Pier #168 – Voxel Points Launches, LatePoint Meets Events, CleanShot 5.0 vs Screen Studio & Gleap Streamlines Changelogs

Ahoi.dev
Stefan from Ahoi.dev   |   The Pier #168   |   September 4, 2026

Welcome to the 168th issue of The Pier. The field of SEO plugins is becoming increasingly crowded. SEO Rank Genius is the latest ‘all-in-one WordPress SEO plugin’, unifying on-page optimisation, technical SEO, AI intelligence, schema markup, rank tracking and site health in one WordPress dashboard. However, we’ll stick with SEOPress as our all-time favourite!

Launch: Voxel Points is a new complete points system for Voxel. Members can earn points for reviews, listings and posts, which they can then spend.

Finally: Blocksy support is now live in Novamira Pro 1.9.0.

New Studio Mode & Video Editor: CleanShot 5.0’s new Studio Mode allows you to transform a simple screen recording into a polished, professional video. Think of it as a new alternative to Screen Studio.

Milestones: Aurelio from WP Umbrella has announced that they have just reached $2M ARR! Growth has been almost entirely organic, driven by word of mouth. In other news, SureRank has crossed 400k+ active installs.

Sneak Peak: See what’s coming to OneStream Live (video).

New Arrival: We would also like to welcome xSpeed Cache to The Port.

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!

LatePoint
Appointment Booking Plugin for WordPress ©LatePoint

👋 LatePoint ❤️ Events

Vijay from LatePoint has just revealed one of the most requested features of the WordPress appointment scheduling plugin. Soon, it will do more than just help you manage appointments.

It will also help you to create and manage events, accept registrations, and sell tickets, all from your WordPress website. This could be anything from workshops and fitness classes to webinars, training sessions and community meetups. Stay tuned!

Gleap
Turn Shipped Work Into Polished Changelogs ©Gleap

👋 New: AI-Suggested Changelogs

With Gleap, you can now create polished, customer-facing changelog drafts from shipped work faster with AI suggestions. It scans your connected repository changes and released feature requests, then generates a suggested changelog header and body, providing you with a clear starting point.

You can also schedule weekly or monthly scans and view the scan report to see exactly what was analyzed, including whether only the most recent pull requests were included.

Vendor Application Form
Vendor Marketplace Application Form ©WC Vendors

👋 New: Plans Inside Vendor Application

What if new vendors in your WooCommerce marketplace could choose and pay for their plan in the same visit they applied? With the new WC Vendors Signup flow, your published membership plans appear as selectable cards within the form itself, enabling sellers to choose a tier before submitting their application and beginning to sell.

A seller who has just decided that your marketplace is worth joining is at their most motivated at that exact moment. Allowing them to act on this decision immediately, rather than asking them to wait for an email from you, is the real win here.

🗞️ Bites & Pieces

WordPress

Presto Player 4.5.0 introduces the Floating Pill player skin, which is a rounded control bar that floats over your video.

Meta Box 3.11.0 adds support for WooCommerce High-Performance Order Storage (HPOS), which allows you to use Meta Box fields for WooCommerce orders. Additionally, frontend and user forms now support Cloudflare Turnstile for captcha verification.

Developed by the Voxel team, the new VX Framework will be available in beta on 15 September. It’s a data modelling layer for agentic WordPress. It provides a consistent way to define structures, create custom fields, work with dynamic data, expose your content via REST and develop using your preferred front-end. At launch, it will be deeply integrated with the Block Editor/Site Editor and Bricks Builder. You can also develop custom themes using its Themes API or adopt a headless approach to power sites and apps through the VX REST API. The core plugin will be free and open source. However, there will also be a Pro version and extensions.

The Search Form element in Breakdance 3.0 Beta 7 has been rebuilt with autocomplete and modal mode. There are also improvements to WooCommerce, new wrapper tag options for the Loop Builder elements, a keyboard shortcut for the Structure panel and expanded MCP capabilities.

Elegant Themes introduces AI Agents to Divi 5. Agents can build layouts, edit modules, update design settings, create pages, manage menus and work with Theme Builder templates. They can also use screenshots, websites and other reference materials for design inspiration.

Kirki 6.3.0 introduces smarter, nested components and freeform positioning.

OneTap 6.17.0 introduces a new ‘Hide on Specific Pages/Post Types’ settings container, which allows you to select pages via a searchable dropdown menu instead of entering page IDs. There is also the option to hide entire post types. Another Pro feature is the ability to upload or select a custom toolbar icon. The free version adds support for new languages: Bengali, Urdu, and Filipino/Tagalog.

Astricode Ops is a new WordPress operations toolkit based on the simple idea that maintenance should start with diagnosis rather than guesswork. The free plugin offers spam registration protection, user risk scoring, controlled clean-up, database and autoload inspection, WebP optimization, diagnostics and activity logs. The Pro version builds on this foundation by automating recurring operational tasks.

WordPress Performance

WP Multitool 1.9.6 gives Site Doctor’s AI Agent access to six read-only WordPress abilities: site-rescue-scan, quickstart, health, autoload, slow-queries and redis.

CRM

SureContact releases a new Shopify integration. You can connect your store using your own Shopify custom app credentials without requiring an app review or shared OAuth app.

E-Commerce & A/B Testing

AB Split Test 2.6.10 adds Usercentrics CMP consent support.

SureCart 4.7.1 now allows you to add ‘Variant Pills’ and ‘Buy Buttons’ blocks inside a product list, enabling shoppers to select a variant and add it to their cart without leaving the list. New: ‘Product List with Variants’ block pattern.

CartFlows Pro 3.2.0 introduces AI-powered product selection for order bumps, auto-suggest for Frequently Bought Together, and new options for checkout expiry to create a sense of scarcity.

ThriveCart now supports the download of EU e-invoices in UBL XML format through Stripe Connect+ and PayPal Enhanced.

Kirki eCommerce Alpha 3 builds on the e-commerce foundation by providing new tools for managing products and inventory, processing orders, customizing the checkout experience and accepting payments.

Communities, Memberships & Comments

SureDash 1.11.2 now allows collections to display ‘Free’ and ‘Price’ tags in the spaces they list, along with a ‘Buy Now’ button for visitors who do not yet have access. This feature requires the Pro add-on and SureMembers. Additionally, the new SureDash Abilities and SureMembers Abilities features are now live, offering a fresh approach to working with your community portal and membership data via AI.

FluentComments 2.1.0 introduces a new ‘Emails’ screen. All five comment notification emails can now be edited and previewed against a real comment from one place, as well as being switched on or off. There is also a new shared email template designer for your logo, colours, footer text and ‘From’ email address. There is also a new FluentComments block for FSE themes, as well as a rebuilt admin screen offering light, dark and system appearance modes.

FluentCommunity 2.9.0 now supports web push notifications, which are powered by the free FluentNotify plugin. There is no need for a third-party service or per-subscriber pricing.

Appointment Bookings

FluentBooking 2.3.0 comes with a new dashboard and settings. Next meetings are now grouped by Today, Tomorrow and Later, rather than being displayed as one long list.

Timetics AI is now available as a progressive web app (PWA), enabling you to access your scheduling workspace with a single tap on both mobile and desktop devices.

Newsletters

Newsletter Glue 4.1 adds an optional featured image caption and a caption alignment control to the ‘Latest Posts’ and ‘Post Embeds’ blocks. The WordPress caption is used by default, but this can be edited per newsletter in both blocks, with its own colour, font family and font size controls (desktop and mobile). In the full-width layout, the featured image can now be reordered within the content and dragged among the other fields in the display options.

Events

EventKoi 1.4.0.0 now allows you to group events using your own taxonomies. You can also display a taxonomy’s terms wherever event data is used, and enable visitors to filter a calendar or event listing by your taxonomy terms. Additionally, you can accept event submissions from visitors without a WordPress account and moderate them before they go live. Finally, you can sell a recurring series as a single ticket covering every date and import attendees, WooCommerce ticket types, and RSVP history from The Events Calendar.

Form Builder

SureForms 2.12.6 introduces an ‘Enable Logs’ option, which records form submission failures in a downloadable file. This makes it easier to diagnose issues on a live site. New Views and Conversion Rate columns have also been added to the Forms list, allowing you to see how each form is performing at a glance.

Web Development

You shouldn’t have to fix every error yourself. With Better Stack, you can assign any error to the Slack-native AI SRE agent, who will provide you with a pull request containing the fix, whether you’re working from your desk or on the go. Watch this video to find out more.

SEO

SEOPress 10.2 enables you to set the opening hours of your local business schema on a post-by-post basis, which is ideal for directories and multi-location sites. There is also a new AI Assistant feature that enables you to activate AI and connect your provider without leaving the setup wizard.

Project Management

Nifty dashboards now include funnel charts, which make it easier to visualize workflows such as ‘Leads > Qualified > Proposal > Won’.

LMS / E-Learning

Tutor LMS Migration Tool 2.6.0 enhances support for migrating course metadata, learner progress, quizzes, reviews, subscriptions and eCommerce orders from LifterLMS.

Klasio introduces a new Pabbly Connect integration. This means your LMS can now connect with your CRM, email tool and other apps.

Server Management

xCloud 2.8.4 introduces a new mobile dashboard UI, one-click Codex connection and a new backup overview. You can now quickly identify backup-eligible sites, check the last backup date and filter sites more easily.

Social Media

Public webhooks and Bluesky analytics (video) are now live in ContentStudio.

WhatsApp Automation

With Pabbly Chatflow, you can now quickly transfer contacts between lists and keep your audience organized. Whether you’re organizing leads, customers or campaign audiences, managing your contact lists is easy with just a few clicks.

Transactional Email

Lettermint is now certified to ISO/IEC 27001:2022, the international standard for information security. With managed DKIM, your DKIM keys will now be rotated automatically.

Virtual Events

HeySummit redesigns its dashboard, adds Flodesk attendee sync and makes it easier to manage team access across events. Additionally, the need for manual reruns when a giveaway winner declines a prize is no longer necessary.

AI Audio & Video

It’s release week at Castmagic! Say hello to Studio Carousels. Select a recording, specify an angle (or allow Castmagic to select one for you), and receive a complete, swipeable carousel for Instagram or LinkedIn. The new Ask feature is a link that conducts an interview on your behalf. Send it to an expert, customer, guest or your whole community and they will answer out loud in about ten minutes, in their own time. The Audience Chat is an embeddable chatbot that has been trained using your content. Your audience can ask questions and receive answers based on your episodes. Also: Castmagic API.

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.

WordPress

Voxel Points – A Full Points System for Voxel Directories

Donald from Code Wattz has launched a new plugin called Voxel Points for the Voxel theme. This gives directory owners a complete points economy, where members can earn rewards for…

Email Marketing

SureContact Adds Zoom Bookings, Custom Form Pages & Partial Submissions

SureContact has added Zoom for bookings, custom form success pages, partial submissions and email open tracking consent to its email marketing and automation platform.

WordPress

BuddyBoss: New Universally Integration for Multilingual Communities

Graham from BuddyBoss as just introduced a new Universally integration which translates not just the pages you publish, but also what your members write. This includes activity posts, comments, forum…

Screen Recording

CleanShot 5.0 Introduces New Studio Mode

The CleanShot team has just announced a new Studio Mode, which makes it easy to turn a simple screen recording into a polished, professional-looking video. Effectively, they are positioning themselves…

WordPress

Greyd.Suite Releases New Frontend Post Forms & Dynamic Forms

The Greyd.Suite team announced two major new features for Greyd.Forms: Frontend Post Forms and Dynamic Forms. These features take the form generator to a whole new level by making…

GTM, Personalized Outreach

Sendr Rebuilds Sequencer Canvas That Now Feels Like Figma

John from Sendr has just announced the release of version 3.2 of the GTM and personalized outreach platform. Say hello to a more flexible Sequencer, a more precise Lead Finder, a redesigned…

🏴‍☠️ Latest Port Arrivals

The following fine new tool has arrived at The Port.

WordPress

xSpeed Cache

xSpeed Cache is an all-in-one WordPress caching and performance plugin with AI-powered optimization, static file delivery, and free core caching.

👋 Latest Jobs

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

MailerLite

PHP Engineer

Tighten

(Technical) Project 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.
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Birthday Promo: Save up to 60% on Amelia.
Bulk: Get 40% off when you buy 2+ Barn2 plugins for WooCommerce.
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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.
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Recurring: Save 10% on Publer, the social media management platform.

That’s all for this week. We hope you enjoyed the 168th issue of The Pier. Until next week! Please tell your friends about The Pier if you like it.

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