meets modern accessibility standards.

Ahead of the EAA deadline in June 2025, WooCommerce engaged us to spearhead the remediation of a WCAG 2.2 compliance audit, working hand-in-hand with WooCommerce’s core development team to implement fixes across virtually every part of the plugin. Over a year, contributions from WooCommerce, Equalize Digital, and Fueled’s WordPress specialists were coordinated to methodically resolve issues in both the classic and block-based interfaces.

To learn more about the key improvements we made to WooCommerce accessibility, read the full post at the Fueled blog.

Fueled is heading to Portland, Oregon for WordCamp US (WCUS) 2025, taking place August 26–29. WCUS is the premier WordPress conference in the United States, drawing thousands of developers, designers, and digital leaders each year.

We’re returning to WordCamp US as a Contributing Sponsor, marking our first sponsorship of a major WordCamp in years and our very first WordPress event sponsorship under our newly unified and refreshed brand, Fueled. Our support celebrates our evolution as an agency and underscores our deep commitment to WordPress and open source. 10up has long been the professional services (agency) leader in the WordPress space, and carries on that legacy as part of Fueled, augmented by industry leading mobile app development and product strategy and design capabilities. We’re bringing more to the table for the WordPress community and our clients.

Read the full post at the Fueled blog.

At Fueled, our wp-scaffold framework has long helped to jumpstart new WordPress projects by automating boilerplate setup, enforcing foundational engineering best practices, and keeping structure consistent across teams. As our codebases grew, we realized that sharing lower level updates and improvements across projects could be easier.

To solve this, we introduced a new Composer package called WP Framework at the start of the year, which we have subsequently open sourced. By moving the common scaffold logic into WP Framework, our project starter becomes leaner and more maintainable, while every project still benefits from shared upgrades over time.

Key benefits of WP Framework include:

• Leaner Projects: The scaffold now pulls in shared functionality from WP Framework, so each project only includes the code it needs. This means less duplicated code and a slimmer starting point.
• Centralized Updates: We can improve, fix, or extend features in one place. When WP Framework updates, all projects can get the changes through Composer without manual edits.
• Standardized Best Practices: WP Framework embeds the best practices we’ve learned into a single package, keeping the foundation consistent across projects. Teams still work with familiar patterns, but with a simpler codebase.
• Stable & Flexible: WP Framework uses strict Semantic Versioning. That ensures bug fixes and new features won’t break existing sites unexpectedly. At the same time, teams can still override or extend parts of the framework for custom needs.

For the more technically minded, I’ve published a more detailed deep dive into how and why we built WP Framework over on LinkedIn.

At Fueled, our 10up WordPress Practice has been part of this effort from the start, helping institute improvements that are now baked into WordPress core. From how scripts and images are handled to how WordPress loads configuration data, our work has made the platform faster out of the box, and made millions of websites deliver better digital experiences.

Read the full blog post on the Fueled blog, or skip ahead to my more technical deep dive into the changes on LinkedIn.

One of the more ambitious design goals behind the new Fueled.com involved bringing to life animated 3D objects in the browser—without relying on WebGL or heavy, real-time rendering.

The solution was a custom animation system that simulates 3D using optimized image sequences, built leveraging WebP image formats, Motion.js, and Intersection Observer techniques. The final product offers smooth, high-quality animation that works reliably across devices and browsers.

Packaged within a custom Gutenberg block, editors can easily select from multiple 3D objects, customize styles with blend modes, and see a preview directly inside the WordPress editor.

I’ve published a deep dive article breaking down the path to the final product—from early experiments with videos and sprite sheets to lightweight image sequences and smart rendering logic to our approach to the custom WordPress editor block.

Read the full article on LinkedIn, and get in touch if you’d like help creating this kind of experience for your own digital properties.

When our partners at Minute Media set out to modernize the front end behind their publishing platform—powering brands like Sports Illustrated and SI Swimsuit—their goals were clear: improve performance, streamline developer experience, and make the stack easier to evolve over time.

Their internal team had been working with React, but was hitting performance ceilings—especially when it came to JavaScript execution and time to interactive. While React and Next.js remained options, they were open to exploring newer frameworks that might better support their long-term goals.

In a new LinkedIn Pulse article, I share how we evaluated several alternatives—including Solid, Svelte, and even lightweight templating engines—before ultimately recommending Qwik. I also break down what makes Qwik’s resumability model unique, and why it offered the right mix of performance and developer onboarding in this particular case.

“This wasn’t about finding a silver bullet. It was about staying curious, testing assumptions, and identifying the right fit for the real-world constraints of the project.”

Read the full story on LinkedIn for a technical deep dive into our evaluation, the trade-offs, and the rationale behind our decision.

And if you’re exploring ways to modernize a complex front end or consult with engineers who can provide this kind of complex architectural strategy, reach out. We’re always up for solving hard problems with clients looking to drive results.

We build websites and digital experiences that help people access the services and information they need. Nowhere is this more important than in the public sector, where inaccessible websites and apps can shut out millions – and often those most in need of public services.

Fueled’s new white paper, Accessible by Design: Digital Strategies for Government Efficiency and Trust, offers a framework for turning legal requirements into opportunities for innovation, efficiency, and inclusion. You can download it over on the Fueled website (10up is now the WordPress practice of Fueled).

Accessibility as Essential Infrastructure

Over 61 million Americans live with a disability. Yet, nearly half of the most visited government websites still fall short of accessibility standards. This is more than a compliance issue—people with disabilities, especially those in poverty, depend heavily on public digital services and are often the most excluded when those services aren’t accessible. And when constituents can’t avail themselves of self-service digital resources, they often lean more heavily on costly, legacy ways of getting help that involve increased labor and facility costs for government agencies.

A Strategic, Holistic Approach

Fueled’s framework outlines four pillars for embedding accessibility into government digital services:

• Architectural: Build accessibility into design systems and CMS infrastructure.
• Assistive: Use AI tools like ClassifAI to streamline accessible content creation.
• Preventative: Integrate accessibility checks into everyday publishing workflows.
• Auditing: Continuously monitor and refine with regular automated scans and planned comprehensive checks.

Combined with training services, this proactive approach improves usability for everyone, enhances trust, and reduces long-term costs.

What It Means for Government—and for Us

We’ve seen firsthand the impact of this model in projects like California DMV and CalMatters’ Digital Democracy. Building accessible platforms from the ground up leads to better outcomes—for agencies and the public.

Check out the full white paper in PDF and ePub formats, and if your agency is ready to make accessibility a lasting part of your digital strategy, let’s talk.

At Fueled, we aim to close the gap between tools designers love and platforms developers trust, while automating repetitive busy work. That philosophy inspired the creation of the Figma to WordPress Automation: a new open source plugin for Figma that streamlines a tedious, time-consuming step that’s a part of every modern WordPress project.

This tool exports design tokens from Figma directly into a WordPress theme.json file, which defines a theme’s global design system—like colors, typography, and spacing—so styles are consistent and selectable in the content editor. This automation transforms what was once a tedious 10–15 hour task into a process that takes about an hour.

Read the full story on the Fueled blog.