You call yourself a Christian engineer, but you haven’t given your life to Open Source? Huh.

What license would Jesus choose? I don’t know if it’s GPL or MIT, but sure as heck it isn’t proprietary.

Letting proprietary code dictate your life is like following a Bible you’re not allowed to read. Beware those who would seek to mediate your relationship to the divine.

Happy Easter, y’all.

(and the new colors are on the site.)

If you’re looking for a good watch this weekend, I couldn’t recommend more the documentary Turn Every Page – The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb. The craft of research, writing, and editing is presented in the most beautiful way possible. Around 400,000 words were removed from The Power Broker, which was ultimately published as 1,162 pages.

This Ashlee Vance interview of Pedro Franceschi from Brex contains so many interesting stories it might cause you to reconsider what it means to be a CEO.

So, two other Matts at Cloudflare announced EmDash — the spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security.

(Is it nominative determinism or a simulation glitch that everyone trying to terraform the web has some variation of “Matthew” in their name? I was in a call set up by Matthew Prince, talking to Matt Taylor and Matt Kane, with my right hand there, Matías.)

First, I’m going to tell you why this isn’t spiritually tied to WordPress at all, then why they haven’t solved plugin security, and finally offer some suggestions.

The Spirit of WordPress

WordPress exists to democratize publishing. That means we put it everywhere. You can run WordPress on a Raspberry Pi, on your phone, on your desktop, on a random web host in Indonesia charging 99 cents a month, and you can run it scaled up on AWS or across multiple datacenters.

The same code. When you download WordPress Playground you’re running the same code that’s being attacked a thousand times a second at WhiteHouse.gov. That’s what we mean when we say democratization.

It’s all built on open source and web standards. You can run it anywhere; there’s no lock-in.

That’s why we do what we do. It’s really hard. You can come after our users, but please don’t claim to be our spiritual successor without understanding our spirit.

The Spirit of EmDash

I think EmDash was created to sell more Cloudflare services. And that’s okay! It can kinda run on Netlify or Vercel, but good stuff works best on Cloudflare. This is where I’m going to stop and say, I really like Cloudflare! I think they’re one of the top engineering organizations on the planet; they run incredible infrastructure, and their public stock is one of the few I own. And I love that this is open source! That’s more important than anything. I will never belittle a fellow open source CMS; I only hate the proprietary ones.

If you want to adopt a CMS that will work seamlessly with Cloudflare and make it hard for you to ever switch vendors, EmDash is an incredible choice.

Claimed Plugin Security

In another example of them not understanding the spirit of WordPress, the fact that plugins can change every aspect of your WordPress experience is a feature, not a bug! And their sandboxing breaks down as soon as you look at what most WordPress plugins do.

I know we get a bad rep because there are 62k plugins with wildly variable engineering quality, and more every day, and when one installed on 0.01% of our user base has a vulnerability, a bunch of websites write breathless articles that get clicks saying “122,000 WordPress Sites Vulnerable!”

That, by the way, I think we’ll be able to fix in the next 18 months with AI. The plugin security only works on Cloudflare.

Critical Feedback

As I said, we had a call with Cloudflare on March 23rd, where they asked for feedback on this thing they built but didn’t tell us the name, said it would probably launch in their developer week towards the end of April, and some top colleagues and I offered to help. I wish I could say the things I’m saying in this blog post on that call, and if they had just shared the announcement post I could have, but in the spirit of open source here’s what I would have said:

1. If they had said the name I would have asked if they had any other options because I have an amazing colleague named Emdash who is doing some of the most exciting stuff with WordPress and AI. (BTW I think our Em will have more impact on the web than this in five years.)
2. I actually think the product is very solid, there’s some excellent engineering, migration tools, it’s very fast, and the Astro integration is nice.
3. I’d be surprised if this doesn’t get tens of thousands of sites on it.
4. The UI is in the uncanny valley of being sorta-WordPress sorta-not. I know it wasn’t a weekend vibecode project, but it has some of that smell. Stuff breaks at the edges.
5. I think using TinyMCE is a regression, and they should adopt Gutenberg, which we licensed and created to be used by other CMSes. (Correction: They use Portable Text not TinyMCE, but same UI criticism applies.)
6. The Skills are amazing, a brilliant strategy, and we need to do the same as soon as possible. I’ve been working on something similar and got some good ideas from their implementation.
7. I’m not going to say which parts, but they copied a lot of things we’re planning to kill. Build from first principles. Make it better. Skate to where the puck is going.

There’s a new CMS every other day. And that’s great! I love building CMSes and I totally get why other people do, too.

In Conclusion

Some day, there may be a spiritual successor to WordPress that is even more open. When that happens, I hope we learn from it and grow together. [removed “out of your mouth” sentence, too spicy for Western palates.] I’ve mostly focused on this post on just the software, but WordPress is also so much about the community — the meetups, the WordCamps, the art, the college programs, the tattoos, the books… The closest thing I’ve seen to a spiritual successor isn’t another CMS, it’s been OpenClaw.

Thanks to colleague Batuhan İçöz for helping review this.

April 9-11, 2026 | Jio World Convention Centre, Mumbai, India

WordCamp Asia 2026 brings the WordPress community to Mumbai, India, from April 9 to 11, with a schedule shaped around artificial intelligence, enterprise WordPress, developer workflows, product strategy, and open source collaboration. For attendees planning their time, the program offers a useful view of the ideas, tools, and practical challenges shaping WordPress today.

Keynotes to Set the Stage

The keynote sessions at WordCamp Asia 2026 help frame some of the biggest conversations at this year’s event.

Together, they offer an early view of the themes and discussions unfolding across WordPress in 2026.

AI, Automation, and the Future of WordPress

Artificial intelligence is one of the clearest threads running through the program. Sessions from Fellyph Cintra, Fumiki Takahashi, and Nirav Mehta examine how AI is already influencing WordPress through Core discussions, testing workflows, plugin development, and day-to-day implementation. That same theme continues in sessions on marketing and content strategy, including Adeline Dahal’s work on structuring WordPress content to make it more machine-readable. 

This cross-section of presentations shows how automation is moving from concept to practice. From autonomous testing with WordPress Playground to AI-supported development workflows, these sessions highlight applicable tools and skills that teams can start using right away, not just concepts. For attendees interested in where WordPress is heading, this is one of the strongest themes across the event.

Enterprise WordPress and Scalability

Enterprise sessions take that discussion further by focusing on scale, architecture, and operational complexity. Rahul Bansal, James Giroux, Anirban Mukherji, and Abid Murshed are among the speakers exploring how WordPress supports larger organizations, more complex commerce systems, and demanding digital environments. Their sessions look at growth, implementation, and the kinds of decisions that matter when WordPress is supporting business-critical work.

Other talks in this track focus on the realities of enterprise operations, including migration risk, observability, and long-term performance. Together, they show how WordPress continues to adapt to larger systems and more complex digital ecosystems without losing the flexibility that makes it widely used in the first place.

Developer Experience and Modern Practices

The developer track stays grounded in both Core tools and everyday engineering practice. Ryan Welcher will cover the Interactivity API, Jonathan Desrosiers will look at automation in open source, and Takayuki Miyoshi will introduce a schema-sharing approach to form management. These sessions point to a broader shift toward building WordPress systems that are more dynamic, maintainable, and easier to scale over time.

These more technical presentations also include sessions on the WordPress HTML API, Content Security Policy, open source data pipelines, and evolving plugin standards. Rather than focusing on a single type of builder, this part of the schedule addresses developers working across infrastructure, security, front-end experiences, and long-term platform health.

Community, Education, and Open Source

The schedule also makes space for the people and ideas that support WordPress beyond engineering alone. A panel featuring Anand Upadhyay and Maciej Pilarski, moderated by Destiny Kanno, looks at education initiatives and student pathways into open source. Kazuko Kaneuchi will reflect on the story of Wapuu and the culture of contribution around WordPress. At the same time, Kotaro Kitamura and Chiharu Nagatomi will share how WordPress and its community shaped their professional journeys.

That wider perspective continues in sessions on product thinking, marketing, career growth, and business strategy. Speakers, including Nabin Jaiswal, Himani Kankaria, Julian Song, Karishma Sundaram, Sandeep Kelvadi, Aviral Mittal, Anh Tran, and Anna Hurko, explore how WordPress works and connects with decision-making, discoverability, professional development, and organizational growth. Taken together, these sessions reflect one of WordPress’s long-standing strengths: its ability to connect software, learning, and community in the same space.

Hands-on Workshops

Hands-on workshops round out the schedule, offering practical sessions for attendees who want to move from ideas to implementation. They include:

• From On-Demand to Cloud: Automate WordPress Installations Like a Pro
• AI + MCP to build, manage, and automate WordPress end-to-end
• Building AI Agents with self-editing memory
• Building Better WordPress Experiences with AI-Driven Development Workflows

Explore the full schedule to plan your sessions, and get your event pass to join WordCamp Asia 2026 in Mumbai.

Mumbai is calling. See you at WordCamp Asia 2026! 

Note: Much of the credit belongs to @webtechpooja (Pooja Derashri) for help in writing this piece.

I’m really excited to introduce a project I worked on with various AI agents the other night, which I think represents a new way we might build things in the future.

First, the problem: My WordPress site has 5,600+ posts going back decades, and I had some categories that were old and I didn’t really use anymore, and I wasn’t happy with the structure. Every time I made a new post, it irked me a little, and I had this long-standing itch to go back and clean up all my categories, but I knew it was going to be a slog.

Let me present Taxonomist, a new open-source tool you can run with one copy-and-paste command line that solves this problem. Here’s the idea:

1. You run this code in your terminal, and it spins up a Claude Code instance that asks you for your URL.
2. Then it takes that and figures out what type of site you have, which APIs are available, and starts downloading all your posts locally for analysis.
3. Sub-agents analyze every post against your current categories and thinks about suggesting new ones.
4. It previews all the changes.
5. Tries a variety of ways to authenticate against your site and make all the changes.
6. Logs everything locally, so anything is reversible later.

THIS IS VERY ALPHA. PROBABLY BUGGY. BE CAREFUL WITH IT. PATCHES WELCOME. MAYBE MAKE A BACKUP OF YOUR SITE BEFORE YOU CHANGE IT.

It kind of just worked. I ran it live against ma.tt and it cleaned up a ton of stuff pretty much exactly how I wanted. But there’s a lot of weird stuff happening here, so I don’t know quite what this is yet.

1. It’s very non-deterministic! There is some pre-written code, and probably could be more, but a lot of the code is generated on the fly by your agent. This creates interesting bugs where people testing with less powerful models had some odd behavior.
2. I kind of want a directory of these useful AI agents on WordPress.org, but also, there’s something a little strange about trusting a remote shell script to run on your machine.
3. I tested this with Claude, but there’s no reason Codex couldn’t use the repo in the exact same way, and I’d love to improve the quick start script to start by detecting all the agents you have, asking which you’d like to use, and also which directory you’d like to work in. I think we could kill the cd taxonomist-main && claude "start" part of it.
4. Because much of the code and commands are generated on the fly from prompts, it’s very resilient! I’ve seen people try it, and it ran into errors with libraries or whatever, but it just figured out how to work around them.
5. I’d love it if, at the end of every session, there was a moment for self-reflection where the agent would take the repository and suggest upstream issues and PRs based on anything that went wrong. Then this could recursively self-improve very quickly.
6. There are some obvious improvements to this, for example, doing this for tags. Sometimes it creates too many categories when you might only want 3-5 for your theme.
7. One fun thing is a bunch of the work of this just uses public WordPress APIs, so you can run it against any site! I like using distributed.blog as a demo. It’ll still do all the fun downloading and analysis and everything, you just won’t be able to make changes.
8. I now have a local cache of all my WordPress posts I can do other interesting things with, and that’s cool.
9. The logging and reverting probably still has some bugs in it.
10. You can riff with it along the way, so for example, it suggested I get rid of my Audrey category because it didn’t have enough posts, and I asked it to look at all the companies on Audrey.co website and categorize any posts that talk about them as Audrey, which created like 50 more.
11. I want to check the GitHub repo for any updates before it starts, and maybe periodically, because it’s iterating and improving really fast.
12. It’s not the default but the entire thing is way more pleasant if you run it with skip-permissions. So testing I usually run the one-liner, exit, resume with skip.
13. You can see some of my prompt history in the Github but I apologize it’s not comprehensive, I also used Gemini and Codex with this and got lots of value from them.

So, not sure what this is, but please check it out, play with it, submit improvements or ideas, and think about what’s next. Might host a Zoom or something to brainstorm.

The final thing I say is that this was a very different process of writing software for me. Instead of staying at the computer the entire time, I found myself going away for a bit, napping and dreaming about the code, coming back with new ideas and riffing on them. Maybe I’ll return to my Uberman polyphasic sleep days? Nap-driven development?

BTW I have lots of thoughts and feedback for Emdash but I thought this was more interesting, will try to get that out later tonight. One preview: TinyMCE is a regression; they should use Gutenberg! We designed it for other CMSes and would be fun to have some common ground to jam on.

On the podcast today we have Elliott Richmond.

Elliott’s been deep in the WordPress community for over twenty years, developing since the early days, back when WordPress was yet to be forked from b2. He’s freelanced, built with multiple CMS systems, and has contributed creatively to the community, including releasing a WordPress advent calendar way back in 2013. He’s an active WordPress developer, content creator on YouTube, and, unexpectedly, a part-time pizza vendor, running a thriving pizza business powered entirely by WordPress tools.

Many listeners will know Elliott for his technical videos, but today we discuss how WordPress has served as the glue for unexpected ventures, like scaling a local pizza business during lockdown using WooCommerce, Jetpack, and custom plugins. Elliott’s experience showcases just how flexible WordPress can be, whether for websites, unique ordering systems, or even streamlining business processes for other niches.

Recently, Elliott has been asked by Automattic to create educational content around WordPress.com, giving him early access to features and allowing him to share his workflow and insights with a broader audience. He talks about his approach to content creation, balancing scripting versus improvisation, and details his low-tech kit, from iPhone cameras to DIY lighting.

Throughout the episode, Elliott shares how community connections and feedback loops, especially via YouTube comments, shape his work, and he discusses the new opportunities for content creators within the WordPress ecosystem.

If you’re interested in WordPress beyond websites, curious about how to turn technical know-how into educational video content, or just want to hear about WordPress-powered pizza (and who doesn’t), this episode is for you.

Useful links

Elliott featured in WP Tavern before: 24 WordPress Snippets ’til Christmas, Submissions Open for 2019

 Jamie Marsland on YouTube

 Gutenberg Times

 Xdebug

Kagi Search Engine

 DaVinci Resolve

Elliott’s YouTube channel

Elliott’s website

Since he spoke to Dean Baquet in 2017, JAŸ-Z hasn’t done an interview. Hov’s back! He sat down with GQ, and it’s a lovely listen and read.

We played enough defense, 2026 is all about offense.

Your morality defines who you are, not what you’ve attained.

In this episode, Birgit Pauli-Haack welcomes Beth Soderberg to discuss key updates in WordPress 7.0 and Gutenberg 22.8. They kick off with small talk about shifting seasons in Munich and Virginia before diving into the new content guidelines in Gutenberg 22.7, focused on standardizing editorial voice across AI and human content contributors. Both speakers express healthy skepticism about AI-generated content, stressing that while AI assists with research and “grunt work” like alt text or excerpts, the core value in writing remains human expertise and review. They caution about automation pitfalls and emphasize validating all AI outputs.

The discussion shifts to the new WordPress AI connectors, which let users connect to services like OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic Claude, and others—including local providers such as Olama and European alternatives like Mistral. Birgit Pauli-Haack explains the evolving infrastructure allowing developers to add and switch connectors with ease, and encourages the community to experiment and test.

A central topic is the release of WordPress 7.0, with a highlight on the increased minimum PHP requirement to 7.4, likely to disrupt agencies with older sites. The admin’s new look-and-feel is poised to confuse some clients, demanding extra support from agencies. Beth Soderberg also celebrates practical improvements: cover block video embeds using external sources, block visibility by screen size, pattern overrides, breadcrumbs block, and streamlined font management. Both speakers note the importance of hidden, friction-reducing features and the advancement of developer-facing infrastructure. The episode closes with a preview of ongoing enhancements in Gutenberg 22.8 and beyond.

Show Notes / Transcript

• Editor: Sandy Reed
• Logo: Mark Uraine
• Production: Birgit Pauli-Haack

Show Notes

Special Guest: Beth Soderberg

• Bethink Studio
• WordPress.org Profile + Slack
• Talks by Beth Soderberg
  • Gutenberg Changelog #122 – Gutenberg 21.8 and WordPress 6.9
  • My Process for Building a Custom WordPress Theme in 2025
  • Bill Erickson,Ellen Bauer, Beth Soderberg: Case Studies – How to Prepare your Theme for Gutenberg
  • And more

AI in WordPress

• Guidelines Lands in Gutenberg 22.7
• Call for Testing: Community AI Connector Plugins
• AI Provider for OpenRouter
• AI Provider for Ollama
• AI Provider for Mistral
• AI Experiements plugin

WordPress Core and Gutenberg

• WordPress 6.9.2 retrospective
• WordPress 7.0 RC2
• What’s new in Gutenberg 22.8? (25 March)

Dev Notes

• Pattern Overrides in WP 7.0
• Pattern Editing in WordPress 7.0
• Block Visibility in WordPress 7.0
• Dimensions Support Enhancements in WordPress 7.0
• Custom CSS for Individual Block Instances
• New Block Support: Text Indent (textIndent)
• Introducing the Connectors API in WordPress 7.0
• Introducing the AI Client in WordPress 7.0
• Client-Side Abilities API in WordPress 7.0

Stay in Touch

Transcript

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Welcome to our 129th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. In today’s episode we will talk about WordPress 7.0 and Gutenberg 22.8. I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator of the Gutenberg Times and full-time core contributor for the WordPress open source project sponsored by Automattic. With me today, and I’m really happy about that, is again Beth Soderberg, founder and CEO of Bethink Studio, a full-service boutique agency and of web experts to tackle any project. Beth has been a longtime WordPress theme builder and WordCamp speaker. She’s also been an early adopter of the blog editor and block themes. Beth, how are you today? Welcome to the show.

Beth Soderberg: I am well. How are you today? Thank you for having me.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I’m good, I’m good. We have winter in Munich again. It was spring and now it’s back to winter. So I’m happy to get out of the town for WordCamp Asia next week. So yes, I’m really happy about that.

Beth Soderberg: We’ve been switching from winter to spring every day here. Every day in Virginia. Yep. It’s different every day.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So what’s the weather doing? Well, I don’t know.

Beth Soderberg: No, I’ve had to look every morning because it’s in the last week I’ve been outside in a winter coat and a tank top and rain boots and you just don’t know. You wake up and it’s a surprise.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, it’s the beauty of surprises. But who likes surprises? I want my spring be steady.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, I agree.

Announcements

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right, so under the announcements we have one thing that’s that content guidelines landed in Gutenberg 22.7. We didn’t really talk about it with Maggie Cabrera at the last episode, but the WordPress AI team has launched guidelines. They are live experiments in the Gutenberg 22.7 or Gutenberg plugin and this project creates a single source of truth for site standards and ensures that everyone, humans and AI tools, follow the same editorial voice and content rules. By providing this infrastructure layer, WordPress can finally maintain a consistency across content contributors. So that’s so far from the experiment post that I’m definitely going to share in the show notes. When you want to use AI for helping you produce content, you definitely want to store some of the standards somewhere. And the experiment lets you do this on your website in your interface with a nice interface for that. I don’t know how I feel about this because I have been using AI quite a bit in the last two years and some of it was for content creation ideas. But the writing is still kind of mostly a human factor. But it helps me for research and it helps me for learning. So I’m not quite sure how that translates to a WordPress site, but I guess if you have ongoing content reproduction that is more service oriented, then you might want to use the help of LLMs or something like that. What do you think?

Beth Soderberg: I’m skeptical for the same reasons. I think that I have had clients ask for something like this. But the more those clients have actually used AI to create content, the more those very same people who had announced that they were going to create all of their content through AI decide that they are going to use AI for research and then create their content. So the AI in actual practical use has been more about reducing friction in that discovery research phase of writing and less about creating the writing itself until you get to the editing part when it becomes helpful again for grammar. But that actual connecting ideas and proving expertise piece is where AI can’t do it. And you need something, somebody who actually understands what they’re reading to piece together the logic of it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I can also see, and we will see this in that you use AI to write an excerpt or to give you suggestions for titles or make sure that there’s an alt text on the image. I think these grunt work tasks kind of thing of AI is really helpful, but I think the human ideas are still. Well, humans hallucinate so much better than AI can ever can. Right.

Beth Soderberg: How can we possibly replicate that? And I think there’s also a place for it with things like you mentioned the alt text. Right. Having it generate them all and then validating that it did it correctly is much faster than writing it all yourself. That is where we’re going to see these things actually become practical. Right. There’s a lot of big ideas about it, which makes sense when you’re dealing with a new technology and an innovation in a major workflow. But in actuality, I think that’s more how people are going to use it. And I think if people set it up to automate everything and then never look at it, never validate it, that’s people are just going to get in trouble over that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: And I, you know, I use it a lot to generate fake content so that I can show someone what something will look like knowing that the content I’m showing them is not real. Right. But when you’re dealing with real content, the biggest mistake I’ve seen over and over again, and humans will learn because we always eventually do. But the mistake is not reviewing what AI has done.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. It’s not a replacement. It’s a tool that you need to validate like any other tool you have to do. I can see that if you have a longer text like for 4,000 words or something like that, you could actually use AI to identify the gaps. If a reader goes through it and say, okay, there is a gap because it didn’t explain why something happens. I think those tips are really helpful, especially when you have longer text or you want to focus on one problem and just kind of figure out what’s in scope and out scope. But I think that’s more like an advisory kind of thing and not a doer.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, validating. Because sometimes I love Grammarly Pro. Grammarly the free version is very annoying, but if you pay it becomes a really useful tool. But even then, the content suggestions it makes, sometimes they tighten up your language and they make it. They add the commas, which is the thing that I don’t do naturally on my own apparently. But sometimes they change the meaning completely.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: And that’s when you’re like, nope, thanks for the suggestion. That’s a no.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah.

Beth Soderberg: I think how this type of thing used well, will make people more efficient. But I also can see it creating a mountain of work for somebody who doesn’t actually need to go through all of these ridiculous suggestions about it. And I think that deciding when to use it, when it makes sense, those strategic decisions about how to use it are going to be what makes it either something that really helps somebody in their publishing workflow or really hinders somebody else.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, if you’re a single blog blogger having a little editor go through that and give you some tips that might not be a bad idea, but sometimes. But right. If you have been blogging for many, many years, you don’t need things like that. It changes your voice and it changes the outlook. That’s what the guidelines are actually for that you can create some of the guidelines as it meant to be to help AI to streamline some of that stuff and also to know about what you want to do. And that certainly helps.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, yeah.

Community Contributions

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Speaking of AI, what I found in so in 7.0 WordPress. So getting closer to that release, there is now a new connectors page that you could connect to an OpenAI to Google Gemini or to Anthropic Cloud from your site. And if you have certain tools that help you with those connections. So there are AI providers for other AI systems like I just discovered three of them. One is the AI provider for Open router or router depending on which English speaking country you go to. It’s a little bit different. So open, I say Router is a service that lets developers use many different AI models like those from Google OpenAI but also others through one simple connection. And the provider was developed by Jonathan Bossenger who is on the AI team and talks about AI on the developer blog. There’s also an AI provider for Ollama, and Ollama is a local system where you can connect local LLMs so you can download an LLM set and Ollama helps you connect that with the task that you want to do. The benefit of Ollama is that it’s on your server and it doesn’t go out to the third-party services, but you still need a provider and connector to it. You can do this on any VPS connection or virtual private server system because you have room and space there to download and add certain things. But it’s definitely important for companies that want to not get data outside of their system. 

And the last one is for Europeans. The AI provider for Mistral. Mistral AI is a French AI company founded in 2023 by a former Google DeepMind and Meta researchers and they built and publish large language model and be a respected independent AI in Europe. Speaking of this, what that all comes together is that the AI team and with that Lauri Saarni published a call for testing for community AI connector plugins. There are certain links to the plugins and the connectors, so it would be really cool if you’re interested in that part of it, to actually go ahead and test things and report back what you find and what you didn’t find and how it all works for your site. It’s a totally different approach for working with the site using AI as we discussed. But it might be pretty interesting for developers to connect with all those AI providers and provide services in a plugin or something like that. 

And if you are not a developer, you can install the AI Experiments plugin that also comes from the core AI team and it will show up on the Connectors page with a link to the plugin and what you can do with it. And it has these things like create an excerpt or check the alt text or create a featured image just so you can kind of get a feel for these kinds of works on the WebPress site. Do you have, do you think you have a need for. To kind of use some of the providers for your agency or for some clients?

Beth Soderberg: I think for some clients it has started. I think that for the agency itself, not yet. We have started to do more writing publicly, but really what we’re doing is turning internal communications to clients into public facing documentation so that we can point to them more easily. So it’s not something we need help with. In the same way, I think for some clients we have started to integrate things like this in an experimental way. Right. And there are, as with anything that’s new, people don’t know how to use these things yet. And I am not against experimenting with a new thing. I love the new stuff, but at the same time I’m cautious about putting new things into a production environment without really making sure that it makes sense. Some of these, in terms of experimentation, like I will install them and actually Grammarly is a great example. It took me several years to decide that I was fine with it because I tried it and it was annoying. And then a few years later I tried it again and it was still annoying. And then one day I realized that it really was like their premium suggestions really were fixing my comma issue, which is a known issue I have with writing and grammar. I just don’t put commas anywhere.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I put them in randomly and so there’s a few commas.

Beth Soderberg: But you know, I experimented with the tool probably three times before I was like, you know what, let me try the premium version and see how that goes. And I tried it and a few days later I was like, yeah, this is actually making my writing better. But it was one of those, like I was monitoring over time if it really made sense with my workflow.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. And that’s how I approach it too.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s how I felt about these. And I think what’s exciting about it is that the infrastructure to do it is becoming more full fledged. But that does not mean people know how to do it yet.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right.

Beth Soderberg: And so that’s the next step is that experimentation phase collectively of how, what. How can we make these tools that we’ve now created function in the best way.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So I really appreciate that the WordPress core developers think about the plumbing of all these services and putting it all the foundation in to open up that total space for freedom for the developers. And there’s a standard there on how to approach certain. So if you are as a site owner, don’t have a plugin that kind of taps into LMMs and you open up Gemini for it, you couldn’t switch just easily to Claude when you think that’s a better fit for that problem, but the plugin will still work. So that’s actually what this whole connector thing is about. And it just came up as for the AI providers, but actually the connector API is for any external service standard. So a standard for any external service. So if you need the OpenStreetMap on your site and you have an API key, the plugin can actually use the connectors API to monitor those API keys and just put it in there. The plugin doesn’t have to come up with its own interface for that, which a lot of plugin developers did for the last 15 years. Yeah. But now they can could actually throw away that piece of the plugin and just tab into the connectors API and don’t have to maintain that piece of the code.

What’s Released – WordPress 7.0 RC2

 But anyway, so that’s kind of the bigger picture behind it. And that’s all coming with WordPress 7.0, which we are now getting to the more practical stuff of WordPress 7.0. So first of all, the WordPress 7.0 release candidate 2 has been published this week. It’s crunch time. The final release is only two weeks away. So if you haven’t tested it, now is really the time to get in there and figure out if your theme plugins and sites actually still work with 7.0, and the developer notes are published. The field guide is in the works and I will continue the list of dev notes in the show Notes like we did the last two episodes. I also know because I have been working on it. The Gutenberg Times Source of Truth is almost done and will be published before this episode actually hits your favorite podcast app. So you get an additional link there. So, Beth, did you get a chance to look over the WordPress 7.0 features? What are the most important ones for you and your fellow agency owners and developers? Is there anything that you are really excited about?

Beth Soderberg: Yes and yes. So the first thing that I think is going to be honestly hugely problematic for a lot of agencies is the change in PHP minimums, because I think that there are. I know that there are a lot of folks sitting on older sites, older themes, maybe they’re stuck at PHP 7.1 and there are old things out there. And I think that this PHP requirement jump is going to catch some people off guard. So it jumps from it’s we’re now requiring 7.4.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: And if you do, it’s already 6.9.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right?

Beth Soderberg: Yeah. But I think this is going to hit harder. Okay. Because people are going to want the new stuff. Like there’s a lot in here that is really great and I’m starting with the thing that I think is going to be most disruptive because I think that people are going to want the other stuff, right? And so I think that that’s going to catch some people off guard. The other thing that I think is going to be really important is the new admin look and feel because people have been training their clients for many, many, many, many, many years with what it looks like now. And there is a client education need here because when the admin changes, even in minor ways, you get clients that come back and say, what happened? I don’t know how to do it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay, Even if nothing changes except the color, right?

Beth Soderberg: Where did it go? Why is this different? And did I do something? Did I write the, that human element of like, hey, you’re okay, it’s gonna look a little different, but I promise you’re gonna be able to do it. Just holler if you have any questions. Right? Because I think that there’s a lot of at least working with long term clients where you become sort of an advisor on the technology rather than a day to day implementer. And for those folks with something like this, I, what I like to do is say, hey, heads up, we are doing, we never do the major core updates right away. I am a let me see how it goes for everyone else.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right.

Beth Soderberg: Type and then if it seems okay, then I’ll go for it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So you’re one of the ones who wait for 7.0.1.

Beth Soderberg: Absolutely. Unless it’s been like three weeks and there isn’t one. Yeah, right. So I either wait for a period of time or I wait for a point release. And if there’s a point release, I wait at least 24 hours to make sure there’s not another point release. But point being though, that this is a big enough shift in terms of what people will see and what people can do.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Which part of the admin is actually the one that will disrupt people’s minds.

Beth Soderberg: Just I think it looking different at all.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, okay. So we should never change that. Is that what you’re kind of thinking?

Beth Soderberg: No, we should absolutely change it. But because we have not changed it for many, many, many years, it will be a surprise. And I think that it’s easy as folks who are in these systems every day to be like, wow, they finally fixed that. That’s great. That might be my reaction to many of these changes. Right. But I also know when I log in to pay my credit card. And they’ve changed it all. And even though the buttons are the same, it looks different. I don’t have as much confidence about clicking the button. And there’s this. The vast majority of people who are maintaining the contents on these sites day to day are marketing people, communications people, regular everyday writing people. And they are not sitting there thinking about how the structure of the software works all the time the way we do.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. But they still get their work done.

Beth Soderberg: They still get their work done. What I like to do with clients is just reduce friction by increasing confidence.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: Right. And so, like, my message to them is going to be, hey, you need to know that this is going to look different, but your workflow in terms of the things you know how to do is the same. Don’t let it freak you out. You’ve got this. Keep going. Right. But like, just that little bit, because that’s. That is 100% what gets people. It’s the smallest stuff. They just need to know, like, hey, the problem’s not me. Oh, wait, there’s not a problem. It’s fine. And then they’re good.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. It’s the first five seconds. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: It’s that psychological adjustment. And I think because it hasn’t changed for so long that it’s just going to be something that I mentioned.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Is there anything else that you are really excited about or is it just.

Beth Soderberg: I know. Okay.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Things change. Okay. I don’t like it to change.

Beth Soderberg: Things change. I’m really, really excited about the cover block video embeds.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: That is really, really going to reduce the size of things as they load for a lot of websites. And that is fabulous. In addition to improving workflow, all of the things around block visibility by screen size make me really happy. I’m really happy about the changes in the header block. And I’ve been building this into themes for years. And the only thing that makes me nervous about it is that I need to go back and see how it impacts the things I’ve already built that replicate this feature.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: But you mean the navigation overlays?

Beth Soderberg: The navigation overlays. Yeah. Because you’re going to have such increases in both accessibility compliance and SEO optimization just by virtue of having the option to manage your headings visually versus syntactically. So I’m very excited about that. I love that our revisions menu now has visual changes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: Because I know that most people looking at the markup that’s been in there lately are like, I don’t know.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I have to squint so much to look through the code to find things. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: And then there’s a few exciting changes to the navigation and the better workflows for pattern overrides. Yeah, it was there before, but it was one of those mystery off menu features if it was there, if you knew how to find it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. Right.

Beth Soderberg: So those are the things I’m most excited about. I think there’s some other cool stuff in there and I am excited about the general infrastructure that we were just referencing that is being solidified with this release. And I think that piece may not be as exciting on the outset because it’s infrastructure. It’s like nonprofits have a hard time funding infrastructure process projects. It’s the same reason. But it lays the groundwork for a whole new level of experimentation. I’m excited to see where that goes and I recognize I think you said it very well a few minutes ago the thoughtfulness to create an extensible infrastructure that has gone into these features in the roadmap and sort of planning moving forward.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: You mentioned the cover block video embeds. That means that you can have a video just to catch up with our listeners. It’s to use a URL to YouTube or to Vimeo and pull that in into a cover block instead of uploading the video to the website because that reduces the cost of hosting and bandwidth for the website. Definitely. And it also you don’t have to maintain the speed and all that on your own server. So it’s always good to offset that into a different service. How are you feeling about the manage the fonts from the appearance menu directly instead of hunting it down under the fonts typography menu on the slobber styles,

Beth Soderberg: I’m feeling really good about that. It remains to be seen for me the biggest issue I have with font management. I am not sure it might be addressed here, but I need to experiment. When you get a font from a total third party non-standard like independent type foundry place getting those integrated, there has still been some friction. So I’m excited about it being easier to find in general. I think that’s great. .

I will be experimenting a little bit with if it reduces friction in some of these more edge cases. Because if you’re using a Google font it’s great and it’s been pretty good for a while. But if you are integrating something from another provider, if it’s a big provider the friction is not as bad. But if it’s like this obscure type foundry that makes like only these little types of historic fonts, which I run into recently, getting it actually integrated properly, it’s really hard because you’re dealing with not the most sophisticated type foundry in terms of the format of their files and they’re not necessarily plugging in as best as the totally optimized stuff from the more common sources. So, yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Is it more a format issue or is it more kind of how it scales in different font sizes and different typography features?

Beth Soderberg: It’s a format issue with the font files themselves. And so I think some of it is probably an education piece for people who make fonts, but I also know that most developers don’t know that much about how fonts are made. And so when you put those two things together, you create some problems. But I think this is a huge step towards getting to the point of being able to solve the edge cases. Right. Because right now finding where you manage the fonts is difficult.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right? Yeah, totally. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: We’re going in a great direction, getting into the nitty gritty of which font providers are supported and that I think that’s the next step from here, personally, because I do think there’s a homogeny that started from a type standpoint around everyone’s using Google fonts because they. It’s easy.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. But it’s also problematic for European sites.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, right, yeah. Because the different requirements over whether you’re hosting the font files or Google is hosting the font files, like, then you’re getting all into all of these legal technicalities of where the font is and who owns it. And I’m glad I’m not a lawyer.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, me too. So, all right, so there are a few developer goodies coming, so to speak, down the pipeline. The PHP-only block registrations and then the pattern overrides for custom blocks that you already mentioned. Those. I think there are a few smaller stuff like the HTML block enhancements where you can put the CSS separately from the JavaScript and the HTML. You could actually kind of create your own little app there, depending on what privileges you have. I found that there are some problems when you don’t have admin privileges. The HTML block really gets scrambled, but that’s an overall kind of problem with the capabilities, I think. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: Oh, I forgot the breadcrumbs block. That. That’ll help a lot of things.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So. Yeah, yeah. I’m also sure that a lot of agencies and site owners already had that problem solved through like for instance, the Yoast SEO plugin had already programs for many, many years. Yeah, yeah.

Beth Soderberg: But I like my websites to be as lean and efficient as possible. And this feels like when, for a long time I was using Coblox for accordions. Right. And in the beginning, coblox had a lot of things that Core didn’t. And so you were using a bunch of things. And eventually it became that I was only using the accordion everywhere. And then one day it became possible to do the equivalent in Core and I was like, great, I can get rid of this plugin that’s only doing this one thing, but has all this other stuff. And I think that’s what makes me excited about this. Yeah. You can do it through Yoast. There’s a number of ways to do it. There’s some independent breadcrumbs block plugins that are really good.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I know that Justin Tadlock had a very good breadcrumbs plugin and he was advising on the core implementation there.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, right. Yeah. And I’ve used Justin Tadlock’s breadcrumbs plugin for a long time, and I’m not going to rip it out of something just because it’s there. It works. It’s good. But for something else where, like, you only have this one thing that you’re really using in this big suite of plugins. Yoast is one of them. Jetpack is one of them. Any sort of like cadence blocks, code blocks, any collection of a large number of things when you’re only using one of them, you should be considering the idea that maybe you shouldn’t use it at all. And that’s what makes me excited about the ability to do this through Core, because it allows for some of that extra bloat to be stripped away in some circumstances.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. All right. Anything else that you want to kind of cover on 7.0 for your agency of developing theme building needs?

Beth Soderberg: I think that the PHP-only block registration, we sort of glanced over it, but I think that’s a very exciting big deal. It opens up, you know, the whole challenge. I think from a developer standpoint, the whole time with Gutenberg has been, how do I level up to do this new thing? How do I level up to do this new thing? And this opens that door wider. And anything that we are doing to open that door wider is great. Similarly, there’s a few things in here that are just really tiny that I think will help people. They’re not like, again, reducing friction. So little enhancements to the query loop, adding some new navigation stuff that is just really tiny, but really Helpful dimension support for width and height. That sounds crazy, right? Like it’s little tiny stuff that reduces friction and stuff. So there’s more of that in here. Like the concept of the grid block being responsive is really great.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, it was responsive before, but there was a setting where it wasn’t and that’s kind of changed now, right? Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: So, yeah, I just. There’s a lot of hidden goodies in here that reduce friction. I do think the biggest things to look out for are if your themes are compatible, if your plugins are compatible, and if you have built in things that replicate some of this functionality. How does that work? Because we’re starting to enter, at least for how I’ve been building themes, a zone where things I have done historically to account for some of these needs are being subsumed by core, which is great. I just don’t know how it’s going to work. So, you know, I think that’s going to be different for everyone in terms of which things it is. But hopefully, and I say hopefully because I know that we have a unified development philosophy about how we build our themes and there’s sort of a continuous logical thread for our themes as they’re built over time. Hopefully agencies who have an internal logic to how they have been building themes can look at this list and say we should look at how we do that and make sure it still works. Yeah, right. Because there’s also going to be agencies where they have a mishmash of things and they don’t know and it’s going to be a one off for each site to see what happens. And you know, that goes for anybody who’s inherited themes too.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, but that’s also for any of the WordPress releases. Yeah, you have to go through a certain testing phase there.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, I think that’s true. And I think some of this is honestly that it’s been a while since we’ve had a major release and so the quantity of little things feels more.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely.

Beth Soderberg: And I think that’s part of why my reaction is this way, because I haven’t had this thought process.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: At least five months.

Beth Soderberg: At least.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, six months. Nine came out December 2nd.

Beth Soderberg: Right. And so as somebody who was used to the four times a year cadence, it is longer and what’s packed into it is greater. And so I don’t think that’s necessarily bad, but it is an adjustment in terms of absolutely how you review things and what you’re looking for. And it’s more of a. This one feels more like a surprise. Not that it is a surprise, but it feels more like a surprise because it is not on this schedule that I had come to expect. Right. And I think we’re getting towards a new schedule, which is really great. But until we are all psychologically adjusted to whatever that new schedule is, it’s going to be a slightly bigger task to review because there’s more. And psychologically it’s going to be like, oh, right, I guess that’s happening and you’re, you know, you got to go do it. Yeah. So I just think it’s just. There’s a little more and the timing is not as predictable.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And I think that the break that was in Twenty Twenty-Five kind of skewed that anyway. Yeah. So we had an April 25, we had a release, and then the last. The next one wasn’t until December. Yeah. So there were eight months that kind of 15 Gutenberg plugin releases. It didn’t feel that much that it is now in 7.0, because that was just kind of coming up out of that pause. And now there’s a real excitement about the Real Time collaboration. There’s excitement about AI. Yeah. So, yeah, it feels that there are quite a few heavy new features in there that also kind of drown out some of the really quality of life things that we have been waiting for quite a bit here.

Beth Soderberg: Right. Yeah. And I. I think it’s like coming back from a long vacation, like, oh, ooh, this is really exciting, you know, but that’s how. That’s how it feels and it’s good. But it is, absolutely. I think that Twenty Twenty-Five, you didn’t have to be as vigilant because it wasn’t happening.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yep, it was a good break.

Beth Soderberg: I think everyone needed it. Honestly, I think everyone really needed it. I know I needed it. But it is, you know, getting back into the. The groove of things is. Is where we are now.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: For which I am thankful, but it’s still an adjustment.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Me too. Yeah. And now with 7.0 kind of out the door almost. Yeah. 

Gutenberg 22.8

We are looking at Gutenberg 22.8 that has been released. Was released this week also kind of what comes into 7.1. It’s already starting and people are discussing things. So although there were quite a few PRs that were either all part of the new WordPress UI package that hasn’t been merged into Core yet, or it’s bug fixes for the connectors or the Real time collaboration for 7.0, so some of the PRs are actually backported to the release candidates and the beta to the release candidates. 

But let’s talk about some of the things that will not be in 7.0, but definitely in 7.1 and what’s new in the Gutenberg plugin. So the first thing is the navigation support for the current menu item. So in theme JSON, meaning when you have a navigation and you’re on a current page that’s part of the navigation, how do you signal that you are at the current page right now in the navigation? And that has been missing for quite a while or people have just did some CSS workaround of that, but now you can actually style that in theme JSON. And so this is cool. What’s also cool is that there is an interface for the states like Hover Focus current. I’m not sure if that’s going to be in there, but it’s also part of making the navigation and the hover states and the pseudo support that comes into 7.0, but now it comes also to the interface. So that’s pretty cool.

Beth Soderberg: That’s my favorite part.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Which one?

Beth Soderberg: The navigation stuff again. The interface around the navigation has gotten a lot better in various iterations of Gutenberg, but there’s still some stuff that you’d think you would be able to do that you can’t. And that’s what some of this is filling in.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: There have been some great work. Some of it gets into 7.0 and some of it is still ongoing. So I really like the navigation that’s actually in 7.0, that you can create pages and publish them and have them in the navigation in one workflow kind of thing. You don’t have to get out of it. You may have to think about it. You just kind of create the page and then you fill it in with content later.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah. And I’ve seen that in other systems. I don’t remember what that is. One of those things where some of these changes, you’re like, you know, I saw that once somewhere. Was it Joomla? Was it Drupal? Was it whatever? I don’t know. But I liked it. And now it’s here. And that’s good.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Absolutely.

Beth Soderberg: And that’s how I feel about that because I do appreciate the tiny little decisions that are being considered here by the core team because it seems very small. But the amount of friction you’re reducing and the amount of time you’re saving for people is huge.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s huge. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s millions of millions of site owners that kind of have advantage. Yeah. Do you want to take the next

Beth Soderberg: thing, the tabs menu. So I think this is going to be fun too. So basically we’ve got a refactor of the tabs menu block. So it’s basically making this more efficient and making some templating changes to how the tabs block works. And if you look at the actual PR for it, there’s really good, very detailed descriptions of how. So it’s making it very clear of it’s no longer using the template block duplicated in PHP and instead it’s rendering with per tab context.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right.

Beth Soderberg: And that’s like all gobbledygook to some listeners. Maybe, but like really what it’s doing is making it more efficient and making it more extensible from a code perspective.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And also for theme developers.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, right. And making it more possible again, opening that door a little wider for more people to be able to work within the code infrastructure. Because that has been the thing that’s been the biggest challenge in terms of developer adoption of Gutenberg.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And the refactor was also necessary to bring it in line with the approach for the accordion block so that certain methods and certain functions can be replicated in a similar way for the TAPS block. I was actually sad to hear that very early that it won’t make it into 7.0, but I think that was one of the reasons where they said, okay, let’s, let’s see if we can kind of align it a little bit more with the accordion block. And it’s no surprise that Sarah Norris, who has been a guest here at the Changelog quite a bit, she also created the accordion block and she has been now instrumental on the restructure of the tabs menu and inner blocks to get it in line and we have make it more streamlined for developers and theme builders.

Beth Soderberg: The one thing to add that is an exciting piece for especially theme developers is the addition of anchor support for the tabs. So that’ll help a lot in terms of things like navigation structures and feasibility. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And also to kind of interlink different pages. You can link to some of the tabs if it’s interesting enough. Yeah. So I know that WooCommerce is using that for their products template. So they have built their own one back then and now they get a little bit closer to core, which makes it more extensible and also appreciative they don’t have to maintain the code for it.

Beth Soderberg: Yep, absolutely.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Which is quite a bit. So right now I’m fishing around on my computer to find my notes again. So here we are. All right,

Beth Soderberg: the next one, the showing one’s own presence and collaborative editing sessions is I think existentially important and just is really going to help this UI experience from the baseline that’s being released in 7.0.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So yeah, I’m pretty sure that it will actually come to 7.0. That made it into the release. That’s good. So the next piece is the one that you can have the site logo and icon screen in the design panel. So in the site editor there’s another menu item now to update the site logo and the icon screen directly from the site editor. So you don’t have to go out into the settings page and upload everything that you need or into the site logo block or header. You can do it right there from, from the menu. So it’s really an interesting update to change the site logo and the site icon directly in the design site editor.

Beth Soderberg: It’s reducing friction. I think that there’s a workflow confusion. There’s the customizer that has become this vestigial organ that sometimes you need, sometimes you don’t need. Where’s this? Wait a minute, where do I add css? Is it over here? Is it over here? Is it over here? Could it be here? And I think that we’re pruning what we need to do through alternate interfaces through changes like this. And the more we can streamline, the better because the biggest confusion I’ve seen is actually with brand new or like more junior developers who do not know the quote old way. And so the idea that it’s even there, like they’ll get stuck because they can’t figure out where it could possibly be coming from. And then some old timer is like, oh, it’s over here in this menu that you can’t see anymore.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Or yeah. So the site icon at the site logo has been a hidden place and only until now it’s kind of coming into the forefront. Yes. So the next thing is another one for the collaboration. I just wanted to point out that by default the collaboration on shared hosting is only. It’s limited to two users and there is also a method for the hosts to either enable that or disable the real time collaboration. So it might not be as obvious when you go on your site and looking for it. You might not be able to get real time collaboration out of the box. You might need to connect with your host to let that enabled because it’s such an additional load on a server. That certain server configurations are not meant for it to be in yet. So if you’re on a virtual private host, I think I mentioned it before, it wouldn’t. It was a different scenario. But it’s probably easier to get the collaboration working than if you are on a shared hosting with 10,000 websites on a. On a server where the hosting company will probably restrict that.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah, I think that there’s going to be a lot of shifts in hosting, either requirements, configuration, pricing options, etc. as a result of all of these changes. And I don’t know what they’re going to be yet, but we do need to collectively remember that the AI features, the collaboration components, all of those things are resource intensive and are going to shift how hosting is being utilized and therefore the hosts are going to need to respond in order to account for the actual cost of that change. So I think that’s a big unknown right now and I think it’s, you know, there’s a few hosts where they’re locking in pricing for a few years, which is cool, but at the same time I’m like, I don’t know, in three years is this going to be enough to pay for that? What will it be in three years?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: So I think there’s a shift coming there and I am not gonna even pretend to know enough about all the details to know exactly how that’s going to play out, but I think that there’s enough shift in what types of resources we need from our hosting that there will be a shift. There has to be, because it’s just so much more resource intensive than what we’ve been doing in the past collectively.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And that is in line with what you said at the beginning, that the PHP requirements. Yeah, it always is also contributing to that because all the newer features. So there might be a. You can’t upload upgrade to 7.0 until you update your PHP. That’s totally sure.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah. And I’ve read that somewhere. Somewhere I did read that there’ll be security releases on 6.9 for sites that can’t go, you know. But then you end up with a situation where you’re gonna. How many sites are gonna be stuck on 6.9 forever?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: But that has been a problem. Yeah. Because the security team is actually backporting, although officially the release is only supported to 6.8 or something like that, but security team actually backported all the security updates that came with 6.3 or 6.4 to 4 point something. WordPress 4 point something is probably 15 years old. So it’s still getting security updates. So that definitely is a backwards compatibility promise that even the security team there. It takes a lot of time to backport that. And John Blackburn, one of the leads on the security team, has actually done a retrospective of the latest security updates because you saw that too. It was a. It’s kind of a galore of releases. 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 7.4 beta. Yeah, it kind of was in within three days, I think there were four releases.

Beth Soderberg: It was a lot. Yes. All at once.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I had a meetup here in Munich and we talked about it. I think the day the 6.4 came out that they were saying, well, is it all hacked or what happened here? Kind of how often do I have to update my WordPress site in a day? And he did a nice retrospective or explaining what happened and what was the reason for that. I’ll link it in the show notes if you’re interested. To listeners, it will probably be a little bit less prominent because of all the death notes that came out, but it’s on the blog on Core.

Beth Soderberg: I’m going to go back and listen to that because that hit during a particularly busy time, just for me personally in general. And so it was a little whiplashy to be like what is going on over there? And I think it will be good to be able to go back and just review so that I am aware moving forward of what exactly happened there.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And back to Gutenberg 22.8. I mentioned it before. There is a feature that implements the state UI for sudo selectors in the global styles. Maggie Cabrera mentioned that in the last episode. It’s now available in the Gutenberg plugin so you can test it out. It gives you a. In the global styles on the right hand side you can select the design for your pseudo selectors like hover and focus and all that. It’s really cool. Hover, focus, Focus, visible and active. Yeah, so you can change all those settings for buttons, for instance. And you don’t have to use theme JSON for it anymore. So this is pretty cool.

Beth Soderberg: Yes. And then this one, I think this is fascinating. There is a PR adding client side navigation block with interactive features. That just sounds really fun to experiment with. So what it’s doing is adding a variant to the Create Block interactive template that allows you to add client side navigation. So this is starting to support the again supporting the infrastructure that exists with actual tooling and UI to use it. So the way that it describes it, this variant provides a self contained working example that mirrors real world patterns, query parameter navigation for pagination, search results, filtered archives and works immediately after scaffolding with no posts or setup required. That’s really cool. That’s a really nerdy and very arcane and wonderful. So I’m excited about that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And that variant is for the Create block scaffolding feature, if I understood this correctly. Yeah, it’s a create block latest. So if you create a custom block, you can have the variant for your client side navigation and scaffold that up. That’s really cool. Yeah. Well, our developer advocacy team, we are working on a so-called showcase for all the good things that you could do with a website or theme, including some of the interactivity API features. And we will probably release that someday in the next two months I would think. And it will be a music site with albums and musicians and artists and using the tabs and using the playlist and block and then also kind of have some interesting changes in the theme. So it’s for custom post types and all that. So it’s going to be really cool. I know that Juan Ma Garrido who put the client side navigation template into the gray block scaffolding, he’s also creating a plugin to have the music play even if you navigate away from that page that had the list of the music. So it’s kind of really interesting to see. So you could use it for video and music. So things stay on the forefront on your browser even if you look at other pages on the website. So that’s one of the features.

Beth Soderberg: The person, the, the part of me that likes to listen to podcasts from the website themselves really appreciates this.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So I, I definitely, once it’s out, I definitely gonna adopt it for the good changelog podcast.

Beth Soderberg: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So I think always through, we are through with booked. Yeah.

Beth Soderberg: Lots of little, little things, but those are the big exciting things, I think.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And there were actually 38 PRs that were backported as bug fixes to 7.0. So it’s still an ongoing work that is coming out in two weeks and people are still fixing it. 

All right, well, I wish you and your agency all the best for that release that all the things that come in don’t disrupt your work or the work of your clients.

Beth Soderberg: We have a list. We know where to look for the problem.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Excellent. Yeah. Well, I’m so happy that you were on the show with me. And as always, dear listeners, the show notes will be published on GutenbergTimes.com podcast this is episode 129 and if you have questions and suggestions or news you want us to include, send them to changelogutenbergtimes.com that’s changelogutenbergtimes.com so thank you for listening and I wish you all a great weekend. Well, or next week. And also toy, toy for the WordPress 7.0 release updates. We will hear each other again in four weeks once I get back from WordCamp Asia. And then we’ll tackle what’s coming in 7.1 and what has been in. Good work. Plugin 22.9 and 23.0. 

Thank you so much. Beth Soderberg, it was wonderful to have you and your perspective and your opinions on the show.

Beth Soderberg: Thank you for having me. It was great to be here and to see you again and I wish you safe travels on all of your continuing travels.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Thank you. All right. Yeah, and you take care. And I’ll put in the show notes how people can connect with you.

Beth Soderberg: Sounds good.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Of course. All right, you take care. Bye Bye.

Beth Soderberg: Bye bye. Thanks, everybody.

First, I want to say how great the jazz scene is in New York. I caught a little Latin at my go-to Guantanamera last night, but the band seemed to be phoning it in a bit, so I walked over to Dizzy’s and heard an amazing big band performance by the Diva all-women Jass Orchestra, they had Clint Holmes leading vocals and I got Frank Sinatra / Count Basie vibes, so great to see such a tight big band.

In WordPress, last week it was fun to see the company some call parasitic WP Engine acquire WPackagist. So a popular way to use WordPress with Composer, previously maintained by an awesome co-op agency in London, was now in the clutches of a company using its capital advantage to try to openwash its alleged bad behavior, probably in a process that wasn’t ideal for the sellers.

Four days later, an awesome independent organization roots.io released WP Composer (renamed to WP Packages, in OpenClaw fashion) with 17x faster cold resolves than WPackagist. Check out their comparison page.

It’s beautiful to see how resilient and nimble the antibodies in the WordPress community are. Major hat tip to Ben Word.

In another type of antibody, Sid Sijbrandi, whom I previously talked about going into founder mode on his cancer, gave an incredible presentation at the Open AI Forum about how he ran a bunch of N-of-1 experiments and therapies to cure his terminal osteosarcoma. He’s also open-sourced 25TB of his data for cancer research. Incredible!

If you want to see the future of health care, give Sid’s presentation a watch.

Nobody is arguing that Stockfish is conscious, but Stockfish would kick Claude’s ass at chess.

Kevin Lincoln in AI Perfected Chess. Humans Made It Unpredictable Again.

A week ago, I put together a quick tech demo, showing how an MCP server could be created for Claude Code that hooked directly into Gutenberg’s Collaborative Editing feature, allowing it to act as a digital collaborator on a post. The demo focused primarily on text generation, but that’s not really the benefit that I see coming with this kind of tool. Anyone can generate text, then copy/paste it into the editor. The real power comes from directly hooking into the entire post creation and editing process.

What’s New?

Since last week’s release, I’ve added a host of editing and review tools:

• /edit {tell the LLM how you want this post adjusted}
  Automatically make simple (or even not so simple!) edits on your post, giving your writing a little extra polish.
• /proofread
  Find and automatically fix simple spelling, grammatical, and punctuation issues.
• /review
  Read the post, and leave notes (using Gutenberg’s Notes feature!) about suggested improvements to your post. This doesn’t touch your post content, leaving you to make use of the suggestions as you see fit.
• /respond-to-notes
  If you’re happy with the notes left in the review, you can also have it automatically apply them, too!

On top of that, I’ve also added an experimental /translate tool, to automatically translate a post into a different language. LLM translation quality varies significantly, though Claude is regularly considered to be quite good. It’s worth remembering that, like any LLM, the output is only as good as its input. If you’re translating to a language that it didn’t have much training data on, it’ll do a lot worse.

Behind The Scenes

The MCP server now does a much better job of making use of the REST API, too: it now handles all block types (and does a pretty good job of guessing how to use blocks provided by plugins!). It can upload media, and it can handle all the post metadata, like categories, tags, excerpt, etc.

Getting It Running

Inspired by the recently released WordPress.org MCP server, the install process got a refresh, too. If you’re running WordPress 7.0, you won’t even need to copy/paste the application password to connect to your site: just click the connect button in your browser, and your site will send credentials back to the installer! And if you’d prefer to avoid the magic, there’s still a --manual option to let you set it up the old-fashioned way.

What’s Next?

This release shows how easy it is for an LLM to talk to your WordPress site. What about the other way? If you’re working on a post, you don’t want to have to switch to a terminal to get spell checking done, so how can we provide this kind of functionality directly from the block editor? Let’s experiment and find out!

Hi,

In less than two weeks, WordPress 7.0 is scheduled to be released. Are you ready? Or are you someone I used to be who waits two to three weeks to see what quirks early adopters find and if they warrant an early point release? Be that as it may, waiting only delays the inevitable, though, sooner or later you get to benefit from the new features and quality of life improvements to the Admin, Editor and Blocks.

The first version of the WordPress 7.0 Source of Truth has been published. It’s again a mammoth post of 4500 words, including 21 images and ten videos. I hope you enjoy the list of all the big and small feature and updates.

Next week, I will be on my way to Mumbai. The next weekend edition will arrive in your inbox after WordCamp Asia, on April 17th, 2026.

Yours,
Birgit

PS: Should you be in Mumbai, grab a coffee of lunch spot from my public calendar, I’d love to meet you!

WordPress 7.0

WordPress 7.0 Release candidate 1 was moved to this week. The WordPress 7.0 RC2 was still on schedule for Thursday, though. Meanwhile, more Dev Notes were published.

Pattern Overrides in WP 7.0 is your heads-up to act before the release lands. WordPress 7.0 lifts the old restriction — Pattern Overrides now work with any block attribute that supports Block Bindings, not just a hardcoded Core block list. You opt in via the block_bindings_supported_attributes filter, and the post walks you through edge cases for static blocks where a render_callback may still be needed.

Pattern Editing in WordPress 7.0 explains that ContentOnly mode for unsynced patterns is now the default, meaning block structure and style controls are hidden from editors by default. Block authors need to audit "role": "content" attributes in block.json, theme authors should test their patterns, and plugin developers should verify UI components still render correctly under the new, more broadly applied editing modes.

Block Visibility in WordPress 7.0 dev note is relevant if your theme or plugin touches block markup server-side. The new viewport key inside blockVisibility metadata lets users show or hide blocks per device — mobile, tablet, desktop — via CSS, not DOM removal. If your code assumes blockVisibility is always a boolean, you’ll need to update it to handle an object too. No changes are needed if your blocks don’t interact with markup server-side.

Anne McCarthy walks through one of WordPress 7.0’s most-requested features: viewport-based block visibility. You’ll see exactly how showing or hiding any block by screen size works in practice — no extra plugins or CSS workarounds needed — and why it is relevant for responsive design. If you’ve been waiting for a native way to tailor content for mobile, tablet, and desktop separately, this is your preview before the April 9th release.

The Dimensions Support Enhancements in WordPress 7.0 comprise width and height as first-class block supports. Block builders and theme designer opt in with a single line in block.json, set defaults in theme.json, and the sidebar UI comes for free. Themes can also define named dimensionSizes presets, giving users a consistent palette rather than free-form inputs. If your block has custom width/height attributes today, this is a good moment to consider migrating.

A long-requested feature finally lands in WordPress 7.0. The dev note on Custom CSS for Individual Block Instances hold all the details. The new customCSS block support — enabled by default for all blocks — adds a Custom CSS field in the Advanced panel of the block inspector, scoped automatically to that instance via a generated class. Block authors whose blocks wrap raw or opaque content should explicitly opt out via block.json. If your render_callback is in play, make sure your block’s outermost element is a standard HTML tag.

A typography feature requested since 2021 finally arrives in WordPress 7.0, the dev note on the new textIndent block support has all the details for developers working on blocks or themes. Opt in with a single line in block.json, and a Line Indent control appears automatically in the Typography panel. Theme authors get theme.json configuration too, including a thoughtful subsequent vs all toggle that respects both LTR and RTL typographic conventions. No breaking changes — purely additive./

WordPress 7.0 ships a new Connectors API — and if you build AI-adjacent plugins, this dev note belongs on your reading list. The new framework standardizes how WordPress registers and manages connections to external services — starting with AI providers — giving you a consistent admin UI, API key management, and auto-discovery via the WP AI Client. Three providers ship out of the box: Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI. The wp_connectors_init action is your hook for registering additional connectors or overriding existing metadata.

Felix Arntz details the new AI Client landing in WordPress 7.0 — a provider-agnostic PHP API that lets your plugin send prompts for text, images, speech, or video without touching credentials or provider logic. You chain methods on wp_ai_client_prompt(), declare model preferences, and WordPress routes to whatever the site owner has configured. Three official provider plugins cover Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI. Client-side JS exists but remains admin-only for now.

Jorge Costa details the client-side Abilities API arriving in WordPress 7.0, the JavaScript counterpart to the PHP Abilities API introduced in 6.9. Two new packages handle it: @wordpress/abilities for pure state management and @wordpress/core-abilities for the WordPress integration layer that auto-fetches server-registered abilities via REST. You can register abilities with input/output schemas, permission callbacks, and annotations — laying the groundwork for browser agents and WebMCP integration.

Gutenberg 22.8

Gutenberg 22.8 release lead Dean Sas highlighted in his post What’s new in Gutenberg 22.8? (25 March) the following features:

• Real-time Collaboration improvements
• Button pseudo-state styling in Global Styles
• Site Logo & Icon in the Design panel
• Connectors extensibility
• Other Notable Highlights

The real-time collaboration improvements and the Connectors extensibility will make it into the WordPress 7.0 release.

I had a blast chatting with Beth Soderberg from Bethink Studio on the recording of Gutenberg changelog 129. We dove into some cool stuff like using AI, WordPress 7.0, and Gutenberg 22.8. It was such a fun convo, and we even touched on that little mental block some users might hit when they see the fresh new look of the wp-admin screens and try to wrap their heads around the change. The episode will drop into your favorite podcast app over the weekend. The 130th episode will be recorded after I return from WordCamp Asia.

The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #128 – Gutenberg 22.7 Version and Dev Notes for 7.0 with special guest Maggie Cabrera

Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners

Courtney Robertson at GoDaddy breaks down what WordPress 7.0 brings when it ships April 9 at WordCamp Asia. Your editor finally gets real-time multi-user collaboration powered by Yjs, alongside visual block-level revisions, a Breadcrumbs block, Icon block, and customizable navigation overlays. Developers gain a provider-agnostic WP AI Client with a Connectors UI, PHP-only block registration, and Interactivity API improvements. The minimum PHP requirement bumps to 7.4 — worth flagging for clients on older hosting now.

A little over a month ago, Johanne Courtright, founder of Groundworx, launched r/WordPressBlocks, a dedicated Reddit community for developers and builders working with the block editor. A longtime block developer and free plugin author, Courtright created the space because scattered conversations about custom blocks, theme.json, full site editing, and Gutenberg’s direction deserved a proper home. All skill levels welcome — come share tips, tools, wins, and frustrations.

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

If you’re finding it a drag to edit theme.json, check out Sérgio Santos‘s creation, WP Theme JSON Editor. It’s a VS Code and Cursor extension that makes dealing with JSON way easier with its cool visual interface. You can easily tweak colors, typography, spacing, and block settings using the official WordPress JSON Schema. Plus, it’s got handy features like CSS variable autocomplete, CodeMirror 6 syntax highlighting, drag-and-drop for palettes and font sizes, and real-time validation, and you even get to play with some experimental WP core properties. I’m not sure if it’s really easier than writing JSON from scratch, but hey, that’s just a personal choice, right?

You can now generate a block theme with Telex, Automattic’s experimental AI theme builder. You describe your site, hit “Enhance Prompt” to let Telex flesh out the design brief, optionally upload a reference image, then pick from four generated variations. From there you build out additional page templates, refine typography and colors conversationally, and download a ready-to-install ZIP containing your templates, styles, and theme.json — no PHP or CSS knowledge required.

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.

Troy Chaplin launched Veils of Fate, a choose-your-own-adventure game built in WordPress using the Interactivity API, post types, and taxonomies. Spanning 3 acts, 18 quests, and 112 scenes, the story was co-written with Claude AI. If you love interactive storytelling, this one’s for you. Nano banana handled the pixel art, Miles created the theme, and Kinsta provides the hosting. A family-inspired project: Troy’s kids are avid readers and his wife is a librarian.

WordPress Studio is a free, open-source local development tool powered by WordPress Playground that has been around for two years now. The team has now published wp-studio the CLI installer you can use to spin up local sites instantly — no Docker, NGINX, Apache, or MySQL required — sync them with WordPress.com or Pressable, share live preview links with clients, and tap into a built-in AI assistant that runs WP-CLI commands natively. It’s only early access to there might be dragons. Also available in WordPress Studio you can use phpMyAdmin to access the database and use it dark mode.

Carlo Daniele at Kinsta walks you through building PHP-only Gutenberg blocks, a feature introduced in Gutenberg 21.8 that lets you register blocks entirely in PHP—no React, Node.js, or build steps required. Using the new auto_register support flag, your attributes automatically generate inspector controls in the editor. You’ll build a pricing card block and learn how to wrap legacy shortcodes as proper blocks, finally giving your PHP-side clients and developers a gentler path into the block editor. It will also come to a WordPress instance near you soon with WordPress 7.0.

If you’d rather watch a video for education, Brian Coords demonstrates how PHP-only block registration in WordPress 7.0 removes the build-tool barrier entirely You’ll see a Hello World block built with custom fields, a WooCommerce integration using the Store API, and how to handle frontend JavaScript when backend JS has limitations. The real payoff comes when you combine PHP-only blocks with Claude Code skills, letting you generate blocks through conversation rather than scaffolding. The code is on GitHub.

Playground News

On this episode of The WP Minute+, Eric Karkovack sits down with WordPress contributors Alex Kirk and Brandon Payton to explore my.WordPress.net, a browser-based WordPress sandbox built around privacy, portability, and AI. Think personal CRM, private family blogging, chat-to-blog workflows, and an AI playground — all running in your browser without a server. The demo shows how plugins become app-like modules, how messaging apps like Beeper can feed content in, and how AI can modify plugins live. Your data stays yours, portable across devices.

AI in WordPress

Fellyph Cintra announces that AI coding agents can now connect directly to WordPress Playground via MCP, thanks to the new @wp-playground/mcp package built by Berislav Grgicak. One command wires up Claude Code or Gemini CLI to a browser-based Playground instance over WebSocket, letting your agent read and write files, execute PHP, manage sites, and navigate pages — all locally, without touching WordPress admin. Think plugin testing, live database debugging, and theme scaffolding driven entirely by conversation.

Gary Pendergast, long-time core committer, introduces claudaborative-editing, an MCP server — written by Claude Code, fittingly — that lets Claude edit WordPress posts live alongside you in Gutenberg. Built on WordPress 7.0’s Yjs-powered collaborative editing protocol, your changes and Claude’s sync in real time with no conflicts. A single npx claudaborative-editing setup gets you started. Claude appears in the collaborators list, edits at the block level, and even streams text character by character as it types.

Darin Koster, developer at Fueled, walks you through how AI featured image generation works inside the WordPress AI plugin. One button click kicks off a five-step chain built on the Abilities API: gather post context, generate an image prompt via an LLM, generate the image, optionally create alt text, then import and set it as the featured image — all in about 30 seconds. The post doubles as a practical demonstration of how WordPress’s AI building blocks can be composed into real editor workflows.

In this lively WP Builds debate on AI, content, and the future of WordPress, Jamie Marsland — Automattic’s head of YouTube and prolific WordPress educator — squares off against a gleefully curmudgeonly Nathan Wrigley. Marsland champions the new Claude–WordPress.com integration, which gives AI full context of your site for content, branding, and SEO. Wrigley pushes back on authenticity, AI slop, and eroding community skills. You’ll find both sides genuinely persuasive — and probably switch teams more than once.

As an example of how AI might change how you use WordPress, Jamie Marsland demonstrates that You can now Vibe Code with WordPress.com. on YouTube. He shows what’s possible once Claude is connected to your site via MCP, from building full landing pages and wiring up contact forms with a single prompt to running promotions across multiple sites, generating downloadable SEO reports, auditing for accessibility, and tracking activity with visual dashboards. Think of it as your WordPress workflow, but driven entirely by conversation.

You can learn more about the official WordPress.com connector for Claude in below blog post and video.

• Your AI agent can now create, edit, and manage content on WordPress.com by Jonathan Bossenger
• 
  It’s Official: You Can Now Use Claude with WordPress! also with Jamie Marsland

Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s master branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.

Now also available via WordPress Playground. There is no need for a test site locally or on a server. Have you been using it? Email me with your experience.

Questions? Suggestions? Ideas?
Don’t hesitate to send them via email or
send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.

For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog,
send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com

Welcome to the Source of Truth for WordPress 7.0!

Before you dive headfirst into all the big and small changes and pick your favorites, make sure to read these preliminary thoughts about this post and how to use it. If you have questions, leave a comment or email me at pauli@gutenbergtimes.com.

Huge Thank You to all collaborators on this post: Anne McCarthy, Sarah Norris, Ella van Durpe, Maggie Cabrera, Ben Dwyer, Jonathan Bossenger, Justin Tadlock, Dave Smith, Courtney Robertson and a lot more. It’s takes a village…

Changelog

Any changes are cataloged here as the release goes on.

• March 27, 2026: First edition
• March 30, 2026:
  • Fixes for clarity and grammar.
  • Changed feature image of the post.
  • RTC: Added Introduce filters for the polling intervals (76518)
• April 1, 2026:
  • Added information from Extending the 7.0 Cycle by release lead Matias Ventura
  • Changed release date to TBD
  • Updated Real-Time Collaboration section with additional information.

Important note/guidelines

Try not to just copy and paste what’s in this post since it’s going to be shared with plenty of folks. Use this as inspiration for your own stuff and to get the best info about this release. If you do copy and paste, just remember that others might do the same, and it could lead to some awkward moments with duplicate content floating around online.

• Each item has been tagged using best guesses with different high-level labels so that you can more readily see at a glance who is likely to be most impacted.
• Each item has a high-level description, visuals (if relevant), and key resources if you would like to learn more.

Overview 

Note: As always, what’s shared here is being actively pursued but doesn’t necessarily mean each will make it into the final release of WordPress 7.0.

WordPress 7.0 introduces several new features and performance enhancements.

Key new features include:

• Real-time collaboration: multiple users can now work on the same post.
• Navigation overlays: Customizable mobile menus for more flexible styling.
• Content focused pattern editing: Pattern editing now prioritizes the content editing experience with more available options when needed.
• Visual revisions: A new revisions screen inside the block editor gives a visual preview of the changes with an easy-to-understand color-coded system.
• AI Foundation in WordPress: User can connect their site to an AI agent of choice to use the AI experiments plugin. Plugin developers can use the Connectors API to register connections to external services.

Furthermore, WordPress 7.0, entails:

• Two new blocks: the Icon block and the Breadcrumbs block.
• Viewport-based block show/hide: Block visibility extended to customize display according to screen-sizes.
• Gallery lightbox navigation: improved browsing through images placed in a gallery.
• Font management for all themes: The screen to upload and manage fonts is now available in the Appearance menu for classic and block themes.

Many more quality of life changes for workflow and design tools made it into this release. You’ll find the complete list below.

WordPress 7.0 is set to be released on April 9, 2026 at Contributor Day of WordCamp Asia.
The new release date is soon to be announced. (see Ventura’s announcement)

Of note, this release consists of features from the Gutenberg plugin version 22.0 – 22.6. Here are the release posts of those plugin releases: 22.0 |  22.1 |  22.2 | 22.3 | 22.4 | 22.5 | 22.6. Later Gutenberg releases contain bug fixes, backported to WordPress 7.0. release branches.

Important links:

• Planning for 7.0 + update on Beta 1
• WordPress 7.0 Development Cycle
• What’s new for developers: December, January, February, March
• 7.0 Field Guide

Assets 

In this Google Drive folder you can view all assets in this document.

Tags

To make this document easier to navigate based on specific audiences, the following tags are used liberally: 

• [end user]: end user focus. 
• [theme builder]: block or classic theme author. 
• [plugin author]: plugin author, whether block or otherwise.
• [developer]: catch-all term for more technical folks. 
• [site admin]: this includes a “builder” type. 
• [enterprise]: specific items that would be of interest to or particularly impact enterprise-level folks
• [all]: broad impact to every kind of WordPress user. 

How can you use these? Use your browser’s Find capability and search for the string including the brackets. Then use the arrows to navigate through the post from one result to the next.

Priority items for WordPress 7.0 

Real-Time Collaboration (RTC) ^{[enterprise][site admin]}

Multiple users can now work on the same page at the same time, seeing each other’s changes as they happen. No more “someone else is editing this” warnings. Whether you’re co-writing a post, reviewing a layout, or making last-minute edits before publishing, everyone stays in sync without leaving the editor.

It represents the biggest step toward achieving full collaborative editing, not only for newsrooms and big publishing houses. It also simplifies working on a site editing for agencies and their clients as well as designers and writers working together on a post.

A presence indicator in the editor header shows who’s currently editing. Under the hood, title, content, and excerpt now sync via Y.text for more granular conflict resolution, and numerous reliability fixes address disconnection handling, revision restores, and performance metrics. (75286, 75398, 75065, 75448, 75595).

You can enable the feature via Settings > Writing. Check the box next to Enable early access to real-time collaboration, in the Collaboration section.

The infrastructure implementation uses HTTP polling for universal compatibility,  CRDT (Conflict-free Replicated Data Type) update data is stored persistently in post_meta on a special internal wp_sync_storage post type (one per “room”/document).

The sync provider architecture is designed so that the storage and transport layer can be swapped out. Updates are batched and periodically compacted. WordPress code initially limits simultaneous collaborators to two to protect hosts. (64622).

Hosting companies have the option to add a different provider. There will be a wp-config constant that can be used to change the defaults. 

Introduces JavaScript filters to allow third party developers to slow down or speed up polling via the RTC client. (76518).

For more details, check out the Dev Note Real-Time Collaboration in the Block Editor.

Update:

Since October, WordPress VIP beta participants — spanning newsrooms, research institutions, and enterprise publishers — tested the real-time collaboration against live editorial workflows, reporting back what worked, what broke, and what they couldn’t live without. Their voices didn’t just validate the feature — they shaped it.

Matias Ventura explains why the WordPress 7.0 cycle is being extended by a few weeks: the real-time collaboration feature needs more time to nail its data architecture. After Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress, expressed a preference to revisit the proposed custom table for syncing presence and content changes, the team is refining the design before committing.

The proposal for custom table to keep a record of the changes to a post/page from each browser window, was discussed in the trac ticket (64696)

Plugin developers relying on metaboxes will want to take note — collaborative editing is disabled when metaboxes are present, making this cycle your window to migrate.

Navigation Overlays and more ^{[theme builder][plugin author] [site admin]}

Navigation blocks now have customizable overlays and give user full control over mobile hamburger menus. A prominent Create overlay button in the side bar guides you through the setup, providing a selection of patterns to achieve various designs for your overlay. WordPress 7.0 comes with multiple built-in patterns including centered navigation, accent backgrounds, and black backgrounds. New blocks default to “always” showing overlays. The Navigation block sidebar section also shows a preview of the selected overlay template parts. You can also access the list of Navigation Overlays via Appearance > Editor > Patterns > Template Parts.

• On GitHub you’ll find a list of all the Navigation Overlay enhancements.
• The dev note Customizable Navigation Overlays in WordPress 7.0 has everything you need to know.

To make it easier for users to create custom overlays for their mobile navigation, four new patterns are now available for the navigation overlay template parts:

• Overlay with black background
• Overlay with accent background
• Centered navigation with info
• Centered navigation

• Submenus: Always visible option: Users can now add navigation blocks to their overlays and toggle if they’d like to have the submenus always visible or not. (74653)
• Page Creation in Navigation: Create pages directly from the Navigation block with helpful Snackbar notices and improved parent page search using relevance matching (72627, 73836).

Treating patterns like a single block ^[all]

Get ready for a smoother, more intuitive experience when using patterns in WordPress 7.0. It’s becoming much easier to customize your site’s design sections with a simplified editing workflow and an improved content-focused mode. 

Users naturally stay in the safe lane without accidentally breaking designs. Agencies can hand off a site knowing clients can’t wreck the layout by default — they’d have to deliberately choose to go deeper.

What’s New for Patterns:

• Quick Content Edits: When you select a pattern, instead of seeing a list of individual blocks, you’ll see a clean, expanded inspector panel. This panel exposes all the editable text and image fields directly, organized for easy access.
• Content-Only Focus: Patterns will now default to a Content-Only editing mode. This simplifies the experience by letting you quickly fill in the content without seeing all the underlying design tools.
• Full Customization (If You Need It): If you do need to change the structure or design of a pattern, you can simply “detach” it. This gives you full access to all the individual blocks, just like before. Use the Edit Pattern button from the sidebar.
• A Unified Experience: This new approach makes patterns feel like single, smart design objects with easy-to-update attributes, whether you’re using a pattern, a design section, or a partially synced pattern.

Head over to the dev note Pattern Editing in WordPress 7.0 for the full picture. 

AI in WordPress ^{[enterprise][developers][site admin]}

WordPress 7.0 ships with a WP AI client API and a built-in Connectors screen — a centralized hub for managing all kinds of external service integrations, not just AI providers. Connect to OpenAI, Claude, or Gemini and WordPress automatically installs the right plugin and prompts you for your API key. Developers get a consistent framework to build on—enabling features like content generation, block building, and theme creation without reinventing the plumbing every time.

The new Connectors page also sports a shout-out to the AI Experiments plugin if users want to see AI features, like title, excerpt, or alt-text generation, in action.

But the real value of this Connectors API is broader: any plugin that needs to connect to an outside service via API keys or other credentials can tap into this standardized connection management system. Users get one place to maintain all their integrations. And plugin developer a standardized way to tap into the plumbing.

• Read the dev note Introducing the Connectors API in WordPress 7.0 for all the salient details.
• The Core AI team also published a Call for Testing: Community AI Connector Plugins.

Visual Revisions ^[all]

How revisions work for the block editor was completely reimagined. The visual Revisions screen keeps you in the editor the entire time, activating a subtle revision mode right where you work, eliminating the need to jump to a separate screen. A timeline slider in the header allows you to browse through different versions, seeing content updates in real-time.

The system highlights visual differences, showing added and removed text, formatting changes, and outlining modified blocks instead of raw code. For long documents, a mini-map along the scrollbar indicates where changes exist, letting you jump directly to them, and the sidebar remains useful with a summary of the changes for the current revision. To simplify reverting, the “Update” or “Publish” button is replaced by a “Restore” button when you are browsing the history (74742).

Yellow marks a changed section/block, in red you’ll find deletions and green are additions compared to the early version. 

Wes Theron has a short video on How to restore previous versions of a page or post in WordPress.

Anne McCarthy also gives a great walk through the screens on Youtube:

New Blocks

Breadcrumbs Block ^[all]

The new native Breadcrumbs block in WordPress 7.0 provides dynamic navigational trails for the Site Editor. It automatically generates paths from the homepage to the current page, adapting to context.

The block handles hierarchical pages (e.g., “Home / Services / Web Design / Portfolio”) and includes taxonomy for blog posts (e.g., “Home / Technology / Your Post Title”). Beyond simple pages, it correctly constructs paths for archive pages (category, tag, author, date), search results, and 404 errors. For Custom Post Types, it includes the post type archive in the trail.

The block offers alignment options (left, center, right, wide/full), as well as other block design options. Additional settings are available for showing the last item as text or a link and consistent homepage handling (72649).

The dev note Breadcrumb block filters has the details. 

Icon Block ^[all]

The new Icon block empowers users to add decorative icons from a curated collection to their content. It utilizes a new server-side SVG Icon Registration API, ensuring icon registry updates propagate without block validation errors. 

The initial release is limited as it doesn’t yet allow registering third-party icon collections. Extensibility for third-party icon registration is planned for future release in 7.1, following further development on the Icon registry API architecture. A REST endpoint at /wp/v2/icons supports searching and filtering. The initial set draws from the wordpress/icons package (71227, 72215, 75576).

Block Editor enhancements

Custom CSS for Individual Blocks ^{[enduser][site admin] [theme builder]}

Previously, applying custom CSS to a block instance required adding a custom class name and then writing a rule in the Site Editor’s global Custom CSS. This two-step process was complex for most users and inaccessible to content editors without Site Editor access.

A new custom CSS block support introduces a Custom CSS input to the Advanced panel within the block editor sidebar, conveniently placed next to the familiar “Additional CSS Class(es)” field. You only need to add the CSS declarations (no selectors!) If you do need to target nested elements, use the & symbol (for example, & a { color: red; }). This field is focused purely on styling and will reject any HTML input. The field is guarded by the edit_css capability to see and use this powerful new field. The editor automatically adds a has-custom-css class for styling consistency. #73959, #74969.

Dive into the dev note Custom CSS for Individual Block Instances for the complete rundown.

Control viewport-based block visibility ^[all]

When you’re editing a post or page, you can now choose to show or hide any block depending on the visitor’s screen size. Select a block, click Show in the toolbar, and pick which devices — desktop, tablet, or mobile — should display it. You can also hide a block from the document entirely through the same modal.

For the nitty-gritty, see the dev note Block Visibility in WordPress 7.0.

Anne McCarthy walks you through the feature:

Anchor support for dynamic blocks ^{[developer][plugin author]}

Dynamic blocks now support Anchor (id attribute) functionality. The anchor reference is consistently stored within the block comment delimiter, enabling dynamic rendering on the front end. (74183)

Paste color values in the color picker ^{[end user][theme builder] [site admin]}

Color pickers throughout the block styles sidebar, now offer support for pasting complete color values. You can now copy/paste the brand colors from a design document or website into the color picker box and don’t have to go through the process of selecting the right color and hue (73166).

Dimension support for width and height ^{[theme builder][site admin]}

WordPress 7.0 expands the Dimensions block supports system with three significant improvements: width and height are now available as standard block supports under dimensions, and themes can now define dimension size presets to give users a consistent set of size options across their site.

The Dev Note Dimensions Support Enhancements in WordPress 7.0 has the details for block.development and theme builders.

Email notifications for Notes ^[all]

Collaborators can now get notified when someone leaves a note on their content. No more checking back constantly (73645).

Block Attributions Groups in the sidebar ^[all]

The block editor sidebar is being reorganized to make controls easier to find. Block settings will be grouped into four clear sections: 

• Content (text, images, captions), 
• List (reordering and nesting for blocks like Lists and Social Icons), 
• Settings (block-specific options), and 
• Styles (typography, colors, spacing). 

This means you won’t need to hunt through toolbars or scattered panels — everything will live in a predictable place in the sidebar. Connected data sources will also appear directly next to the attributes they affect, so you can see at a glance what’s linked and where. It also means that for the transition a reordering of the sidebar and controls to be in different place than before. For instance. For an image block that includes the “Alt” text setting is now to be found in the content tab rather than the settings tab.  (73845)

Here’s an example of the implementation for Patterns:

Link Control validation ^{[end user] [site admin]}

The Link Control component in Gutenberg now validates the URLs, you enter helping to avoid broken links (73486).

Improved Blocks and Block handling

Pseudo Styles for Button Blocks ^{[theme builder][site admin]}

Theme designers and developers can now style button states (hover, focus, active, and focus visible) directly within the theme.json, making it much easier to keep all design controls centralized and consistent. This reduces the reliance on custom CSS for things like button hover states (71418).

{
    "styles": {
        "blocks":{
                "core/button":{
                    "color":{
                        "background":"blue"
                    },
                    ":hover":{
                        "color":{
                        "background":"green"
                        }
                    },
                    ":focus":{
                        "color":{
                        "background":"purple"
                        }
                    }
                }
            }
    }
}

{
    "styles": {
        "blocks":{
                "core/button":{
                    "color":{
                        "background":"blue"
                    },
                    ":hover":{
                        "color":{
                        "background":"green"
                        }
                    },
                    ":focus":{
                        "color":{
                        "background":"purple"
                        }
                    }
                }
            }
    }
}

More details are available in the Dev Note: Pseudo-element support for blocks and their variations in theme.json.

Extra divs removed from blocks in the editor ^{[theme builder][developer][site admin]}

WordPress 7.0 introduced a new HtmlRenderer component, which renders HTML content as React elements with optional wrapper props. For theme authors, this means that several blocks will no longer have an extra wrapping <div> in the editor, allowing for consistent styling with the front end (74228).

Blocks that have been fixed are:

• Archives
• Calendar
• Latest Comments
• RSS
• Tag Cloud

Universal Text Alignment ^[all]

Nearly all text blocks now support the standardized text-align block support system, including Paragraph, Button, Comment blocks, Heading, and Verse. Plus, text justify alignment is now available. See tracking issue to follow along on the progress (60763).

Cover Block Video Embeds ^{[site admin][end user]}

For the Cover block this release comes with the ability to use embedded videos (like YouTube or Vimeo) as background videos in the Cover block, rather than being restricted to locally uploaded files. Offloading video to 3rd-party services helps reduce hosting and bandwidth costs. Also, the focal pointer is now available for fixed background. (#73023, #74600).

Gallery Block 

Lightbox navigation ^{[site admin][end user]}

The Gallery block’s “Enlarge on click” lightbox now lets you navigate between images. When you click a gallery image, back/next buttons appear so you can browse through the rest of the gallery without closing the lightbox. Keyboard navigation (arrow keys) and screen reader announcements are fully supported. It also works with swiping on mobile, however the swiping isn’t yet visual/animated.  (62906) and lightbox items still miss captions.

Content Tab in sidebar ^{[site admin][end user]}

For fast access to Alt text box the sidebar of the Gallery block shows a new content tab in the sidebar. 

Responsive Grid Block ^{[site admin][end user][theme builder]}

The Grid block is now responsive even when you set a column count. Previously, you had to choose between setting a minimum column width (responsive, Auto mode) or a fixed column count (Manual mode)—a binary toggle that confused many users. Now you can set both: when you do, the column count becomes a maximum, and the grid scales down responsively based on your minimum column width. 

You can set neither, either, or both—the block handles all combinations gracefully. The confusing Auto/Manual toggle is gone entirely, replaced by clearer “minimum width” and “columns” labels with a plain-language description explaining the relationship between the two controls.. (73662)

Heading block variations ^{[site admin][end user]}

Each heading level (H1-H6) is now registered as a block variation on the Heading block. These do not appear in the inserter, but the change does add icons to the block’s sidebar for transforming it between variations (73823).

HTML Block Enhancement ^{[site admin] [themebuilder] [end user]}

The HTML block was redesigned to work now as a modal-based editor featuring separate tabs for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Admin can now use it for more powerful customizations, when HTML JS and CSS work on a single block. (73108).  

Image block inline editing and controls ^{[site admin][end user]}

WordPress 7.0 comes with a revamp of the image editing feature in the editor. It’s now easier to crop, rotate or zoom in on a particular image corner. (#72414) (#73277).

Advanced Image Controls ^{[site admin][end user]}

Image block now supports the focal point control and aspect ratio adjustments for wide and full alignments, plus reorganized inspector controls with a dedicated content tab. #73115, #74519, #74201

Math Block Improvements ^{[end users][site admin]}

LaTeX input now uses a monospaced font, and style options are available for better mathematical expression editing (72557, 73544).

Paragraph ^[all]

A new typography tool has been added for specifying the line indent of paragraph blocks (73114, 74889). Users and theme creators can specify line indentation rules for a single paragraph block and also at global styles / theme.json level for all paragraph blocks. For global styles and theme.json, it’s possible to choose whether all paragraphs or only subsequent paragraphs are indented, which accounts for different indentation standards around the world.

The dev note on the new textIndent block support has all the details for developers working on blocks or themes.

The example code sets a default indent value of 1.5em globally for paragraphs:

{
  "settings": {
    "typography": {
      "textIndent": "true"
    }
  },
  "styles": {
    "blocks": {
      "core/paragraph": {
        "typography": {
          "textIndent": "1.5em"
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

{
  "settings": {
    "typography": {
      "textIndent": "true"
    }
  },
  "styles": {
    "blocks": {
      "core/paragraph": {
        "typography": {
          "textIndent": "1.5em"
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

More details can be learned in the Dev Note: New Block Support: Text Indent (textIndent) 

Columns in Paragraph blocks ^[all]

Now that there is block support for typographical columns, the paragraph block can now handle text columns by default (74656).

On the front-end only, the Paragraph block now has a .wp-block-paragraph class. This change doesn’t affect global styles, which still use the p selector.(71207)

Query Loop Enhancements ^[all]

Query loops now support excluding terms. When the block is locked it now hides design change and choose pattern options. #73790, #74160

Verse Block, renamed to Poetry ^[all]

The Verse Block has been renamed to Poetry block (74722) Also it now utilizes border-box for its box-sizing, which guards against overflow issues and should make it easier to style without additional custom CSS.

Admin / Workflow updates 

Manage fonts for all themes in a dedicated page ^{[site admin][theme builder] [enterprise]}

A dedicated Fonts page is now available under the Appearance menu for all themes. Until now, font management has lived deep inside Global Styles, requiring navigation through several panels to install or preview a font. This new standalone page lets block theme users browse, install, and manage their typography collection in one dedicated space. 

Under the hood, this page is built on a new routing infrastructure for the Site Editor, designed to improve navigation and support new top-level pages in wp-admin. View transitions are now wired into this routing layer, providing early zoom/slide animations when navigating between pages (73630, 73876, 73586).

The Font Library and Global Styles also work with classic themes (#73971, #73876). Like the Media Library, you can access the Font Library as a modal or through a dedicated admin section—regardless of your theme type.

Command Palette in Adminbar ^[all]

Instantly access all the tools you need with a single click using the new Command Palette shortcut in the Omnibar! In 7.0 Beta 5, logged-in editors will see a field with a ⌘K or Ctrl+K symbol in the upper admin bar that unfurls the command palette when clicked. The new command palette entry point streamlines navigation and customization, giving you full control from anywhere on your site – whether you’re editing, designing or just browsing plugins.

View Transitions  ^[all]

View transitions have been integrated into the WordPress admin in 7.0, enabling smooth transitions between screens.  The implementation for the front end is slated for the next WordPress 7.1 (64470) The result is a smoother page-to-page transitions using the CSS View Transitions API — no markup or JavaScript changes required, just a progressive enhancement you’ll notice immediately when navigating between admin screens.

Improved screens across WP-Admin  ^[all]

WordPress 7.0 is getting a CSS-only “coat-of-paint” visual reskin of the wp-admin, bringing the classic admin screens closer to the visual language of the block and site editors — no markup changes, no JavaScript, no functional changes, and all existing CSS class names and admin color schemes preserved. (64308)

• New default color scheme: “Modern” replaces “Fresh” as the default admin color scheme (#64546)
• Updated buttons and input fields: primary, secondary, and link buttons, plus text inputs, selects, checkboxes, and radio buttons, now align with the WordPress Design System (#64547)
• Updated notices: info, warning, success, and error notices refreshed for clarity and consistency (#64548), including on the login screen
• Updated cards and metaboxes: dashboard widgets and metaboxes get modernized styling (#64549)
• New wp-base-styles stylesheet handle: consolidates admin color scheme CSS custom properties into a single reusable stylesheet, available across the admin and the block editor content iframe
• Login and registration screens: the WordPress logo updated from blue to gray to match the new design, and scheme styles now apply to login, install, database repair, and upgrade screens

Developer Goodies ^{[developer][enterprise]}

Client-side Abilities API

WordPress 7.0 ships a JavaScript counterpart to the server-side Abilities API introduced in 6.9. The Client-Side Abilities API arrives as two packages: @wordpress/abilities for pure state management usable in any project, and @wordpress/core-abilities, which auto-fetches server-registered abilities via the REST API. You can now register browser-only abilities — navigation, block insertion, and more — opening the door to browser agents, extensions, and WebMCP integrations directly in the client.

WP AI Client

WordPress 7.0 ships a built-in AI Client, that gives your plugin a single, provider-agnostic PHP entry point — wp_ai_client_prompt() — for text, image, speech, and video generation. You describe what you need; WordPress routes it to whichever AI provider the site owner has configured via Settings > Connectors. Official provider plugins cover Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI. No credential handling, no provider lock-in, and graceful feature detection before any UI is shown.

PHP-only block registration

Developers can now create simple blocks using only PHP. This is meant for blocks that only need server-side rendering and aren’t meant to be highly interactive. When possible this feature also auto-generates sidebars for user input for suitable attributes and design tools.

To do so, call register_block_type with the new autoRegister flag. A render_callback function must also be provided. (71792)

Dev note with all the details. PHP-only block registration

Pattern Overrides for custom blocks

Since WordPress 6.5, Pattern Overrides let you create synced patterns where the layout stays consistent but specific content can change per instance. The catch? Only four core blocks supported it: Heading, Paragraph, Button, and Image.

Not anymore. Any block attribute that supports Block Bindings now supports Pattern Overrides by default. Block authors can opt in through the server-side block_bindings_supported_attributes filter. This closes a long-requested enhancement and opens up synced patterns to custom blocks (73889).

DataViews, Data Form components and Fields API 

A substantial API update introduces new layouts, validation rules, grouping options, and picker improvements affecting plugins using wordpress/dataviews. The Dev Note has all the pertinent details: DataViews, DataForm, et al. in WordPress 7.0

UI Primitives and Components

The WordPress UI package just got a significant update, adding multiple new components and tools to help developers create more polished and accessible interfaces for WordPress users.

• A new dropdown menu for creating standardized select controls.
• A tooltip component for displaying helpful hints when users hover over elements.
• The building blocks for creating form fields with consistent styling and behavior.
• A component that hides content from visual display while keeping it accessible to assistive technologies.
• A standardized button component for creating consistent interactive elements.
• Building blocks for grouping related form controls together (fieldsets).
• A component for displaying icons consistently throughout your WordPress interface.
• A building block for creating consistent layouts around input fields with standardized appearance and functionality.

A list of all the dev notes can be reviewed from the Make Core blog

The second Release Candidate (“RC2”) for WordPress 7.0 is ready for download and testing!

This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it’s recommended that you evaluate RC2 on a test server and site.

Reaching this phase of the release cycle is an important milestone. While release candidates are considered ready for release, testing remains crucial to ensure that everything in WordPress 7.0 is the best it can be.

You can test WordPress 7.0 RC2 in four ways:

The scheduled final release date for WordPress 7.0 is April 9, 2026. The full release schedule can be found here. Your help testing Beta and RC versions is vital to making this release as stable and powerful as possible. Thank you to everyone who helps with testing!

Please continue checking the Make WordPress Core blog for 7.0-related posts in the coming weeks for more information.

What’s in WordPress 7.0 RC2?

What’s new in WordPress 7.0? Check out the Beta 1 announcement and 7.0 Developer Notes for details and highlights. For technical information related to issues addressed since RC1, you can browse the following links:

• GitHub commits since March 24, 2026
• Closed Trac tickets since March 24, 2026

How you can contribute

WordPress is open source software made possible by a passionate community of people collaborating on and contributing to its development. The resources below outline various ways you can help the world’s most popular open source web platform, regardless of your technical expertise.

Get involved in testing

Testing for issues is crucial to the development of any software. It’s also a meaningful way for anyone to contribute. 

Your help testing the WordPress 7.0 RC1 version is key to ensuring that the final release is the best it can be. While testing the upgrade process is essential, trying out new features is equally important. This detailed guide will walk you through testing features in WordPress 7.0. For those new to testing, follow this general testing guide for more details on getting set up.

What else to test:

• Real Time Collaboration
• Pattern Editing and content-only Interactivity

If you encounter an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums or directly to WordPress Trac if you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report.  You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs. 

Curious about testing releases in general?  Follow along with the testing initiatives in Make Core and join the #core-test channel on Making WordPress Slack.

Test on your hosting platforms

Web hosts provide vital infrastructure for supporting WordPress and its users. Testing on hosting systems helps inform the development process while ensuring that WordPress and hosting platforms are fully compatible, free of errors, optimized for the best possible user experience, and that updates roll out to customer sites without issue.

Want to test WordPress on your hosting system? Get started with configuring distributed hosting tests here.

Update your theme or plugin

For plugin and theme authors, your products play an integral role in extending the functionality and value of WordPress for all users.

Thanks for continuing to test your themes and plugins with the WordPress 7.0 beta releases. If you haven’t yet, make sure to conclude your testing and update the “Tested up to” version in your plugin’s readme file to 7.0.

If you find compatibility issues, please post detailed information to the support forum.

Help translate WordPress

Do you speak a language other than English? ¿Español? Français? Русский? 日本語? हिन्दी? বাংলা? मराठी? ಕನ್ನಡ?  You can help translate WordPress into more than 100 languages. This release milestone (RC2) also marks the hard string freeze point of the 7.0 release cycle.

An RC2 haiku

At first just a dream,

RC2 flows like a stream

with seven-oh gleam.

Props to @amykamala @annezazu for proofreading and review.

Over 10 years ago, we introduced the oEmbed API to WordPress, expanding how WordPress handled embedding to cover all WordPress sites. It was an intentional decision to focus on oEmbed at the time: we wanted to focus on the embedding mechanism that would give site owners maximum control over what their embeds looked like. The code we wrote back then still runs on tens of millions of WordPress sites every day.

There was something extra that continued to bug me, however. What about all the other sites? oEmbed provides rich embed experiences, but not every site needs that. Sometimes, you just need a card with an image and a description, which is where OpenGraph has similarly stood the test of time. It provides a straightforward method for both site owners to create simple, rich embeds, and for service providers like Slack, Discord, or even Apple Messages to safely create a rich card to place alongside links.

WordPress has grown since then, too. The big change is Gutenberg, of course, which really brought forward the idea that the editor should be a rich content experience, that shouldn’t just be reserved for the front end.

With that in mind, I build a plugin to handle embedding all the other sites.

This is a block plugin that tries to avoid you using the block it provides if at all possible! Instead, it hooks into the end of the Embed block rendering process – if the URL you pasted couldn’t be embedded all the normal ways, this plugin will try a few more fall back options: OpenGraph, Twitter Card tags, or even just a plain description in the meta tags. It’s the kind of plugin that you can install, and never have to think about again.

One of the nicest things about WordPress is how pluggable it is. Even as a long time WordPress Core developer, I don’t think everything needs to land in Core, sometimes a feature can live as handy little plugin. If you like everything just magically embedding, give this plugin a try!

I’m in NYC for the Stephan Wolfram dev/ai/nyc conversation tomorrow at the Automattic Noho space. While walking back from the Apple Store in Soho where I had picked up a new Studio Display XDR to try out, ran into one of my favorite YouTube accounts to follow right now, Ari at Home! I ran into him around 32 minutes into this Twitch stream. Here’s how he set up his rig.

A video I’ve shared with friends recently is when Harry Mack ran into Ari, which was fun for me because they’re two of my favorite accounts to follow. Sorry I didn’t freestyle! I had to get back to do some work, which is why I got the monitor.

In other cool X/Twitter news, they launched an awesome feature today that lets you restrict replies not just to people you follow, but to people they follow as well. Nikita gave a hat tip to the conversation I had with Peter Levels / @levelsio.

When WP Engine acquired WPackagist on March 12, the WordPress developer community faced a familiar question: what happens when critical open source infrastructure ends up under corporate control? The community already had an answer in progress. Four days later, WP Packages (formerly WP Composer) launched as a fully independent, community-funded alternative, with some neat additional features.

Built by Ben Words from Roots, the team behind Bedrock, Sage, and Trellis, WP Packages is a new open source Composer repository for WordPress plugins and themes. Composer is PHP’s dependency manager, and it is how many professional WordPress developers install and update plugins and themes in their projects. Every free plugin and theme in the WordPress.org directory is available through WP Packages. Migrating from WPackagist can be done via a single script or a few terminal commands.

What Happened and Why It Matters

WPackagist was created in 2013 by Outlandish, a UK-based digital cooperative, and it served the WordPress Composer ecosystem for over a decade. In its later years the project suffered from deferred maintenance, slow update cycles, and little to no community input. When WP Engine announced the acquisition, developers raised immediate concerns about a private-equity-backed corporation controlling infrastructure this foundational to the WordPress developer workflow. WP Engine immediately updated the Composer info field to display a “WPackagist is now maintained by WP Engine” notice in every developer’s terminal. A small thing, but telling. That’s how corporate ownership changes the relationship between a tool and its users.

Ben had already started building a WPackagist replacement last August, long before the acquisition made headlines. When WP Engine’s deal landed, he accelerated the launch, going live on March 16 with a fully open source repository on GitHub.

Open source repo ≠ transparent system. WP Packages makes everything public, including infrastructure and build process. – Ben Word on X

It’s also just a better tool. WP Packages supports Composer v2’s metadata-url protocol, which lets Composer fetch metadata only for the packages a project actually needs. WPackagist still relies on the older provider-includes approach, forcing Composer to download large index files before resolving dependencies. Cold dependency resolves on WP Packages are roughly 17x faster: 0.7 seconds for 10 plugins compared to 12.3 seconds on WPackagist.

WP Packages also uses CDN caching with public cache headers and serves immutable, content-addressed per-package files. Package naming is cleaner (wp-plugin/ and wp-theme/ instead of wpackagist-plugin/ and wpackagist-theme/), metadata includes plugin and theme authors, descriptions, and homepage URLs that WPackagist has been missing for years, and updates sync every five minutes rather than WPackagist’s roughly 90-minute cycle.

How to Switch

Switching from WPackagist to WP Packages requires just a few terminal commands.

1. Remove your existing WPackagist packages:

composer remove wpackagist-theme/twentytwentyfive

2. Remove the WPackagist repository and add WP Packages:

composer config --unset repositories.wpackagist && composer config repositories.wp-composer composer https://repo.wp-packages.org

3. Require packages with the new naming:

composer require wp-theme/twentytwentyfive

Alternatively, use the migration script to automatically update your composer.json:

curl -sO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/roots/wp-packages/main/scripts/migrate-from-wpackagist.sh && bash migrate-from-wpackagist.sh

Roots also provides a WP Packages Changelog Action for GitHub workflows that tracks dependency updates using the new naming format. Projects using Bedrock already ship with WP Packages configured out of the box.

Open Source Wins

The entire WP Packages project is public. The application code, documentation, and even the full Ansible deployment configuration are available on GitHub. Anyone can fork the repository and run their own WordPress Composer registry. Ben has also committed publicly that WP Packages will never use the Composer info field to push messages, ads, or upsells into developer terminals. That kind of restraint is easier to promise when a project answers to its community rather than to a corporate parent.

WP Packages is funded through GitHub Sponsors. Current sponsors include Carrot, Kinsta, WordPress.com, and Itineris. The WordPress ecosystem has always been at its strongest when the community builds the tools it needs in the open. Ben saw a gap forming months before anyone else was paying attention, built something better than what existed, and released it for everyone. No acquisition required. No boardroom decisions about availability or pricing. Just developers solving a problem for other developers and sharing the result. Open source wins.

On the podcast today we have Zach Stepek.

Zach is what you might call a ‘unicorn’ in the tech world, having held roles in design, development, and much more. His experience spans everything from ColdFusion and Flash, to JavaScript, WordPress, and WooCommerce. He’s worked with brands like IBM and MTV, in varied industries from medical records to e-commerce, and has spoken at WordCamps, WooConf, and contributed to the WordPress community through both agencies and product companies.

You might know about WordPress, agencies, product companies, and hosting, but might not have thought about how partnerships actually work in this ecosystem, or why they matter right now. Zach is here to explain just that.

He starts off by sharing his journey into WordPress, his early challenges, and how an unexpected ‘viral’ moment led him deeper into the ecosystem. He describes the three interconnected pillars of WordPress success: agencies (or individuals), product companies (think plugins, themes), and hosting / infrastructure, and how each depends on the other to thrive.

We discuss the current state of partnerships, how companies collaborate, why trust and values-driven approaches are essential, and why the rapid rise of ROI-driven, transactional thinking is at odds with WordPress’ open source roots. Zach explores the perils of short-term wins and the value of nurturing long-term, mutually beneficial relationships, especially as economic uncertainty and changes in the broader world are beginning to reshape how companies interact.

Then we talk about the challenges faced by hosting companies, the role of product companies in innovation, and how agencies often bridge these worlds. Zach makes the case for cultivating relationship equity, not just revenue, and how a rising tide can lift all boats if the community keeps its collective focus.

Towards the end we discuss how the landscape has changed, why community contributions matter more than ever, and what the future might hold as WordPress partnerships reach an inflection point.

If you’re curious about how these invisible partnership threads bind the WordPress ecosystem together, and how true partnership drives success, this episode is for you.

Useful links

ElasticPress

Theme Switcher Pro

Mighty Swarm

zachstepek.com

Zach on X

Zach on LinkedIn