Pier #165 – ACSS 4.0, Uplads & Voxel Ads Go Live, ThinkRank Takes on SEOPress, Kirki eCommerce Set To Challenge SureCart & FluentCart

Ahoi.dev
Stefan from Ahoi.dev   |   The Pier #165   |   August 14, 2026

Welcome to the 165th issue of The Pier. Thomas from Replient.ai has just launched Uplads, a new platform that enables you to launch Meta (Facebook & Instagram) and TikTok ads 10 times faster.

Milestones: ACSS 4.0 is now officially available and FluentSnippets crossed 50,000 active installs. What’s more, Bricksforge 4.0 is now in open beta!

Don’t Miss Out: SureCart has announced an upcoming price increase for all its plans. All annual discounts will be removed, and the price of every lifetime plan will increase. Get SureCart before 18 August!

Great Progress: Unblock 1.0.0-beta.8 introduced support for WooCommerce dynamic data. When editing a product, a product template or a loop over products, product fields such as price, SKU, stock, attributes and galleries can now be inserted from the data picker (see The Pier #159).

New Competitor: Kirki eCommerce is now available as an experimental alpha release. How will it compare to WooCommerce, SureCart and FluentCart? We’ll soon find out!

Price Increase: Nuelink has announced its first price increase, which will take effect on 21 August. Lock in the current prices now!

Launch: ThinkRank is an AI SEO plugin for WordPress, built by WPDeveloper for the new agentic SEO workflow. It comes with an AI SEO assistant, a built-in MCP server, AI content briefs, LLMs.txt generation and AI-powered internal linking, and much more besides.

Launch II: Uncanny Page Builder claims to be ‘the first true AI page builder for WordPress’.

Launch III: Mark from uiPress/uiXpress has introduced Talos, an AI agent that operates within the WordPress admin.

News: Automattic joins the PHP Foundation board.

Here is a selection of the latest and greatest blog posts we published this week on Ahoi.dev. You will also find some interesting industry news, the latest directory listings on The Port, job openings, and more. Enjoy!

AI Agents
AI Agents in Conversations, Threads & Inbox ©Gleap

👋 New: AI Agents in Conversations

Gleap has released the biggest update to its inbox yet this week. AI agents now work directly inside your tickets, conversations can branch into threads and you can now control the entire dashboard from your keyboard.

Product Search for WooCommerce
Lightning-Fast, Live Search for WooCommerce, Typo Tolerance & Smart Results ©Studio Wombat

👋 Product Search for WooCommerce

The Studio Wombat team has launched its latest plugin. Product Search for WooCommerce allows your customers to quickly find what they’re looking for using the fastest live search plugin available for WooCommerce. Search through 50,000 products in milliseconds!

The intelligent search engine supports fuzzy search, synonyms, and relevance ranking. It’s also language-aware, so plurals, tenses and word endings never hide a product from a shopper.

Don’t miss out on the 30% launch discount! LTD plans are available!

🗞️ Bites & Pieces

WordPress

Classic Monks 2.2.0 features a rebuilt SMTP engine, enabling it to rival dedicated email plugins. It supports multiple connections with automatic fallback, OAuth 2.0 for Gmail, Google Workspace and Outlook, as well as integrations with over 20 providers. There is also an auto-retry queue that resends failed emails instead of dropping them silently. Admin columns now offer inline editing and filtering directly in the list table. Finally, you can now add extra user roles directly from the user profile.

TranslatePress adds a built-in translation glossary, enabling you to specify how important words and phrases should be translated across your multilingual WordPress site.

Breakdance 3.0 Beta 3 is now translatable, aka speaks your language. There is also a new slider and WooCommerce elements, as well as easier styling for fundamental elements and MCP improvements.

Flowguard 1.2.2 adds support for Fluent Forms in Test Mode: during test runs, emails, entry saving, captcha and integrations are blocked.

Elegant Themes introduces a new Post Filter module for Divi 5, which allows you to search for, filter and reorder loops on the front end. You can create custom forms to query post content, taxonomies and custom fields, adding a whole new dimension to loops. There is also a new Tooltip module.

Divi 5 now comes with four new modules. The Charts module allows you to create interactive charts in nine different formats and manage data using the new tabular data editor. The Gravity Forms and Imagely modules simplify the process of adding and styling custom forms and galleries in the builder. Finally, the Payment Button module offers a straightforward way to set up PayPal and Stripe payment buttons.

SearchUs replaces WordPress’s basic search with a fast, relevance-ranked search function that helps visitors quickly find the information they need, whether it’s pages, products, documents, images or videos.

The Carousel Designer is a brand new feature of Ollie Pro that enables you to create stunning, lightning-fast carousels using only blocks.

InstaStudio (‘HTML-first WordPress’) is a workflow layer on top of InstaWP that enables you to transform a plain HTML file into a live WordPress page without using a page builder.

Pheasantly transforms WordPress scheduling into a recurring weekly queue. Rather than opening the date picker to work out when your next post should go live, you simply set your preferred publishing times and then queue your drafts to be published at these times.

WordPress Security

Levamo releases the biggest update to Advanced SiteShield since its launch. The old summary view has been replaced by the full Patchstack security platform, which is now embedded directly inside the Levamo dashboard. Users now have access to comprehensive vulnerability intelligence, including priority levels, complete stack audits, over 16,000 virtual patching rules, firewall controls and flexible reporting.

E-Commerce & Sales Funnels

GenerateBlocks is currently developing a complete FSE toolset for WooCommerce.

ProfilePress releases a new ‘Pay What You Want’ add-on that allows customers to name their price for memberships, products and services. It’s perfect for receiving donations!

With Lightfunnels, you can now create and sell subscription-based products directly, allowing you to start building a recurring revenue stream into your business. Stripe is currently the only payment method available for subscriptions.

Marketing Attribution

Usermaven releases a new Salesforce integration that allows you to connect your leads, opportunities and revenue data, so you can see which channels and campaigns actually drove them. Make budget decisions based on business results rather than clicks and form submissions.

Form Builder

SureForms 2.12.3 enables Pro users to send email notifications as soon as someone saves a form in progress and adds a one-click entry shortcut for Instant Forms. It also offers enhanced WPML compatibility.

Fluent Forms 6.2.12 introduces an optional, built-in MCP server that enables AI assistants to work with your forms, entries and reports.

WPForms releases its new Mercado Pago add-on, which enables merchants based in Latin America to accept card payments.

Directories

Voxel Toolkit 1.7.6.1 for Voxel increases the number of tools available on the MCP Server from 26 to 38. Previously, the watermark was applied to every image uploaded anywhere, including timeline photos, message attachments, and media library uploads. Now, however, you can limit it to post submission forms and select exactly which fields it applies to.

Voxel Toolkit for Voxel announces a new Anonymous Posting feature, which allows members to post and reply anonymously on post walls and reviews. Admins can always see who it really is.

Food Blogs

The Recipe Index block in Recipe Card Blocks Pro now comes with a search form and additional filters, enabling your readers to narrow down recipes by course, cuisine, difficulty, cooking time and more. There are also new ingredient filters — the question “What can I cook with chicken and rice?” can now be answered in two clicks on your food blog. Finally, the new app-like mobile experience offers smooth filtering and browsing that feels native on phones.

DNS Management

The bunny.net CLI brings DNS into the terminal, making it easy to create zones, manage records, enable DNSSEC, import existing configurations and configure DNS using code.

Remote Work

Cosmos improves noise cancellation in virtual offices.

Laravel & Filament

The NativePHP Masterclass is now available! It will teach you how to build a mobile app for iOS and Android (and later macOS, Windows and Linux) using NativePHP.

Major performance improvements & security patches for Filament v4.12 and v5.7. Read the full story!

Learn how to teach agents your conventions with Laravel Boost project rules. This is a set of dedicated Markdown files that document your application’s conventions and are limited to the directories to which they apply.

The official Laravel Zed extension is available.

With Laravel Doctor, you can diagnose your app with just one Artisan command.

With Laravel MPP, you can charge AI agents for access to Laravel routes using the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP).

Email Builder

Postcards 4.0 is now a fully-fledged AI email builder. The new AI Generator can create email templates from scratch or enhance existing designs using AI. You can redesign a template, improve or rewrite the copy, translate your email into other languages, adjust the tone or generate new content. With the new HTML Import feature, you can import templates created elsewhere and use AI on those too. You can easily import existing email templates into Postcards and continue editing them directly in the editor.

CSS Frameworks

As covered in The Pier #159, Core Framework 2.0 is now free and open source, with every integration included: Bricks, Oxygen, Gutenberg and Figma. Templates and UI kits will continue to be sold separately via the marketplace.

LMS / E-Learning

Curious about what the instructor experience is like in Tutor LMS 4.0? Well, let’s find out!

Klasio introduces ready-made sections to its page builder, which allows you to build a page using one of 50 pre-designed templates instead of creating every section from scratch. In other news, you can now create badges that are awarded by Klasio itself. Simply set a name, image, trigger event and threshold, and the badge will be awarded to students the moment they earn it. Earned badges will appear in a new ‘Badges’ column on your ‘Students’ page.

Icons

Lordicon 4.0 features a completely redesigned library, a new and simpler editor, and improved export formats. Transparent backgrounds are now supported for WebP, PNG Sprite and PNG Sequence.

Uptime Monitoring

Pulsetic now comes with a built-in AI assistant that lives in your dashboard and reads your live monitors, incidents, domains, and RUM data. Pulsetic also takes a screenshot of your page when a check fails, and you can add annotations to your response time chart to highlight changes.

Project Management

Nifty‘s AI Workflow Builder transforms your project description into a ready-to-run project, complete with the correct views, statuses, lists and custom fields.

Social Media

Giststack now supports one-click publishing to LinkedIn, Threads, X, Facebook and Instagram via its new Larkpulse integration (see The Pier #163).

Publer releases its MCP server in beta. This allows you to connect Publer to AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude, enabling you to manage your social media and perform actions in Publer via simple back-and-forth chats. Finally, new hashtag groups give you a dedicated space in Publer to save, organize and reuse your hashtag collections.

WhatsApp Automation

You can now add and manage tags directly from the Inbox in the Pabbly Chatflow mobile app without leaving the conversation.

From the Editor: Biff.codes

We’ve launched a new side project called Biff.codes, a free job board for WordPress developers and more. Find out why Biff can get paid in burgers. 🍔

🚨 Latest Posts

The following highlighted articles have been published in the last 7 days. All posts can be found on our blog.

eCommerce, WordPress

FluentCart Now Natively Supports Divi 5

Jewel from FluentCart has just introduced native FluentCart modules for Divi 5, along with a new Saved Payment Methods feature, to its WordPress e-commerce plugin.

WordPress

Voxel Ads – Easily Turn Your Voxel Directory Into An Ad Network

Donald from Code Wattz has just announced the launch of Voxel Ads, a new plugin that turns your Voxel directory into an ad network. Members can purchase ad space via…

Event Platforms, Virtual Events

HeySummit Introduces Workspaces, Embedded Zoom & SMS Reminders

Ben from HeySummit has introduced workspaces, embedded Zoom, SMS reminders and a native ThriveCart integration to the event planning and hosting platform.

GTM, Personalized Outreach

Sendr Announces Lead Finder v2, Campaign Copilot & Personas

John from Sendr has announced a new set of features designed to make launching outbound campaigns effortless. These include Lead Finder v2, Campaign Copilot and Personas.

Product Demos

Supademo Introduces AI Command, Demo Versioning & Presenter Mode

Supademo has introduced AI Command for demo editing and more, demo versioning and a new presenter mode to the interactive product demo platform.

👋 Latest Jobs

Looking for a new professional challenge? Find your new job.

Geocodio

Technical Support Engineer (GIS)

Hospitable

Product Engineer, Core & Connectivity (Laravel)

Brainstorm Force

Growth Marketing Manager

🔥 Quayside Deals

A few irresistible offers that might be of interest to you, don’t you think?

Summer Sale: Save up to 26% on Voxel plans (Starter, LTD Lite & LTD).
Exclusive: Save 10% on Novamira Pro Agency (first year) and Agency Lifetime plans with code AHOIDEV10.
WordPress Search: Save 20% on Relevanssi with code HELLO20.
Birthday Promo: Save up to 60% on Amelia.
Bulk: Get 40% off when you buy 2+ Barn2 plugins for WooCommerce.
Spring Sale: Save 30% on all Plugin Planet Pro plugins, e.g. BBQ Pro.
LTD Ending Soon: Get SureContact, the email marketing and CRM platform for WordPress.
Early Bird LTD: Get Sigmize, the new A/B testing platform for WordPress.
Early Bird: Get FluentCart LTD, the new WordPress e-commerce plugin.
Exclusive: Get 30% off the Gleap Team plan for 3 months. The support OS comes with features such as bug reporting, engagement, onboarding and a help center.
Promo: Save 30% on Sendr, the personlized outreach platform, for 3 mo.
Exclusive: Get 20% off Replient for 3 month(s) with code Glumpler20.
Exclusive: Save 15% on PassiveWP with code AHOIDEV.
Exciting: Save BIG on the SleekWP All Access Pass LTD, which includes SleekPixel, SleekAI, SleekMotion, SleekView and all future plugins.
Recurring: Save 10% on Publer, the social media management platform.

That’s all for this week. We hope you enjoyed the 165th issue of The Pier. Until next week! Please tell your friends about The Pier if you like it.

Curated and published with lots of ♥ by Ahoi.dev!
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