The term “block theme” is used a lot in WordPress but it was never really clear to me what that meant exactly from a code point of view.
While researching The post editor is going full iframe: what block developers need to know before WordPress 7.1, I learned that the outcome of testing WordPress 7.1 Beta 1 may soften the plan: instead of forcing the iframe for everyone, core might force it only for block themes, while classic themes using blocks with apiVersion 2 or lower keep the current 7.0 behavior. (The linked article covers the 7.0 state of things in full.)
If that’s the split, then the exact definition of “block theme” suddenly matters a great deal. So what does core actually check?
The public API is wp_is_block_theme(), which just asks the active theme:
A theme is a “block theme” if it ships an index.html block template, either in templates/, or in block-templates/, the pre-5.9 legacy location. Nothing else is consulted. That has a few consequences that may surprise people:
theme.json doesn’t make you a block theme. Neither do patterns, block template parts, or add_theme_support( 'block-templates' ). A theme can adopt every one of those “hybrid” features and still land on the classic side of this check, because the test only looks for a top-level index.html template.
Child themes inherit the answer.get_file_path() looks in the child theme first and falls back to the parent, so a child theme of a block theme is a block theme even if the child ships no templates of its own.
It’s a filesystem check, not a declaration. There’s no header in style.css that opts you in or out. Drop a templates/index.html into a theme and, as far as WordPress is concerned, it is a block theme.
The minimum files required for block and classic themes
This is the entire minimum viable block theme — two files:
Markdown
my-block-theme/├── style.css ← standard theme header└── templates/ └── index.html ← this file IS the decider
(WordPress considers a theme valid if it has style.css plus eitherindex.php or templates/index.html, which means for a block theme, index.php, functions.php, and even theme.json are all optional.)
And this is a theme that is guaranteed to stay classic:
Markdown
my-classic-theme/├── style.css└── index.php ← the classic fallback template
Staying on the classic side of the check comes down to two conditions:
Notemplates/index.htmland no legacyblock-templates/index.html. Other block templates don’t matter: a theme with `templates/single.html` but no `templates/index.html` still tests as classic. (In practice, though, if you’re shipping block templates, ship the index and be a block theme on purpose.)
No block-theme parent. The check falls back to the parent theme, so a child of Twenty Twenty-Five is a block theme no matter what the child contains. To be classic, the whole chain has to be.
Everything else is fair game. theme.json, patterns, add_theme_support( 'block-template-parts' )` custom templates registered from plugins — none of them flip the switch., patterns, add_theme_support( 'block-template-parts' ), custom templates registered from plugins: none of them flip the switch.
Where real themes land
Running that check against some current releases from the theme directory
Six of the themes in the first column ship theme.json, the marquee “block” feature, and still test classic, because the check never looks at theme.json
Twenty Twenty and OceanWP are another good gotcha: both ship a templates/ directory and are still classic, because it’s full of PHP page templates (template-cover.php, landing.php). The check wants templates/index.html specifically, so “does it have a templates folder” is not the indicator you might assume.
How the editor reads it
On the JavaScript side, the block-theme flag surfaces in two different places, which is worth knowing if you go source-diving.
For all the weight the term carries, “block theme” boils down to a single file: templates/index.html exists, or it doesn’t. Not theme.json, not patterns, not any amount of hybrid adoption. Just one index template, checked up the parent chain.
That’s worth keeping in mind if 7.1 does end up drawing the iframe line at wp_is_block_theme(). A hybrid theme that has adopted everything except block templates would keep the classic editor behavior, while adding a single templates/index.html (even accidentally, even in a parent theme you don’t control) would flip a site to the forced iframe. If your theme or your users’ sites sit anywhere near that line, now is a good time to check which side of it you’re actually on: it’s one is_file() call away.
What a week! WordPress 7.1 Beta 1 (and Beta 2) arrived with a huge array of updates. We’ll unpack them together over the next four weeks, right up to the final release on August 19, 2026.
One thing shouldn’t wait, though: the security release WordPress 7.0.2. Go update your production sites now — this newsletter will still be here when you’re back.
In this edition, you’ll also find the first speaker lineup for WordCamp US, a fourth page-builder migration story, WooCommerce 11.0 on the horizon, and plenty of block development goodness: from iframed editors to on-brand maintenance pages.
Grab your favorite Saturday beverage and dig in.
Yours, Birgit
WordCamp US 2026: Four Tracks, Three Workshops, 33 Speakers
The first wave of WCUS 2026 speakers is live — and it reads like a who’s-who of WordPress in practice.
WordCamp US just published its opening lineup for August 16–19 in Phoenix: 34 confirmed speakers so far, including K Adam White, Brian Coords, Jamie Marsland, Kathy Zant, Miriam Schwab, and Robert Abela, all experienced developers, educators, security specialists, community builders.
The program runs four tracks.
AI in Action leads with sessions on agentic workflows, AI search, and guardrails for AI-assisted development.
Honing Your Skills covers the practical side: maintenance, privacy compliance, creator commerce, security.
Technical WordPress digs into block migrations at scale, WP-CLI automation, and plugin pipelines.
Beginning WP101 is the on-ramp for newcomers — or for clients you’re bringing along.
Three hands-on workshops round out the program, where you build something real in the room and leave with it.
The full session schedule isn’t out yet, but the speaker list alone is a useful signal. If someone on that page is a voice you follow, a tool you depend on, or a corner of WordPress you’re actively navigating, you now have a specific reason to be in the room.
WordPress 7.1 Beta 1 was release on July 15, 2026. is now available for testing. The release post offers instructions how to sent up a test side and shows an extensive list of new features.
The security team released WordPress 7.0.2 with the urgent appeal to update right away. The security fixes were also backported in 6.9.5 and 6.8.6.
The security fix was also included in WordPress 7.1 Beta 2, so testing sites are also protected during this release cycle.
Huzaifa Al Mesbah, from the Core Test team, published the accompanying Help Test WordPress 7.1 post.
A few WordPress 7.1 Dev Notes are already available:
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
In about 10 days, WooCommerce 11.0 release is schedule. Brain Coords has the skinny for you in what’s coming for developers in WooCommerce. Performance leads the release with 28 PRs — product object caching becomes the default for new stores, speeding up variable products by 9–12%. You’ll also find email verification connecting guest orders to accounts, new phone validation hooks, video embeds in the block email editor, and the final removal of the Product Editor beta. The beta is ready for your testing now.
Jamie Marsland followed his instincts and build Jamie’s Front-End Editor for Content Teams, a plugin that lets your editors click any paragraph or heading on the live page and start typing — no block editor required. With the latest updates, you can now edit text, links, buttons and images right on the live page. No wp-admin, no block editor, just click and change it in place.
Built on the Interactivity API with no build step, it preserves block markup on save, records edits as native block notes for an audit trail, and lets you restrict chosen roles to front-end-only editing. Let Marsland what you think.
Last week, I shared three migration stories from page builders to the Core block editor and block themes. Here’s a fourth perspective: The team at WP Expert, an Ottawa agency founded by Frederic Sune, put together a comprehensive post on migrating agency sites from page builders to Gutenberg, should you go on that journey, too. You’ll find the strategic arguments (better Core Web Vitals, smaller attack surface, less technical debt) alongside a practical playbook covering backups, staging, block theme selection, pattern development, and SEO safeguards. The post also explores what block-based architectures mean for an agency’s business model, from premium modernization packages to fewer layout-related support tickets. An FAQ rounds it out.
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
Brian Coords tackles a common WooCommerce pain point: custom product templates for block themes. He combines two core WordPress features — the plugin template registration API from 6.7 and the venerable single_template_hierarchy filter — to serve custom templates for product collections, like all products in a category. His example plugin falls back to your Single Product template unless you override it. Clone the repo and give it a try; custom Product fields are next on his list.
On the WordPress Developer Blog, Troy Chaplin shows you how to build an on-brand maintenance mode for block themes. You add one small hook to your theme’s functions.php once, then design and manage the maintenance page entirely in the Site Editor with full access to your Global Styles. Renaming or deleting the template toggles maintenance mode on and off, no code needed. An SEO-friendly variant adds 503 headers so crawlers know the downtime is temporary.
“Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2026” A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test, and Meta team from Jan. 2024 on. Updated by yours truly.
On WP Mayor, Jean Galea untangles when to reach for WP-CLI, the REST API, or the Abilities API. His mental model: they’re layers, not rivals. WP-CLI lives on the server for bulk work, REST serves off-server callers like headless front ends, and the Abilities API tells AI agents what they’re allowed to do, complete with schemas and permission checks. Galea also shares how his own sites lean on all three at once.
Get up to speed how to make your custom blocks plugin work in the iframed post editor, if you haven’t yet. After five years of ruminating and communicating the switch is coming to WordPress 7.1. In his post, Ryan Welcher explains why the post editor is going full iframe in WordPress 7.1 and what that means for your custom blocks. You’ll find the fixes for the most common breakage — global window and document references, editor styles enqueued into the wrong document, stale admin-scoped CSS, and third-party libraries — plus a companion demo plugin with broken/fixed block pairs, Playground blueprints for testing both states, and a handy pre-flight checklist.
The video volunteers at WordCamp Portugal uploaded all recordings to WordPressTV and two of the talks caught my eye:
Imran Sayed walks you through the fastest way to build Gutenberg blocks with modern tools, scripts, and AI. If custom block development has felt complex or time-consuming, you’ll appreciate his focus on practical, real-world workflows you can adopt immediately — moving fast without over-engineering. The recording is available on WordPress.tv, and the presentation slides are linked below the video for easy reference.
Jorge Costa shows you how to use the AI building blocks already shipped in WordPress core (the WP AI Client, the Abilities API, and the MCP adapter) to bring AI-powered features into your own plugins, themes, and sites. He also tackles the bigger question: when agents can spin up entire projects on any stack, why is WordPress still the right bet? Slides are linked alongside the recording.
Check out the not so new any more Talk Devy to Me series on Ryan Welchers YouTube Channel! In the latest epsiode, Antonio Sejasdemos Studio Code, the agentic AI assistant built into WordPress Studio’s desktop app and CLI. You can spin up sites, run performance audits, add content, and install plugins and themes through natural language conversation — all locally, so nothing you break goes public. Sejas explains how it works under the hood before building something live with the host. Studio Code is free while in beta, so now’s a good time to experiment.
If you rather want to read about the updates in WordPress Studio, Fredrik Rombach Ekelund shares three big updates to WordPress Studio: a new default Native PHP runtime makes your local sites load 30–50% faster while using a third of the memory, the Studio CLI now installs with one dependency-free command — no Node.js or npm required — and Claude Sonnet 5 is the new default model in Studio Code, improving multi-step work like tracing bugs across files. A Sandbox runtime remains available for testing untrusted code.
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 years, the post editor has lived a double life. The Site Editor renders your blocks inside an iframe. The post editor — where most people actually spend their time — renders them directly in the admin page. That split ends with WordPress 7.1: the post editor canvas will always be an iframe, on every theme, no matter what apiVersion your blocks declare. The Gutenberg plugin has been enforcing exactly this for months. If you ship blocks, assume the iframe.
If your block never touches the global document or window, you can probably stop reading after you’ve changed "apiVersion": 2 to "apiVersion": 3 in block.json. For everyone else — and especially anyone shipping blocks that wrap third-party libraries — the iframe changes where your code runs versus where your markup lives. That gap is where things break.
Console warning (with SCRIPT_DEBUG) when a block registers with apiVersion 2 or lower. The block.json schema now only validates apiVersion: 3.
WordPress 7.0 (Apr 2026)
The iframe decision now looks at blocks actually inserted in the post, not every registered block. All inserted blocks on v3+ → canvas is iframed. Insert a single v1/v2 block → the iframe is removed on the fly. Nothing is enforced yet.
Gutenberg 22.6+
The iframe is enforced regardless of theme — this is the feedback-gathering phase.
WordPress 7.1 (Aug 19, 2026)
The iframe is enforced on every theme, regardless of apiVersion. The conditions are gone, not tightened.
The WordPress 7.0 change is subtle but important: before 7.0, one apiVersion: 2 block registered by any active plugin — even one never used in the post — kept the entire editor out of the iframe for everyone. Now only inserted blocks count. Your v3 block gets the iframe until the user inserts a legacy one, at which point the editor quietly reloads the canvas without the iframe. The companion plugin ships a legacy-api-v2 block so you can watch this happen — insert it into an otherwise-v3 post and the iframe disappears. In 7.1, that escape hatch closes.
Worth knowing, as an aside: the “every theme” decision landed in WordPress 7.1 Beta 1, and it’s deliberately being tested in public. Gutenberg merged “Post editor: always iframe” (#74042) on July 10, 2026, deleting the theme and apiVersion conditions outright. The 7.1 release lead signed off on that merge on the condition that the team could “move to the softer approach” if Beta 1 feedback surfaced real problems — the softer approach being enforcement on block themes only, with everything else staying on the 7.0 rules. No specific mechanism is committed to; the plan is to respond to what the beta actually turns up.
Which is a reason to test harder, not to wait and see. If that rollback happens, the iframed and non-iframed editors both stay in the wild longer — and your block has to work in both regardless of which way it goes.
It’s also worth noting that blocks that will break with the 7.1 changes are most likely already breaking in the Site Editor.
Why the iframe is a good thing
This isn’t change for change sake. Rendering the canvas in an iframe gives the editor a real document boundary:
Admin CSS stops leaking into your content. No more #wpadminbar-adjacent style resets, no more admin styles subtly changing how blocks render in the editor versus the front end.
Viewport units and media queries finally work.vw, vh, and @media rules resolve against the canvas, not the admin page — so tablet/mobile previews and zoomed-out views actually behave like the front end.
What you see is much closer to what you get. The canvas document is built from your theme’s styles, not the admin’s.
The issue this raises for block developers? Your editor JavaScript runs in the admin page, but your block’s DOM lives in a different document. Every assumption baked into document.querySelector(...) and window.addEventListener(...) just became wrong.
What actually breaks (and how to fix it)
Everything below is demonstrable with the companion plugin — each pattern ships as a broken/fixed pair of blocks: iframe-editor-examples on GitHub.
1. Global window and document references
The classic: a block that reads the viewport or listens for resize.
Editor scripts load in the admin page, so window is the admin window. In the iframed editor this reports the wrong width and never reacts to the canvas resizing — switch to the Tablet preview and the number doesn’t move.
The fix is to derive the document and window from your block’s own DOM element:
element.ownerDocument is whatever document the block is rendered into — the iframe’s document when iframed, the admin document when not. ownerDocument.defaultView is that document’s window. Code written this way is context-agnostic: it doesn’t care whether the iframe exists.
useRefEffect (from @wordpress/compose) instead of useRef + useEffect: it re-runs the callback when the ref changes, so if the block ever moves between documents, your listeners re-attach to the right window.
2. “Close on outside click” and other document-level events
This one is my favorite because it fails weirdly. A dropdown that closes when you click outside, implemented the way every React tutorial teaches it:
In the iframed editor, clicks inside the canvas happen in the iframe’s document. They never bubble to the admin document, so the listener never fires. The result: click another block in the canvas and the dropdown stays open — but click the admin sidebar and it closes. Same code, same block, works perfectly in the non-iframed editor. This is the kind of bug report you’ll get from users that “can’t be reproduced” — because whoever tested it happened to have a v2 block sitting in their post, which quietly dropped the iframe and made everything work.
If you’re styling your block’s editor experience with enqueue_block_editor_assets, those styles load in the admin page — outside the iframe. They silently stop applying the moment the canvas is iframed:
PHP
// ❌ Loads in the admin page — never reaches the iframed canvas.functionmyplugin_enqueue_editor_styles() {wp_enqueue_style( 'myplugin-editor', plugins_url( 'editor.css', __FILE__ ) );}add_action( 'enqueue_block_editor_assets', 'myplugin_enqueue_editor_styles' );
The fix is to register editor styles through block.json, which WordPress injects into the canvas document, iframed or not:
JSON
{"editorStyle": "file:./index.css"}
(add_editor_style() also gets copied into the iframe, if you need theme-level editor styles.)
The demo plugin makes this visual: the same block carries a green banner from editorStyle and a red banner from enqueue_block_editor_assets. Count the banners — two means no iframe, one means you’re iframed.
4. Stale CSS written for the leaky editor
The section above is about CSS loading into the wrong document. This one is the sneakier inverse: the stylesheet loads into the right document — injected straight into the canvas, exactly as intended — and still gets it wrong, because of what it was written to describe. These are the rules that quietly stop matching, or start over-matching, once the canvas becomes its own document. It’s the code that’s been sitting in themes and plugins for years, “working,” right up until the iframe is enforced.
Selectors keyed on admin body classes
The most common one, and it fails exactly like the “close on outside click” bug — silently.
CSS
/* ❌ The canvas body no longer carries these classes */.wp-admin.my-block { padding: 2rem; }body.block-editor-page.my-block__title { font-size: 2rem; }
Inside the iframe, the canvas <body> is a clean document — no wp-admin, no block-editor-page. The selector matches nothing and your editor styling just evaporates. Same block, same stylesheet, works perfectly in the non-iframed editor.
CSS
/* ✅ Scope to the block, not the admin chrome */.my-block { padding: 2rem; }.my-block__title { font-size: 2rem; }
.editor-styles-wrapperdoes still wrap the canvas content inside the iframe, so .editor-styles-wrapper .my-block keeps working if you need genuinely editor-only styling — but the admin ancestor was almost never necessary in the first place.
Offsets that compensate for admin chrome
CSS
/* ❌ Subtracting the admin sidebar and adminbar from the viewport */.my-fullwidth { width: calc( 100vw - 160px ); } /* 160px = admin menu */.my-toolbar { position: fixed; top: 32px; } /* 32px = #wpadminbar */
This is the flip side of the win from earlier: now that 100vw resolves against the canvas instead of the admin page, there’s no sidebar to subtract — so the calc() overshoots, and top: 32px pushes your toolbar below an admin bar that doesn’t exist in this document.
CSS
/* ✅ The canvas is the viewport now — no compensation needed */.my-fullwidth { width: 100vw; }.my-toolbar { position: fixed; top: 0; }
Specificity walls built to fight leakage
CSS
/* ❌ Cranked up to beat leaking admin styles */.editor-styles-wrapper.my-blockp {font-family: Georgia, serif!important;line-height: 1.6!important;box-sizing: border-box!important;}
The iframe already stops admin CSS from leaking in — that’s one of the reasons it’s a good thing. These !importants and resets have no admin styles left to override, but they do now override the theme styles the iframe loads into the canvas. The result: your editor preview drifts away from the front end — the exact opposite of what the iframe is for.
CSS
/* ✅ Let theme styles through; set only what your block truly owns */.my-blockp { font-family: Georgia, serif; }
Two things to notice:
The pattern is the same as the JavaScript fixes: stop describing the admin, start describing your block. A selector that names .wp-admin, #wpadminbar, or .block-editor-page is reaching for chrome that isn’t in the canvas document anymore.
Most of these were workarounds for problems the iframe solves. Deleting them is usually the fix.
5. Third-party libraries that assume one global context
The biggest real-world hazard. Masonry layouts, sliders, lightboxes, maps — a generation of libraries was written assuming there is exactly one document:
JavaScript
// Inside some-legacy-lib.jsconsttargets = document.querySelectorAll( selector ); // finds nothing in the iframe
Your block calls the library, the library queries the admin document, finds zero matches, and silently does nothing. No error, no warning — the block just stops being enhanced.
Your options, in order of preference:
Pass elements, not selectors. If the library accepts an element (lib.init( element )), hand it the block’s element from useRefEffect and you’re usually fine.
Patch the library. For unmaintained dependencies, patch-package is the pragmatic answer: edit the module in node_modules to resolve document/window from the element (node.ownerDocument), run npx patch-package <pkg>, commit the patch, add a postinstall script. The official migration guide walks through a real patch for @panzoom/panzoom.
Guard and bail. If the library is loaded inside the iframe (front-end scripts are), check for it on defaultView before using it: if ( ! defaultView.jQuery ) return;
So what does apiVersion: 3 actually do?
Less than you might think — and that’s the point. Declaring "apiVersion": 3 in block.json doesn’t change how your block renders; it’s a signal that your block is iframe-ready. All core blocks have been on v3 since WordPress 6.3. For most blocks the migration is literally a one-line change… followed by the actual work: testing that nothing in your edit component (or the libraries it pulls in) touches the global document/window.
And to be clear about 7.1: the iframe will be enforced there regardless of apiVersion. Staying on v2 doesn’t opt you out anymore — it just means you get the console warning and the breakage.
How to test today
You don’t need to wait for 7.1. What you’re testing is that your block works in both states — iframed and not — because both will exist in the wild for a while yet.
Iframed: install the Gutenberg plugin 22.6+. It enforces the iframe regardless of theme, so this is the fastest way to live in the future. 7.1 Beta 1does the same — I’ve confirmed it forces the iframe on a classic theme, which is the merged behavior shipping in August.
Not iframed: run WordPress 7.0 without the plugin and insert a v1/v2 block alongside yours — the canvas drops the iframe on the fly. The companion plugin’s legacy-api-v2 block exists for exactly this. Any theme will do: core 7.0 has no theme check in the iframe decision at all, so you don’t need to hunt down a classic theme to reproduce this.
Confirm which state you’re in:element.ownerDocument !== document, or look for iframe[name="editor-canvas"] in devtools.
The Site Editor has been iframed for years — if your block already behaves there, you’re most of the way home.
The companion plugin ships a wp-env setup, an example override file that adds Gutenberg for enforced mode (copy it to .wp-env.override.json), and two Playground blueprints — one per state, so you can flip between iframed and not in two tabs without installing anything.
The block author’s checklist
Set "apiVersion": 3 in every block.json.
Check your editor code for window. and document. — every hit is a suspect. Replace with element.ownerDocument / .defaultView via useRefEffect.
Check for enqueue_block_editor_assets — move canvas-affecting styles to editorStyle in block.json.
Check your editor CSS for .wp-admin, #wpadminbar, and .block-editor-page , admin chrome offsets and !important
Audit third-party libraries: pass elements not selectors, patch what you must.
Test both states, not both themes: iframed (Gutenberg 22.6+ active) and not iframed (no plugin, v1/v2 block inserted).
Watch the console with SCRIPT_DEBUG on — the deprecation warnings tell you which registered blocks are still on v1/v2.
Note What’s not on that list: checking whether the active theme is a block theme. Core exposes that answer twice — as __unstableIsBlockBasedTheme in the editor settings and as is_block_theme on the REST themes endpoint — and there’s a shelved PR and a live debate behind it. Your block never needs to ask. element.ownerDocument !== document answers the only version of the question that affects you. If you’re curious what that theme check does under the hood, that’s its own story: How WordPress decides a Theme is a “Block theme”.
In episode 132 of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast, host Birgit Pauli-Haack and guest Ellen Bauer explore the latest updates within the WordPress ecosystem. The conversation centers on the releases of Gutenberg 23.4 and 23.5, the recent WordPress 7.0.1 maintenance update, and the strategic roadmap for the upcoming WordPress 7.1.A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to major merge proposals destined for WordPress 7.1 that aim to evolve the core software.
These include “Core Abilities” for AI agent integration, the new “Knowledge” post type for managing site standards and guidelines, and “Design System Theming” to enhance consistency and accessibility via CSS custom properties. The hosts also discuss the shift toward mandatory iframing for the post editor in block-based themes, a critical architectural change designed to improve content rendering.Beyond core architecture, the episode highlights user-focused improvements such as enhanced responsive editing controls, which now allow for granular canvas resizing without preset limits. They also touch on media-related updates, including aspect ratio controls in the media editor, and improvements to the Icon block.
With WordPress 7.1’s Beta 1 approaching, Birgit and Ellen emphasize the importance of community involvement, encouraging developers and site owners to participate in ongoing “Call for Testing” efforts. Whether discussing React 19 status or new grid layout properties, the episode serves as a comprehensive briefing for anyone looking to stay current with the rapidly changing landscape of the block editor and WordPress core development.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Welcome to our 132nd episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. In today’s episode, we will talk about proposals for core, calls for testing Gutenberg 23.4, Gutenberg 23.5, and whatever side ideas we have about 7.1, which is in the works. I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and a full time core contributor for the WordPress open source project sponsored by Automattic. With me today on the show, and I’m very delighted to tell you that is Ellen Bauer, product manager at WordPress.com and early adopter of block themes. Thank you for joining me, Ellen. How are you today?
Ellen Bauer: Thank you very much. Always happy to be here. I’m great. I just landed back in Bangkok this week where we are. I’m staying here a little bit longer with my family this year from Germany, visiting family and attending a meetup. And yeah, it’s good to kind of do that travel because it always inspires me to get out of a routine. And yeah, I’m really glad I’m here now and motivated.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Ellen Bauer: To get back into working, improving WordPress.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s a great time to spend in Germany. And I hope you had luck with the weather.
Ellen Bauer: Well, there was this heat wave in the second week. It completely knocked me out, to be honest.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that was really hard. And a lot of people say that.
Ellen Bauer: It was great and went on the last day I went to Legoland for the first time, which was also an experience and exhausting, but great.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s here between Munich and Augsburg.
Ellen Bauer: Yeah, I think it’s close. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, between my first time. Oh, nice. Yeah, maybe I should go there too. But it is fun.
Ellen Bauer: It is fun. Maybe not. I don’t recommend to go in the summer on a Sunday, which we did, but. Oh yeah, that’s actually really fun.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Family day. Yeah. So you mentioned you attended the meetup in Porto. What was your takeaway from the meetup with digital?
Ellen Bauer: So it was actually the main reason I came to Europe for it was the first time all products meetup from Automattic in beautiful Portugal for me, also the first time I’ve been to Portugal, which shouldn’t happen to not visit before. But it was really cool. I love Portugal. Really lovely people, beautiful vibe, nice weather. Yeah, it was really relaxing, really a treat. And then very inspiring and motivating to be in the product group for the first time all together in a nice setting and we had amazing conversations. For me, I also got to know my team a little bit better because I just sort of recently switched into dot com, so that was helpful. But yeah, also a lot of meaningful, deep conversations and I’m really, really motivated after that meetup.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh yeah. So when you said meetup, I’m still in the community brain, so I thought it might have been a WordPress meetup because I spent some time. And that’s probably also the reason why my brain went there instead of the internal. Because I spent some time with meetups, local WordPress meetups in Salzburg and in Erfurt and also in Munich. I restarted the meetup here in Munich with a few of the original founders and some other people and. And it’s a totally different vibe than a WordPress conference.
Ellen Bauer: That is true. I love meetups.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: You meet 15 maximum 20 people and then you learn more about how they use WordPress, what they really move a normal user. So it kind of grounds you much better than kind of always being in the contributor section, kind of.
Ellen Bauer: So that is true. Well, there was WordCamp Europe, which I didn’t attend because it was just so much. I attended WordCamp Asia, which I also loved this year. That was such an amazing experience and very motivating. And I talked to a lot of people who are meetup organizers in India and I really now want to visit one of their meetups. It sounds fun. I also visited the meetup here in Bangkok before and I love the people there, the really tight community. And I’m also. I have been thinking for many years now that I should actually start a meetup in our town in New Zealand. I haven’t committed, but I’m always coming back thinking about it. So maybe I should just commit and do that because it would be cool to have like a local.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Ellen Bauer: In New Zealand. There aren’t many around, but it would be cool.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, the first thing that you need is a co-organizer. So don’t start until you have a second person to do that because we travel a lot. Well, I travel a lot and I cannot be at every meetup, so I need somebody else to do that. So that was kind of back of mind.
Ellen Bauer: That’s a good advice.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And the meetups in India, they’re really big. They’re 40, 50 people.
Ellen Bauer: I talked to someone and. And they have 200 people every month on Surat. I was like, I want to come. Yeah, it’s amazing. Like, I want to visit.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s a small word camp for an evening kind of thing.
Ellen Bauer: That is so true.
Calls for Testing
Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right. Yeah. So work for 7.1 is progressing and there are calls for testing out, and this is the first time that there are so many out there. There are five of them. And if you want to learn what’s really in 7.1, there’s no better way to take a deep dive and heed the call for testing.
So there’s a call for testing for the responsive styling and yes, it’s coming to WordPress now. And then there’s a call for testing for the new modal media editor that opens up when you click on the crop icon in the toolbar of an image block or a cover block. And then there is the call for testing for the client media processing. That’s a feature that comes to 7.1 where the client, the browser is actually doing a lot of work in uploading the upload side of the image uploads and the resizing and then dumps it into the WordPress media library.
There’s also a real time collaboration outreach effort that is also a call for testing. And then there’s a call for testing for getting Unicode into email addresses. And that’s kind of fun too. So the testing has done an amazing job putting those calls for testing together because you get instructions on how to use it and videos to show you how to use it and then the instructions also for the testing. So your mental work on how do I test this is already done. You’re just going to follow the script and, and then have room in your mental room to observe your feelings for whatever you’re doing and kind of try to, to verbalize them and share your feedback. So it’s really interesting and I hope you dear listeners are going to heed those calls. One or two of them. You don’t have to do all of them. Yeah, I don’t grade you, but there will be a test. Yeah.
Community Contributions
Then there are also two. Well, I said two, but there are actually three merge proposals from the contributors. There’s new things coming to WordPress Core. One is expanding the WordPress Core abilities. It’s a merge proposal to add three read-only abilities to cover the settings, content and users for AI. And it gives AI clients real tools to call so the agents can understand what your site’s configuration, post and people are doing. There’s a discussion should this be in core, should this be a plugin and all that you can read up on the post. And the second one is also for AI is the guidelines to build knowledge on your website. Yeah, what’s your tone about what’s the tone of voice, the expression, what the topic is about and what the members are, what the standards are and all the notes for revision and capabilities. So an AI agent could follow those instructions as well.
And for people who manage multiple sites with one AI they can actually it’s different for every site. So it’s really important to have that on the site to give that that’s a new content type and new settings pages for these things. So you can even use your AI to update those guidelines. There’s one thing and then of course the last one is the bigger one and that’s a merge proposal for the design systems theming Andrew Duthie published a merge proposal bringing design tokens and new theme components to WordPress built by the Gutenberg Components team. But it turns the hard coded admin styles into CSS custom properties so your plugins and screens stay consistent and accessible.
Then a color ramp tool generates harmonious accessible scales from just two seed colors and the user color scheme reaches the site editor which will come into I think 7.1. So with a dark mode on the horizon. So it’s a good time to get involved in the discussion now, dear listeners, and to make your point of view listen to and converse with others on the impact for you and your business and for your clients because that’s where the decisions are made. Some of them are already made but they are loosely held, so to speak.
There’s a whole aspect of WordPress is we have strong opinions but they’re loosely held. If you have a good argument and you have a good use case or a different point of view, you are listened to. Of course if aired respectfully and even if it’s not respectful it should be because we all want to do the same thing. So the links to all the merge proposals and calls for testing will be in the show notes. You get to pick what you are interested in and so that’s a whole thing that happened in the last three weeks when we didn’t have a Gutenberg change log. So I wanted to catch you up. Any thoughts on that Ellen, that you want to share with our listeners?
Ellen Bauer: I think on the merge proposals but I think for the calls for testing the responsive styling of course sticks out to me because we have been calling for that for so long and the user the feedback was always there like what is that without responsive styling? So now here it is. So yeah go ahead and test it and I will do the same and kind of contribute to make it better or improve what. What we can. But here we go. We finally have. I think the number one ask always this is missing in Gutenberg.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I think the number one ask is not the responsive design because Gutenberg is responsive in certain areas. It’s a viewpoint. It’s a media kind of thing. Yeah. So what is a tablet? What is a mobile. And to change things for those screen sizes. And there was a big hesitation and there’s. On the developer blog, there’s an article about intrinsic design that’s built into Gutenberg. And I think the thinking was, okay, intrinsic design is what comes after media queries. Comes after. So because we need to also talk to what is component in the container queries in CSS and all that. And at the start of Gutenberg people wanted to push the envelope of intrinsic design and then see what’s missing. And. And now we know where it all goes and how to. To change it. And there is a. Yeah, we talk about it a little later when we come to that. Yeah, but so that’s kind of. That part why it took so long, I think was the reason why I kind of went on the drain there.
Ellen Bauer: That is true. I’m glad that we didn’t do like earlier versions of it. It seems late, but yeah, there’s. There’s a reason.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: But I think, yeah, a lot of plugin companies actually filled that gap quite nicely. I also saw a few implementations where you didn’t have three viewports or breakpoints, you had six, so. And I kind of couldn’t imagine that a normal user can keep in their head six different sizes to control the styling and when something needs to be changed to find it again where that actually was changed. I get the hesitation. So yeah, yeah..
Ellen Bauer: You quickly go a little overboard with that. And I’m also glad that we didn’t do that on the core level.
What’s Released – WordPress 7.0.1
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So that brings us to what’s released and it’s release week kind of thing. So on Wednesday and we’re recording this on Friday, July 10, Thursday, July 9, WordPress 7.0.1 was released with bug fixes from the major release. And the release candidate announcement has a list of all the fixes in track and from the Gutenberg repo,
I’m preparing an article for the Gutenberg Times. I will probably put in the show notes about what the fixes actually did is the WPKSS or however say that CSS corruption on some of the admin design glitches and some more. So you can have a summary of that. Yeah.
On Wednesday, just the day before 7.0.1, a user ask in the core channel, what is. I see all the communication. Yeah. What is the latest version actually, and at that time it was still 7.0, but we say but tomorrow it’s going to be 7.0.1. 7.0.1. Yes. Yeah, yeah.
So 7.1 last month Anne McCarthy posted the roadmap 7.1. It was aspirational and also very concise with an outline and links to the tracking issue for the many features contributors have been working towards. Beta 1 of 7.1 is scheduled for next week. That’s July 15th. And by then we will know the full picture of what made it and didn’t make it into the release features from the Gutenberg plugin releases 22.6 through 23.6 will come to 7.1 unless they’re behind an experiment flag or plugin or plugin only as guardrail 23.6 release candidate. And that’s what’s getting into the beta version is on July 14, so one day before the beta version, because that’s where all the NPM packages are created and all the things get into the branches. Right feature branch.
The final release of 23.6 is moved to July 22nd. That was kind of decided by the release tech leads to get it all just in time for beta and organize that. So the deadline for enhancement into the plugin on 7.1 is July 14, the day before beta. So if you’re a contributor and you want to get the feature that you were working on in this weekend is probably crucial because it also needs to be reviewed and approved. So give people time to get in there.
So yeah, what should be on your radar for 7.1 is the mandatory iframe of the post editor. We mentioned it before. It actually has also a lead time to come to this point is the post editor runs inside or the block editor should run inside an iframe because it isolates the content from your admin styles and makes the viewport units and media queries work correctly against the editing canvas rather than the browser window. And in 7.1, iframing becomes more enforced for block based themes or for all themes because it ensures that canvas behaves predictably and the blocks render accurately for both the post editor and the site editor, template editor and pattern editor and plugin developers.
So plugin developers who have not updated their Block collections from version 2Block JSON version 2 to 3 should actually upgrade to make this all work. If you want to catch up on the newest discussion, there’s a Gutenberg PR that’s called Always the post editor for book theme. And that’s the 79819. And if you put that in your playground, you can actually add some of the plugins or your staging site, or add it to the staging site, then you can test your things. I think the biggest problems are sites that are maintained by people that do not read the make blog or do not listen to podcasts or read blog posts about their site or the software. And those are sites that haven’t been maintained for a while, otherwise they would have already upgraded things. Yeah.
Ellen Bauer: So block themes need to do anything too. They haven’t. No. Right.
Ellen Bauer: I haven’t looked into that.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s a problem for blocks. Yeah.
Ellen Bauer: That are in the block plugin collections.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. That only. They were only meant for post editor and have never been used inside editor or something like that. Because those would have broken already. Because the site editor since 2020 kind of uses an iframe version. So if you use the block in a template or use the pages thing from the site editor, the pages administration from the site editor, you will know when the block breaks. And in the post editor, if you go into the console, you see the notification that it’s going to be deprecated. But if you’re only in the post editor and never look at anything else and those blocks might break if they’re not updated.
Ellen Bauer: What should they do if this happened to them?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: There are some guardrails in place and there were two PRs. That one is the hard kind of, okay, we do all the iframe insight and that’s going to be in beta. And in beta, listening to the feedback will decide if there will be a switch to the other less hard choice there in terms of saying, okay, if it’s a block theme, it’s going to be an iframe post editor. But if it’s not a block theme and. Or if there are blocks on the page that are on the old version, like the version 2, then it will not be iframed, but that is subject to change. It’s kind of. There’s a trial and error kind of process here to figure out what is the best way move forward. Because the first post blog post about that was actually published in June ‘21, so five years. And then there was another one in November 2025, and there was another one in February ‘26. So there is a lot of leeway or runway for agency developers and plugin developers to kind of update, but sooner or later there will be a push to make it final and then deal with the consequences. Yeah.
Anne McCarthy’s roadmap included two updates that we already know have been already punted. So that’s the update to React 19 and the deprecation of the classic block. Those things have been punted. And there are blog posts on the make blog for the reasons and next steps for that. It’s pretty much the classic blog where there was a lot of communication around it that said, okay, maybe it’s not a good time yet. And for the RAC 19 there were too many backwards compatibility issues, but it’s going to come. So it just needs a little bit more runway to get final to that point. All right. Any thoughts about that?
Ellen Bauer: Not really. I’m excited for 7.1. I think we haven’t mentioned the release time. Is that still planned for WordCamp US and like August 19th.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes, the planning is July 15th being beta and then August 5th being release candidate and August 19th final release on the last day of WordCamp US.
Ellen Bauer: Okay, cool. I’m excited.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I’m excited too. There are nice features in there and there are nice updates to the site editor there and I’m very excited about that.
Gutenberg 23.4
And now that brings us to Gutenberg 23.4. Let’s go and talk about things.
Ellen Bauer: So that was released June 17th. We’re also going to talk about the next release 23.5 right after. So let’s start with this one first.
So I think the most exciting things in there are related to media. And the first thing that is pretty exciting is if you load media into the post editor, you now get like a little notification snack bar that kind of tells you the progress of your uploads. Like if you load dump, just dump in like 20 images you’re going to see. And you also I think timed first image, second image, third image. We are used to it, I don’t know from apps and stuff. So I think that is really, really helpful to see the progress of the loading there.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And Adam Silverstein did an amazing job to get this all done. There’s a second one that also that the upload process is now enabled. So when it’s interrupted because you’re offline or something, it also resumes automatically the upload on the when the connection returns. So this would save quite a few hurry up and wait kind of thing. When you’re maybe on a train or in a country where you don’t have stable Internet connections to upload your media.
Right now, I only highlighted that because it’s in the same thing that the client side media processing is now geared towards 7.1. So the plugin’s only guardrail has been removed and it can be merged into WordPress.
Enhancements
The next one is the playlist block. It now has a visualization style selector so it has the playlist lock. When you try and test it, you’ll see there is a visualization kind of where the music builds some animation on top of the track and you can select the styles now for that. And also it now has a track length setting so you can set up the settings for that as well.
Ellen Bauer: Another thing I kind of liked because I’ve built that before is if you have, I don’t know, on a WooCommerce theme or something, if you want to have the log out log in or for any other kind of purpose, you can now get that into an inner block of the navigation submenu. The lockout lock in. That wasn’t possible before. It’s a small thing but very helpful for whenever you want to have that in a drop down or sub menu.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. If you have a membership site or subscribers only content and you. You offer them a nice accessible way to log in and log out. There’s a very minimal change, but you might need. You will notice it. It’s the time to read icon has been renamed to time. So it’s not. Might be getting rid of redundancy, but I’m not sure it’s even clearer. It’s clear enough. So yeah, that’s the change.
Ellen Bauer: Yeah, I think that’s mainly kind of to reuse it, to be able to reuse it for more things. Right.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Ellen Bauer: Another thing that I think is a little bit bigger and quite helpful is that now it’s possible that columns and gallery blocks can be transformed into grid variations for layout styling. I think that’s kind of cool. I think I wanted to do that many, many times.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, me too. Because I forgot that I have a grid block and I tried to do things with the columns block.
Ellen Bauer: Yeah, yeah. So often you kind of start out in a column and then you realize no, that should be a grid.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And then again for the media. But this time it’s out of the block editor. The media editing modal has changed and it has some new features, better features, new libraries. And we talked about it before on this podcast. But now you can reorder the details field has been reordered and then now you have aspect ratio controls for the mobile toolbar and they refactored a little bit the modal layout in total. But this is a great, great tool. So these are all just the usability issues. The main feature was already in 23.2 or 3 and there are editable attachment fields. And the mobile tool. The mobile toolbar has been updated to include the aspect ratio controls. Also uses the zoom uses now plus and minus buttons. Yeah. Instead of the spyglass.
Ellen Bauer: Oh yeah. That is actually very helpful an update on the dashboard. And you maybe have to help me out if I’m not 100% sure if I understand that correctly. So we always had the grid columns and now they are opinionated. So pre designed responsive. Is that correct if I say that like in your dashboard, like the two columns, I think it’s maximum four columns. It doesn’t go more than four and then it reduces like it nicely responsive by default, right?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. It goes from 960 desktop width, so four columns to two columns between a tablet kind of size, between if it’s smaller than 960 to 600 and if, if it’s smaller than 600 or 600 and smaller, it’s going to one column and has a mobile kind of view there. So it’s definitely responsive. But that’s the dashboard. It’s about the admin dashboard. It’s not in the block editor. So that grid has nothing to do with a grid block in the block editor. So we have a little issue there with using the same words for different things. But that’s because it’s all grid based. But it’s a good thing.
And contributors have an experiment on redesigning the dashboard and also let blocks going in there and all that. So it’s. It’s quite interesting to see that there are more additional features in there like this day before. Right. So if you’re in a block, you can. They’re figuring out how to put the previous day and previous years. So if you have a blog for 30 years or 10 years, you. You get. Or even five years. Yeah. You get a notification, what you published about this time of year, last year or something like that.
Ellen Bauer: Yeah, I like that.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And that was actually kind of nice.
Ellen Bauer: It kind of embraces your blogging history.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, exactly.
Ellen Bauer: One actually kind of cool little change that I really like is in the site editor now. The admin color scheme, if you select another one, get translated into the site editor. So I know a lot of people always say, oh, you go into the site editor and it’s this black different looking user interface. And yeah it’s. Why is it so dark? So now it kind of adopts the color scheme you have selected. And I think this like part of bigger work going into kind of making the interfaces more be like one thing instead of.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. The unification of the admin interface is also a long time coming and I think that’s a, that’s a fantastic step. Yeah. To kind of just make it sure that if you have a green sidebar that it’s also green in the site editor.
Ellen Bauer: Yeah. Because why, why wouldn’t it be?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So on the client media side again, the ultra HDR JPEGs that are detected by upload and then the originals are kept unmodified and the sizes subsizes. They preserve their ICO standards. So you have a better quality of the Ultra HD but it also handles the bigger sizes. So it’s a nice addition to the media upload feature that we talked about before.
APIs
Ellen Bauer: And then we also have an update on APIs. Oh, God. You have to help me with this one. I read it, but now I’m kind of like what was that about again? The future it will help.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So it tracks per entity, the view configuration for pages. And then so it’s about the pages of pages, posts, patterns, template parts, templates and have their default layout in the grids being the, the layout grid in the admin. So when you’re in the site editor you have a choice when you look at templates, what kind of layout. You have a grid layout, a list layout and these kinds of things. And now there is actually an API that you can extract that view configuration for several other things. If you’re plugin developers, you can then replicate what the, what the priority is or what the preference is for your user. And you see that in the rest API when you pull out the information and display it again, that you get the configuration with it. I don’t know.
Ellen Bauer: So you can practically kind of unlock whatever the configuration was in default and then use that in a plugin or something, right?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Exactly. Yeah.
Ellen Bauer: The same screen.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So when you. One use case could be if you are using WordPress as your content container, but have another application that displays things as a headless or in another. In another admin content management system that only talks to WordPress with all and pulls out the things that are in WordPress and measures it up with other data that’s also in the system, then you are able to display the same what the user sees in the WordPress admin, you can display that also in your system at the same time. So that kind of would be one of the use cases that I just made up.
Ellen Bauer: Yeah, that makes sense and very good to explain in that way. What else do we have next?
Experiments
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So the dashboard we talked about that now has also an events widget that can be filled.
Documentation
I wanted to point out one documentation thing that is really a big deal that Juan Margarido has taken on in April or May and push that through a merge now with 23.4 and that is the auto generation of the per block API reference from the block JSON files.
So, until now it was really hard to figure out, okay, what’s the block markup and are there all the supports in there? Because the documentation was handmade. So if somebody updated a block’s configuration and block JSON and added support to it for other things, it would not show in the documentation until someone touches the documentation page. And for 90 blocks or so that are in core right now, that’s a moving target and fast moving target. So he proposed to go in and auto generate that documentation page for humans and AI to map multiple things.
So one is the parent relationship with other blocks like think accordion block and the sub blocks there, the attributions in the table, in a table that what the block supports and with links to explain those features. So if you don’t know what the alignment or support of a block is, you can look it up right from there and then what block styles come with core so you don’t have to figure that out from the interface. So like the button comes with two styles, one is the default, the other one is the outline style. Then which CSS selectors are automatically created and then an example of the block markup. And last but not least, also the links to the source of the information and the packages. So you have a full 36-degree view on the block. And because the documentation is auto updated, it comes right there when the new features are kind of added to the block and it will be shown in the documentation.
This not only helps the developers and theme developers to have a better handle on or one lookup page or section in the documentation, it also helps AI agents to form a comprehensive space to learn about WordPress blocks. Because I have found that AI sometimes just does a custom HTML block and puts it all there instead of using a column block or cover block or something like that.
So this is a very big deal because that’s something where AI elevates human capabilities because he used AI to run the code that parses the block JSON and puts it into the documentation page and then also has that documentation page from the GitHub repo into the developers.wordpress.org document block editor documentation automatically merged there. So this is a big deal. And kudos to Juan Margarido. He also spent some time getting some community input from the documentation team from the Gutenberg leadership. We had a hallway hangout with a Q and A and it finally was merged now. So kudos.
Ellen Bauer: Yeah, that’s pretty cool.
Gutenberg 23.5
I think now we’re moving to the latest release, 23.5, released July 1.
Enhancements
I think the first thing we wanted to highlight was that the design system token defaults now with out a runtime which practically, as far as I understand it correctly, helps that all the styling from the design system is just there by default. There’s nothing that got missed. Is that correct? Yeah, because it happened before that some design elements were in style.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Exactly. Yeah. It’s now available as public export. That’s pretty much so you can use it in your own apps that you put into apps. I say it’s also called plugin, so you can use it without having to import it into your plugin via NPM and these kinds of things via the build process. So you can just import it into your app here.
But I also want to point out again the match proposal for the design system. Everything there is kind of in a holistic way explained and also what it’s supposed to come to. And these are all plenty of the component work that’s done for 23.5 and released or merged is actually in support of the design system and the UI revamp of the components.
Ellen Bauer: I think about the block library. And we have a few other updates in the release. The first one is that the viewport states and the controls are now support for they supporting aspect ratio and all the related controls with that.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So I think yeah, it’s part of the styling system. Yeah.
Ellen Bauer: For image blocks featured image block media library also no, no background images. A background cover image and cover block, yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Also yeah, okay, that’s the viewport states is the name that they give the responsive editing screens. So those controls are now also available.
There’s also a line item in the block library section of the changelog about the classic block to hide it from the inserter that has been reverted. That’s part of the blog post that I mentioned earlier that was published after the release of 23.4, so I wanted to point that out.
The next one is that the media editor modal is now available also for the cover block that comes with that. I think I mentioned that already. But now when you have a cover block with an image, you can also use the media editor modal to crop it, to rotate it, to tilt it and all that kind of things.
Ellen Bauer: That’s a nice add on small but also visually really nice to have is that the icon block now has controls for flip and rotate the icons, which is very nice to have like a. One of the things you like kind of expect to be able to do and then it’s super difficult. So now you can do that. And then it also. What is the second one about?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, it just adds a default placeholder instead of to the blockchain.
Yeah. So there was also a big push to have text alignment support for some of the text blocks. And now the block quote. I think there were seven or eight blocks that have that again. This time there was missing text align support and that has been rectified. So now you have also text align support for the block quote.
Yeah, that was one thing that threw me quite a bit and quite often I always went back to the quotes block. But a quote block and a pull quote have different use cases and a pull plot is an excerpt from the article and you couldn’t make it not centered. It was kind of odd that you couldn’t left align it. Which is my favorite. Yeah. Centered when you have more than one word in the center, you hardly can read it. Or more than one line. Yeah. So I always wanted to be left aligned and I can’t quote just a sentence. Yeah. So I’m really great that they have a text aligned support now that makes sense.
Ellen Bauer: It’s these little things that kind of throw you, throw you off if you don’t have them and you’re like, why can’t I then? I think one of the biggest things in this release is that the resizable editor now it’s like fully resizable. You can drag it along. It’s not just mobile, tablet, desktop, you can get your own size and preview it. I think this is one of the biggest releases in this. In this update 23.5. So can you do anything else? You can resize it.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. It has a handle though. You can resize it. So you have a handle to make it smaller but not as small as mobile. So you can see if. If somebody uses a tablet whatever and odd width you can kind of test it if, if your settings actually work there or your. If the. The layout is there. But you cannot change the viewports themselves. Yeah. They are not customizable. It’s just so you can see the preview there. Yeah.
Ellen Bauer: Which is very helpful like visually.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Especially when you get a call and you don’t have that device on hand. Yeah. That a client sees or a client has a complaint from their clients that something is wrong on the view. You can just kind of tested in the block editor without having the device on hand.
But there is a long standing request to be able to change the viewport numbers and because right now they are hard coded to I think 768 is the desktop and then 467. Yeah. 468 is the tablet and or between there is tablet and then below is the mobile. But there is good news. There is coming with 23.6. It’s already merged is in PR where you can change that via the theme JSON. So theme developers are now able to change viewport numbers for their sites. There is no UI yet for it. But that’s typical. That theme JSON is first. So theme developers can test it out and can actually use it. But for the UI you need a little bit more information how things are going and how users would work with it.
Ellen Bauer: And there’s also been a smaller change on. If you add a note that just. It’s simplified how the show more or less collapse works. If you have a long note you want to collapse it and show more or less. I think that just has been reworked or simplified.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right.
Ellen Bauer: I don’t think it’s anything we see on the user side. Right. It’s more in the background. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s just faster. Yeah. It’s kind of that. Okay. Mostly performance issue. Yeah. You’ll see a slight change there.
There is the experiment of the omnipresent toolbar which is pretty much the admin bar. In the editors you see the admin bar, the black admin bar on top of the screen when you’re logged in and you look at your website from that perspective and you also in the post editor you see the black toolbar but you couldn’t in the site editor or in the other editors. So now the experiment is to show it but then also unify the interface because the design view or the site editor has its own W to go back to the other admin. And when it’s in the admin bar you just click where you normally click to get to the site. So it’s all unification of the interface pretty much. And now you can see the site icon instead of the dash icon if you select it as well in the toolbar. So there has been an ongoing effort and some of it might come to 7.1. It’s on the roadmap for the admin bar everywhere, so to speak.
Ellen Bauer: I think one thing that I remember I struggled with quite a lot is the flex behavior of children. So now there has been.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: You mean your child? Well, it’s not the flexibility of toddlers.
Ellen Bauer: The Flex elements. I love flexbox CSS always have. But I think we always had a problem that they weren’t behaving like exactly like CSS. Flexbox should behave. So now one of the changes has been that so flex children that had a fixed width, this is now like truly fixed. I think it was squishable before. Can you say that? Is that correct? And now it’s like a truly fixed width to zero. So I think that’s one of the things visually that helps a lot. And then the other one was grid layouts now have fill available space, toggle. Is that correct? I think it’s just a toggle in the settings. Right. That you can toggle on and off and then you have auto fill and auto fit behavior. Okay. And this behaves exactly like CSS grid behavior.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, you would expect. Yeah, that’s pretty nice. There was some. Some quirkiness to the grid block and the grid layouts and I’m glad that Isabella is working on that constantly to improve it and to get back to it.
Ellen Bauer: Yeah, she’s doing great work. I met her live at WordCamp Asia this year and it was really pleasant because I love flexbox Grid. I always love these blocks and CSS settings and they never quite worked. How I or like went into that depth, I wish they had. And yeah, she’s. I think, like, she has the same opinions, so it was a good chat.
Another thing that is kind of cool and fun to have is that now global styles allow text shadow settings. So, yeah, there’s these options of text shadow, if you ever want to use that in like a cool, fun design or. So now you can set it in global styles, which is really cool. That wasn’t possible before at all, I believe. Right?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Ellen Bauer: Right.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s a new style support.
Ellen Bauer: I really like that.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I tested it and it’s really nice. There are some presets in there that come from core, and I still need to figure out or find out how you can switch off some of the styles and how you can add your own styles like you can do with the shadow box. The shadow box has a feature that you can switch out the core styles with your own styles or just switch them off, but you definitely would need that for the texture as well.
Ellen Bauer: Maybe we will add that.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s not there. It’s the first version and the first version is pretty much a minimal viable kind of setup. Yeah.
The next thing is again Media Editor modal. It now has some error states. You can magnify the crop to fill the canvas and the current post always includes the initial options. There are also minor fixes, but that is because it gets ready for 7.1 release. So every aspect of it is actually and comes from feedback from the call for testing. The call for testing was actually already issued in I think in May. So it’s already a month in or two months in. So there is already some feedback coming back.
The data layer has a feature for the real time collaboration or many features, but one of them stands out is that you can disable collaboration per post. So if you have maybe a recipe or a book post type and you don’t want anybody to collaborate with you on that, you can switch that off. It’s probably best for very visual post types or it’s also necessary for template parts or for navigation. Those are also post types. You can control that now.
So there was a for a while in the text controls there was a prop to have the next 40px default size and there was underscore. Underscore was an experimental property and that now has been made the default. So if you had a 36 before or 32 on the default size for the text box, then if you wanted to be in the same realm as WordPress itself, you had to use the underscore next 40px default size prop to have the same sizes of the controls and now those are default now. So you don’t have to do this experimental prop to use but it will change how things work. So you might want to, as a theme developer or a plugin developer, you probably want to check your plugins, your text control components, how they change behavior or at least the default layout. So that’s why I’m calling that out here in the episode.
And also a similar thing is known that 23.6 Gutenberg 23.5 bumps. The minimum required version to install the Gutenberg plugin is now 6.94 versions 23.5 and newer. So if you are on 6.7 or 6.8, you are not getting the newest version of the Gutenberg plugin. So I think. Oh, there’s one more. Did I overlook something?
Performance
Ellen Bauer: No, I think on performance you highlighted that blocks migrate markdown converter from showdown to marked. And what does that do?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It actually is just performed faster. Yeah.
Ellen Bauer: Oh, yeah. Okay.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And it also has a different parser, so it might have a say. It’s G. What’s it called? GTM. There is a standard for markdown that comes from GitHub and it now adheres to that standard. Yeah. So that’s updated. It’s a minimum change most people wouldn’t even need to do. But if you copy paste something from GitHub or from other Markdown editors or from your AI agent, it’s a different parsing process.
Ellen Bauer: I just researched that and it said that the previous one was like from 2018 or so and this is just like a faster newer version that we updated to. Okay, that makes sense.
Experiments
And then there was one last highlighted thing on the block library unwrapping. Classic block migration notice experiment.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that’s part of the effort to the classic logic. But that has also been reverted so it will not announce that this is deprecated. So it’s important to know that that line item in the change log has been overwritten already with a newer version that comes to 23.6 on July 22.
Various
Ellen Bauer: And there was another small update on icons to self declare icons color on the icons block.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, nice. Yeah, I overlooked that. I got lost in the changelog already. So.
Ellen Bauer: I mean there were a lot of these smaller things.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh yeah. So if you have an icon, it can say I’m. I’m only in blue or something like that. What does it mean, the current color?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, current color. Yeah, of course. Duh. Yeah. I was still stuck on tab sync finally second the tab sync because it’s the. For stabilizing it to come into 7.1. The tabs block is still under active development until July 14, so don’t start building on it yet because there’s API cleanup and refactoring going on where the contributors try to nail down the final version before it gets into core. Yeah, that’s the end of it.
Ellen Bauer: Wow.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, we still had a lot to talk about, Ellen. Yeah. So apart from the responsive styling, are you excited about some things that come to 7.1 in the near future?
Ellen Bauer: I think for me, being like a Visual X thing builder or and working on blocks, I think responsiveness is a big one and I’m excited to see how. Yeah. How we just kind of improve things. Also, I like that we are looking more into the dashboard and finding ways to unify the experience. I think this is one of the things that always come up that it looks kind of like two different versions, partly outdated. And I think we need to move along and kind of come to maybe not make everyone happy, of course, but come to a compromise that we can all live with and then move forward. I think this would really help WordPress to kind of shine in a way that it doesn’t look outdated or not like one product. I think if we can come together and do that and push for that change, that would be really, really helpful for all of us and for everyone and for WordPress. So I’m excited to contribute and help to make this happen.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. I like the new blocks that are coming. Of course. I have been a fan of blocks since the beginning of the block editor, so I like that the playlist block and the TAMS block. And finally. The table of content. There is an effort to actually have the table of content come to WordPress. Right now. It’s only available for years in the Gutenberg plugin.
Ellen Bauer: I didn’t even know. I thought it would be in.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Ellen Bauer: Even small things like rotating icons and stuff like that or having them be the current color and all these grid and Flexbox things. They. We need these things. I think it’s still very, very important to have professional settings like that available.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And this is a visual person. You’re probably also happy that you now can have in the group block. Background gradients. Gradients. We all love gradients. I love gradients. I love gradients. Yeah. And there’s these kinds of things.
Ellen Bauer: They’re like, why aren’t they there? And so responsiveness. And I think just of kind of growing up Gutenberg and the editing experience.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Ellen Bauer: Seems. And even like with AI helping on a lot of things and being able to patch CSS and stuff on onto things to make things better that we don’t have. I think it’s still important that we aim for a really high quality experience in manual editing so people find what they’re looking for and are not frustrated or get lost. I think that’s just the quality we want to stand for and have in WordPress no matter what.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Ellen Bauer: I think the standard should like, should be. We aim. Should aim for that as being just there for people, for users.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: I think we. We develop, as I say. Yeah. Are kind of really immersed in this AI grace and hype and also the possibilities and the usefulness of AI in our work. There is a danger that we forget that WordPress users that are writers or publishers actually are not using AI to do their work on WordPress. So we definitely need a delightful interface and all these small changes, quality of life changes and the big changes like the responsive editing and the dynamic galleries and whatever is going to come. The modal editor, the media editor needs to be delightful and useful for humans that are kind of having fun and producing more content for the Internet that is kind of. Yeah. Eating it whole, so to speak, with AI.
Ellen Bauer: Yeah, yeah, I love that too. Delightful is a beautiful word to use. Yeah. We want to delight people using WordPress and this should be our aim. AI or not, like in whatever. We have to meet users wherever they are, however they want to use the tool. It shouldn’t be, oh, we can leave this stuff now because everyone uses AI. I think if we have a user interface, it would be delightful. If it’s not yet delightful, we have to make it delightful. And AI can only help us to do that because we can contribute faster, we can move things faster. So let’s use AI for that, to delight users to meet them wherever they are for everything we offer, and we do offer a user interface. So here we are with some work to do.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: I think that’s a good end of the show today. Thank you so much, Ellen, to be on the show and walk with me through those changes that are coming and if people want to reach you, how is a good way to reach out to you.
Ellen Bauer: So I am in the community Slack WordPress community Slack. I’m also on social media, not that active to be fair, but reachable anytime. I think for WordPress community, the community Slack is the best place to reach me. But if you look at my name, Ellen Bauer, you can find me online on all kinds of platforms and I’m oh, I’m actually revamping my Manu and my Little Elmo Studio blog. So there’s going to be a new design and I’m really excited to get blogging again. Also doing a lot more like a few more YouTube videos. I have some ideas for that over the summer month now. So, so wonderful. Yeah, I will share if I have some news on that. Look out for Ellen or Elmer Studio and just reach out anywhere.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Excellent.
Ellen Bauer: Yes, I’m always excited to hear from you.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Ellen.
Ellen Bauer: Thank you for having me. Birget, you’re welcome to be on the show.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s delightful to have you to overuse that word.
Now, dear listeners, the show notes will be published on GutenbergTimes.com podcast this is number 132, 132. And if you have questions and suggestions or news you want us to include, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com that’s changelog@gutenbergtimes.com thank you all for listening. And until the next time, goodbye.
After a four-week break — courtesy of a sciatic nerve with strong opinions — I’m happy to be back in by office chair and in your inbox. There is plenty to catch up on.
Beyond the updates on the new WordPress and Gutenberg versions, you’ll find stories below from WordPress veterans on migrating to and working with block themes on client sites and dive into more complex theme solutions or
Don’t let me keep you from your light summer reading.
Have a splendid weekend ahead!
Yours, Birgit
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
The team around release lead Aaron Jorbin pushed WordPress 7.0.1 Maintenance release out the door to update millions of WordPress sites. The update covers 17 Trac tickets and 14 Gutenberg PRs. The full list is available in the RC 1 announcement post from last week.
In WordPress 7.0.1 Fixes Registration Spam, wp_kses() CSS Corruption, and 7.0 Admin Design Glitches, I cover the most important fixes for end users and developers of this release. You’ll learn how the registration-spam loophole got closed, which admin design glitches were sanded off, and why developers can finally remove their wp_kses() CSS workarounds. Update your sites soon if auto-updates aren’t enabled.
Ryan Welcher compiled What’s new for developers (July 2026), and it’s all about the 7.1 cycle getting real: Beta 1 lands July 15, final release August 19 at WordCamp US. You’ll want to test responsive styling, the React 19 runtime flag, and Unicode email addresses now. Also on your radar: merge proposals for Core Abilities and Guidelines, the 40px component default, icons inheriting color, and Playground’s MCP support.
Berislav “Bero” Grgičak announced what’s new in Gutenberg 23.5, released July 1. The headliner: you can now drag the editor canvas to any width, with the device preview dropdown and resize handles working together for responsive editing. The experimental Media editor gains a magnified crop canvas, pixel-snapping handles, and Cover block support. Also notable: text shadows in Global Styles, flip and rotate controls for the Icon block, and a minimum WordPress version bump to 6.9.
For the next episode of the Gutenberg Changelog, I sat down with Ellen Bauer to chat about what’s coming next for WordPress. We dug into the latest Gutenberg plugin releases (23.4 and 23.5) and the recent WordPress 7.1 update. Plus, we walked through some big merge proposal, like the Design System Theming. our excitement around responsive styling coming to WordPress. It’s a packed episode full of news you won’t want to miss! The episode will land in your favorite podcast app over the weekend.
WordPress 7.1 roadmap and more calls for testing
Anne McCarthy published Roadmap to WordPress 7.1., scheduled for August 19, 2026. Longstanding styling gaps are being tackled: responsive styling and interactive-state styling let you adjust blocks per viewport or on hover — no custom CSS required. You’ll also find new Playlist, Table of Contents, and Tabs blocks, a smarter command palette, a Design → Identity screen, the admin bar inside the editors, a media editor modal, and expanded Unicode support for email addresses.
Also mentioned Real-time collaboration, Knowledge Guidelines, React 19 upgrade, Classic block deprecation have been punted since the posts came out. Beta 1 arrives July 15 and will settle which of the other Roadmap features are in and which will be punted to a future release.
Nikunj Hatkar, this year’s team rep of the Core Test team, posted a call for testing responsive styling. You’ll be able to style blocks differently for tablet and mobile right in the editor — no custom CSS or media queries needed. The underlying PR unifies the resizable canvas with the device-preview switcher. Fire up the linked WordPress Playground instance, walk through the four test scenarios, and share what feels intuitive or broken. Plugin and theme developers should test their canvas integrations, too.
Dennis Snell published a call for testing Unicode email addresses. With initial support merged, is_email() and sanitize_email() now accepting non-ASCII addresses like grå@grå.org, and validation aligns with the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) spec. You’ll want to check your plugins and themes: the new WP_Email_Address class gives you structured access to local and domain parts, and a snippet lets you disable Unicode support until third-party integrations catch up.
Three Merge Proposals
Core contributors put together three merge proposal for new features to be added to Core for public comment.
Jorge Costa published a merge proposal to expand WordPress Core Abilitiesin WordPress, adding three read-only abilities covering settings, content, and users. Building on the Abilities API from 6.9, they give the AI Client real tools to call, so agents can understand your site’s configuration, posts, and people. Settings and post types opt in through a dedicated flag, and management abilities are planned for a later WordPress version.
Greg Ziółkowski published a merge proposal for Guidelines built on Knowledge, a new custom post type headed for WordPress 7.1. Knowledge gives your site one shared home for standards, memories, and notes — with revisions, capabilities, and REST access built in. Guidelines is the first feature on top, letting you capture voice, tone, and per-block rules right where writing happens. Although, originally aimed at WordPress 7.1, in their latest comment, Anne McCarthy indicated that it needs to simmer some more before it’s considered for inclusion in WordPress Core.
Andrew Duthie published a merge proposal for Design System Theming, bringing design tokens and a new theme component to WordPress. Built by the Gutenberg Components Team, it turns hard-coded admin styles into CSS custom properties, so your plugins and screens stay consistent and accessible. A color ramp tool generates harmonious, accessible scales from just two seed colors, and the user color scheme reaches the Site Editor — with dark mode on the horizon.
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
Anne Katzeff published a tutorial exploring the WordPress Cover Block for parallax scrolls. You’ll learn how the Fixed Background setting turns a Cover block into a layered parallax effect — background, middle ground, and foreground text moving at different speeds. The post steps through nesting a second Cover block, switching which layer scrolls, and improving text readability with grouped backgrounds. A video tutorial rounds it out. She also demos her process in this YouTube video.
Carrie Dils shared a case study, One Header, Two Themes, on phasing a legacy Elementor site toward Full Site Editing without a rebuild or content freeze. Using ThemeSwitcher Pro to run two themes side-by-side, she built one shared header in a plugin that both themes render. You’ll learn from five real-world snags — WooCommerce’s hooked blocks, cascade conflicts, routing gaps, query-string bypasses — and why shipping the shared layer first de-risks everything after.
Gina Lucia compared WordPress block themes vs page builders on the Ollie blog. You’ll get a clear-eyed walkthrough of what classic themes, page builders, and block themes each handle — scope, design control, performance, lock-in, and maintenance — with side-by-side tables. Her conclusion: block themes combine sitewide design control with visual editing natively, so you rarely need a page builder anymore, though migration costs and team habits can justify keeping one.
Elliott Richmond explained why he spent 16 months turning 400+ holiday cottages into WordPress blocks. The kate & tom’s site moved from ACF flexible content to a native block theme, freeing the marketing team from waiting on custom widgets. You’ll appreciate his candor: 10,590 widgets migrated via a purpose-built plugin, re-run against fresh production snapshots, with flaky conversions fixed by hand. Even untuned, PageSpeed jumped from 22 to 67.
Wes Theron published a video tutorial, How to Create and Edit Navigation Menus in WordPress, for anyone getting comfortable with block themes. In under ten minutes, you’ll learn how to edit your menu with the Navigation block, add pages, posts, categories, and custom links, and build dropdown menus. Timestamps let you jump straight to the part you need — handy if dropdowns are the only thing standing between you and a finished header.
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
Henrique Iamarino shared how the Automattic Design team built a WordPress theme without ever opening Figma. You’ll follow the making of Crafted, a production-ready theme created almost entirely in the WordPress Editor: Global Styles for typography and spacing, Create Block Theme to save edits to theme files, WordPress Studio for local review, and an AI assistant for finishing-touch hover CSS. His takeaway: the Editor is now a professional design surface.
Justin Tadlock explained how to dynamically load template parts in block themes on the Developer Blog. Instead of maintaining a pile of near-identical templates, you can hook into the render_block_data filter and swap a template part’s slug on the fly — say, a different sidebar per post category. His walkthrough covers early returns, fallback behavior, and file setup, and the technique works for headers, footers, and banners, too.
“Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2026” A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test, and Meta team from Jan. 2024 on. Updated by yours truly.
Jeff Paul announced what’s new in AI 1.1.0, the latest release of the canonical AI plugin. Two experiments headline, type-ahead text suggests inline ghost text as you write in the block editor, and key encryption secures your AI Connector API keys in the database. You’ll also find smarter content readiness checks with locale-aware counting, more control over guest comment moderation, a new core/read-settings Ability, and a peek at 1.2.0 plans.
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.
WordPress 7.0.1 is now available. As the first maintenance release of the 7.0 cycle, it’s strictly a bug-fix release: every included ticket addresses either a regression introduced during 7.0 development or an issue intentionally deferred at the end of the cycle.
The release ships fixes for 17 core Trac tickets and 14 Gutenberg PRs. Because this is a maintenance release, sites with automatic background updates enabled will update to 7.0.1 automatically — everyone else should update as soon as possible. Here’s what stands out for each audience.
Kudos to release lead Aaron Jorbin and his team for pushing this release over the finish line and getting it into hands of WordPress users quickly.
The most important fixes for end users
Registration page spam is shut down (#63085). The account registration page could be abused to send “Login details” spam emails from your site. This is arguably the most impactful fix in the release for anyone running a site with open registration — it protects both your users’ inboxes and your domain’s email reputation.
The 7.0 admin reskin gets its rough edges sanded off. WordPress 7.0’s refreshed admin design shipped with a handful of visual glitches that this release cleans up:
Form elements are now standardized in the mobile viewport (#64999)
The image editor’s scale and crop inputs no longer mismatch in size, and the info icon uses the new color scheme (#64937, #65428)
The publish settings panel no longer crowds its primary action buttons together (#65286)
The Media Library’s loading spinner is properly aligned in the modal filter toolbar, and the search bar no longer jumps position after a search (#65275, #65296)
A “black flash” that briefly appeared on wp-admin pages before the interface finished loading is gone (Gutenberg #78493)
Emoji behave correctly again. Two related fixes: the emoji detection script is once more printed in the admin (#65310), and certain characters are no longer incorrectly replaced by Twemoji images (#64318).
Accessibility improvements to the new revisions experience. The Visual History / Revisions feature introduced in 7.0 receives several accessibility fixes: focus now moves to the revisions slider when entering revisions mode, and changed blocks are marked with a CSS outline as a secondary, non-color indicator — important for users with low vision or color blindness (#65122, Gutenberg #77530, #78393, #79691).
The most important fixes for developers
wp_kses() no longer corrupts valid CSS (#65270). Since 7.0 RC4, wp_kses() could mangle legitimate background-image: url(…) declarations into a broken style=")" attribute. If your theme or plugin outputs inline background images through KSES-filtered content, 7.0.1 restores expected behavior — any workarounds you shipped can now be removed.
global-styles-inline-css can be dequeued again (#65336). Since 7.0, developers were unable to remove the global styles inline stylesheet. If your build pipeline or performance optimization strips this and re-serves it another way, that control is back.
PHP 8.5 compatibility fix in wp_get_attachment_image_src() (#64742). An incorrect array access triggered issues under PHP 8.5. If you’re testing sites on newer PHP versions, this removes one blocker.
A removed Navigation function returns as a deprecated shim (Gutenberg #78484).block_core_navigation_submenu_render_submenu_icon() was removed in 7.0, breaking themes and plugins that called it directly. It’s restored as a deprecated shim — but treat this as your migration notice, not a reprieve. Update any code that references it.
Editor state management fixes reduce false “unsaved changes” warnings. Two Gutenberg fixes matter here:
controlled/mode block changes are now marked non-persistent (#79350), and
related navigation entities are no longer dirtied during passive renders (#79000).
Together these should mean fewer spurious dirty states and a cleaner undo history — a quality-of-life improvement if you build with template parts and navigation blocks.
Block Visibility: “hide everywhere” keeps working after a block opts out of visibility support (#65389). If you register blocks that disable visibility support, previously hidden instances now stay hidden as expected.
How to update
You can update directly from Dashboard → Updates in your site’s admin, run wp core update with WP-CLI, or download WordPress 7.0.1 from WordPress.org and install it manually. Sites that support automatic background updates for minor releases will begin updating on their own shortly.
The full ticket list is available in the release candidate announcement, Trac report 4, and the 7.0.x editor tasks board on GitHub.
What’s next: WordPress 7.1
With 7.0.1 out the door, attention turns to the next major release: WordPress 7.1 is scheduled for August 19, 2026. To see what’s planned for the release, check out the Roadmap to 7.1 on the Make WordPress Core blog.
In episode 131 of the Gutenberg Changelog, Birgit Pauli-Haack welcomes Isabel Brison to discuss the latest developments in Gutenberg plugin releases 23.1, 23.2, and 23.3, as well as progress leading up to WordPress 7.1. The hosts highlight recent calls for testing, including collaborative editing—previously delayed from 7.0 due to stability concerns—and the new media editor modal for the image block.
Isabel Brison shares insights into the new responsive global block styles, allowing users to customize styles per device breakpoint, as well as updates to the layout and dimensions controls in the block editor. She encourages feedback from users as these features iterate for the upcoming WordPress 7.1 release. The episode covers stabilizations, such as the improved, more ergonomic media editor and cropper, and strides in accessibility, particularly regarding the tabs block.
The hosts also discuss experiments in dashboard widgets, content type management, and empowering plugin developers with new admin UI components. Both stress the importance of community feedback and testing, given the ambitious new features arriving soon. The episode wraps with practical notes on documentation improvements, React 19 integration, and a reminder of the short summer break ahead.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So welcome to our 131st episode of the Gutenberg Changelog. We will talk about Gutenberg plugin releases 23.1, 23.2 and 23.3. There are calls for testing out for WordPress 7.1 and we have more. I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and a full-time core contributor for the WordPress open source project sponsored by Automattic. Today, Isabel Brison joins me from Sydney again. Isabel is a longtime core contributor and JavaScript developer on the Gutenberg Project. Welcome back to the show, Isabel. Thank you for joining me. How are you?
Isabel Brison: I’ll be good. Thanks for having me. It’s always a pleasure to be here.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, I’m so glad you’re here because you and your team have worked on some of the most exciting features that coming to Gutenberg. People have been waiting for quite a long time. So we will dive in when we get to the updates. How is Sydney?
Isabel Brison: It’s winter, cold, rainy, you know, the usual.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: The usual? Yeah. How is the technology? I know you’re going to meetups there. Are these WordPress meetups or are these other technology meetups?
Isabel Brison: I go to a variety of tech meetups. There’s not a huge amount, so I’ll go say to JavaScript meetup and there’s a good technology leaders one too. I enjoy going to the Python meetup even though I don’t work with Python. It’s just a lovely community and they have some interesting talks. So it’s sort of whatever’s on offer, I guess.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, nice. Yeah, I found out in Munich to the technology community and I kind of connected with a local Claude meetup community and it was kind of interesting at the Technical university or the Design university, they switch around the places, but it was interesting. Yeah, they had some lightning talks. Yeah, like 20-minute talks and it was really cool. Yeah, I think we need to get out more.
Isabel Brison: Yeah, no, I like, I like going out after work and just, you know, even if it’s just to listen to some tech talks, you get a bit of air and meet new people.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that’s good. Yeah.
Announcements
All right, so we have a few announcements. WordPress 7.0 has been released two weeks ago and we are heading big steps towards 7.1. Beta 1 is scheduled for July 15th. That’s kind of a little bit of ahh. It’s only six weeks away.
Isabel Brison: Yeah. So we get going not long time at all.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And contributors have been working on the next major version already. So the official roadmap planning post is in the works. The team is in the final steps to assemble the release squad and we do well from the Gutenberg plugin releases we get a pretty good idea what might come through also from what didn’t make it into 7.0 as well. So we will. But it’s the web, right? Web is translated for me in the Japanese kind of design thing. Yeah, it’s like wabi sabi. Nothing is finished, nothing is last, and nothing is perfect. So we always get work to do and it’s always getting better. Yeah.
Isabel Brison: Yep. It’s a work in progress.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s a work in progress.
Calls for Testing – WordPress 7.1
So there are two calls for testing out now. One is announcing the collaborative editing outreach effort for 7.1. Many of you dear listeners remember, okay, collaborative editing, real time collaborative editing was pulled from the 7.0 because it wasn’t stable enough for all the hosting environments that are out there. And there was this call for testing out for hosting and now there’s another one for outreach effort to make sure that everything is kind of caught for 7.1.
And Anne McCarthy just published it on the Make Core blog so you can join it anytime. There’s a separate channel Collaborative Editing Outreach that you can. It’s kind of modeled after the full site editing outreach program that ran for two or three years. I hope this doesn’t run for two or three years before it’s released, but it definitely there are more people kind of discussing it and how it all supposed to work. Amy Kamala, who was the Release Coordinator for 7.0 and Justin Tadlock, who is a developer advocate at Automattic and Theme Team Rep are helping Anne to coordinate those calls for testing. And also some of the teams at Automattic who work with Enterprise level are also there. So yeah, it’s a bigger discussion on how collaborative editing works on all the levels.
Isabel Brison: Yeah, it’s a pretty big and complex piece of work.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, join the channel and dive right in if that’s a feature that you are excited about. I’m excited about it. But I also only have two or three people that handle my editing stuff. So I don’t have 10 or 15 editors in my post zone.
Another call for testing is about the media editor Modal that has been added to the image block. Ramon Dodd published a call for testing about two weeks ago about the new modal for the image cropper. It’s kind of the bigger image cropping in the block editor, so you don’t have to. It’s a much easier way to get your images in line, but you can also rotate the images and resize them. And it has been merged with the Gutenberg plugin. It also, with 23.3, is out of experimentation. So anybody who has the Gutenberg plugin installed can be testers. And Ramon has some great details on how to test things and what to look for and how to share the feedback. It also has a little paragraph there on what’s out of scope. So for this version, we of course share all the links in the show. Notes. Isabel, you’re part of that project. What excites you about it?
Isabel Brison: I haven’t actually, actually worked on it. Well, not I, I, I helped a little, a little bit at the very beginning when we were discussing sort of choice of libraries and whether to build our own or use a third party. And a bit with the initial testing, but it was mostly Ramon and Andrew’s work. This latter part, the bit that’s now in Gutenberg, in fact, it was all their work. And I think it’s super exciting because replacing the old, the old Cropper, I. I never liked it. I have to be perfectly honest.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: I hate the old Cropper.
Isabel Brison: I never could figure out how to use it. It was not ergonomic at all. And this one is such a better experience. Aside from allowing us to do all the stuff that the old Cropper, the in Editor Cropper is what I’m talking about. The one that you can access from the Image block toolbar. It’s also on the site Logo block. So you can now access it from both those blocks and the new one, in addition to what the old one did, also allows you to do free cropping and free rotating. So if you want to rotate your image 3 degrees and if you want to crop it to whatever weird aspect ratio you like, you can do that, which you couldn’t on the old one. Yeah, and it’s. It’s just a much nicer experience. I believe it’s also more accessible than the old one in terms of the keyboard accessibility of it. It’s. It’s better too, so. All advantages. Yeah, they did a great job on it.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: I used it just for a little bit and I was so amazed how smooth it was. Yeah, I kind of. It was also much more intuitive. I never knew what to do with the Cropper when I was pinging it previously and said, so how do I do this now? Every. I had to think every time. And this one is very, very intuitive and very smooth also to use it and to see it. So I’m really happy about that. I’m hoping it makes it into 7.1. Yeah, so we have that.
Isabel Brison: Yeah, it’s, it’s on track, I don’t think. I mean, barring any major natural disaster, I don’t think that there’s any reason for that not to make 7.1. It’s a great piece of work. It’s really stable and now that it’s not behind the experiment flag anymore, real users are using it. I’m sure we’re going to get tons of feedback if there’s anything that’s not 100% perfect and we still have time to iterate on it until beta one.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: I really appreciate that Roman and Andrew went to the research portion and kind of looked at how other graphic programs actually are doing things and tried to get some of the experiences also into the blocked. So okay, yeah, so two calls for testing for those who want to dive in. It’s a very good way to contribute to WordPress because it’s so close to what you’re doing with WordPress. And not only developers but also content creators can help testers even better and those who work at agencies or work with clients at agencies to kind of see how that all works. Which brings us to what’s released. I mentioned it.
What’s Released – WordPress 7.0
WordPress 7.0 Armstrong was released. We talked about it in previous episodes on this changelog with various people from the agency view, from the designer view, from the content creators views. We will share in the show notes in case you need to catch up. The Field Guide the link to the official field guide for WordPress 7.0 as well as to the source of truth on Gutenberg Times that has all the user facing stuff in there. Those are the best information on 7.0. I have not seen in the last two weeks any major boo boos that came in. Yeah, it was such a great testing cycle with a delay of six weeks.
Most of the bugs were actually caught quite early or in the loliso, I don’t think. I’m not sure when there will be a point release which normally happens within a few weeks of the major release, but I have not seen any planning for that. But it could be end of June after WorldCap Europe.
So let’s dive into the Gutenberg releases. We start with Gutenberg 23.1. Oh, one question, Isabel, do you have a favorite feature that came into WordPress 7.0?
Isabel Brison: Oh, I don’t know. There’s a bunch of interesting features and I worked on some of them. Of course I have sort of my personal favorites of the ones that I worked on of which one that is. It was very, very subtle or sort of low profile. We didn’t talk about it much, but I worked on a little handy addition to the grid block or the grid layout type, I should say. That allows us to configure a responsive number of columns. So by setting column count and a minimum width you can say I want my block to always have at maximum three columns but on smaller screens it can go down to two and even one. So that’s something we didn’t have before and I’m quite happy with it. I think it’s a good improvement. But compared to. Oh, there was. There was loads of stuff. The pattern editing work I think is going to be really handy. And what else? There was the notes feature.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, I was in 6.9 already. Yeah.
Isabel Brison: Oh yeah. No, there was something about what? Oh God, I’m confusing my releases.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, they’re kind of. They melt together once it’s released. They melt all together. It’s kind of. Yeah. Was it there or there? Yeah, sometimes.
Gutenberg 23.1
All right, let’s dive into Gutenberg 23.1. It was released on May 7, had 212 closed PRs by 49 contributors. So we are really wrapping up the releases or the work on Gutenberg and the block editor. It’s now not only the block editor, it’s also the site editor. It’s the data views, it’s the. The design system, those all. So the Gutenberg repo has kind of exploded in other areas for the WordPress ecosystem. So. But yeah, the first one on the list and it’s. It’s really interesting how these change logs are actually automated and coming together is the upload media and it enabling concurrent sideload uploads. That’s an interesting thing because it’s so performance issue to have multiple streams on upload on images so you don’t have to wait so long that the image shows up in your block canvas. And that’s a really good improvement for that.
Isabel Brison: Yeah, yeah. I’d imagine when uploading, when bulk uploading particularly.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So when you copy paste content from another source it has this also a feature that you can download and upload the images that you connect there. And that also happens in this module stream uploads thing. So it’s really cool. You only know this because it’s faster but other than that there’s no disruption of your work or any of that.
Isabel Brison: Yeah, there’s a lot of good work. This was also the client side. This is part, I believe, of the client side media processing work that did not make 7.0 but is now being aimed at 7.1. That’s mostly Adam Silverstein’s been working on that. I haven’t kept a close eye on it, but it looks like, you know, very useful work and it’ll be good once we manage to get it in for performance.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, Adam Silverstein has worked on these image handling features quite a bit for 6.9 as well.
Enhancements
So yeah, there is an enhancement that I have flagged here, but I’m not sure how useful that is. It’s for the WordPress UI overlays and a global preview styles on the storybook. So the WordPress UI is the next level of components for WordPress.
Isabel Brison: It’s sort of the successor of the components package.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And at the moment both are used, but I have seen now efforts to migrate, merge things, I don’t know how you call it, but to get it kind of in one thing. But the overlays, the preview styles is how you can show the preview in the storybook so you have a better inkling how it’s going to look later on.
Isabel Brison: Yeah, that should be good.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And then there are tons of changes for the components, the admin ui, the UI components, dialogues. This is mostly for developers that are working with WordPress and creating their own either building WordPress or creating plugins for WordPress to have a unified design system, unified component system that they don’t have to kind of come up with their own interfaces. Those decisions are already made and you can kind of build on top of things before any of that, even the components, every plugin had to design their own interfaces and now this is really cool.
Isabel Brison: Yeah, it’s good to have a sort of a system that you can use when you’re extending and you need to build a new screen or something for your plugin, you can just use these components and everything looks integrated with WordPress.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And it’s also good for the users because they don’t have to think about how do I use this tool now? Or how, how is. How do I filter now on this screen? Because it’s all a unified system and it’s all built out and stable. So the next thing is on the notes getting a few updates. So right now it’s in 23.1. It’s mostly refactors on the positions and the floating board. But we will see later in, in the other releases that there are some nice features coming in for the Blocked libraries. We have updates to the tabs block. I’m really hoping that it comes into 7.1. It’s still behind an experiment flag, but now it can handle duplicate tabs, meaning duplicate handles on the tabs. And it follows now WCAG tabs pattern for accessibility in the renaming of the blocks. So which is a. It’s a major step towards accessibility and acceptance for that. I’m really waiting for the tabs to come into Gutenberg or to.
Isabel Brison: Mostly I think the renaming was about as I understand it, so that the blocks have names that match the accessibility standards or how these things are known as. There’s a WCAG pattern it’s linked to in the PR, and those sort of example patterns that the WCAG website has for people to know how to use ARIA attributes correctly, which is a whole science. And the idea is to have our tabs blocks match the names of that pattern so that it feels more standard and it’ll be more familiar to people who might have implemented tabs in other places.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And those are the standards also where screen readers kind of tap into and people are. That use screen readers kind of have a common pattern for that. Yes. So that definitely elevates the tabs block in its accessibility. Yeah.
Isabel Brison: So it’s going to be pretty useful block once it’s stabilized. So I hope it is.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. I know that quite a few block collections have tabs right from the beginning in the last eight years. And they’re not going to go away because the first iteration of any of the core blocks will not be as feature rich as any of the block collections that have been developed for the last six or seven years. Yeah. The next one is tapping into the image cropper we talked about. So you can. And it was tapping into the keyboard actions with drag handles on the canvas. So you can use your mouse to do some of the actions that you want to do with the image cropper or the image tool. Yeah, if you say Image Cropper, it kind of reduces it to cropping, but yeah, it’s also the handling to rotate
Isabel Brison: And all that too.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. There’s a new API for the WordPress grid package, but that’s a different grid that you are working on.
Isabel Brison: Yeah, that’s not the layout. The block layout grid. This is something else. This is a grid that you can use for dashboard UI.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Exactly.
Isabel Brison: Sort of admin stuff.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. That’s the new API that powers the new experiments that in Gutenberg. That is the dashboard widgets. We kind of talked about it a little later. You as a plugin developer or extender of WordPress, you can use them now as well for any of your dashboards. If you are having a plugin that has some data vising kind of, you can put them into these grid package and display them on your plugin settings pages. The guidelines is also a new API and it has now a public API method and the REST API route to it. There have been iterations after 23.1, so I think that that would be really helpful to look at later.
New APIs
The guidelines are actually a whole set of content types that are for AIs. Pretty much when your agents come to the WordPress site, you can tell them what to do with things. What’s the purpose of the site? The editing guidelines? Yeah, how, how you want AIs to behave on your site if you let them in. And it’s really important when you have other agents come in that you don’t control. Yeah, that sounds scary.
But if you as a site owner connect your Claude to your website, you can have in the guidelines all the things that you want Claude to know about your site. So it’s. You don’t have to put it all in a prompt and it kind of finds all the things and it’s also your memory. So if you use an agent to do your SEO, to do your. Some of the content updates like headlines or tags, your policies on how to do tags and categories, that’s all things that you can solidify in your documentation in the guidelines for your AI. And it will remember that. But it’s also interesting to see the discussions about it. I had a short discussion with Grzegorz, who was a former co-host here on the Changelog, a few, I would say a few hundred episodes before, but it wasn’t that much. But he is now part of that team who thinks about AI and memory and all that. And it was really interesting to hear because if you are in an agency, you work on multiple different sites, but you have one Claude, so you don’t want things to bleed over from one site to the next. And these guidelines help you kind of keep track of everything. So it’s an interesting problem space that came out with AI.
Isabel Brison: It’s like providing the correct context and the correct amount of context so that the AI can be maximally productive on your website, whatever you want to do with it.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. Most people are really not all that into. Site owners are not so into AI, but it helps a few things quite nicely. I find it with SEO and with yeah, accessibility and all that. It’s really helpful to have a double check there. Yeah. All right, what’s next in 23.1? Do we have something?
Experiments
Oh yeah, there’s these custom taxonomies experiment in 23.1 with the custom post types and taxonomy management that started out as out of. I don’t know how that came about, but it probably is one of the radical speed month project as well that people say okay, we probably need to have content management when the APIs were in WordPress in 3.1. But there is no interface there and there were always plugins there to do this, be it custom UI, custom post UI or ACF or so. But there’s no interface for. And that’s where this experiment comes in to kind of push the envelope on that a bit. Have the REST controllers in there, have the interface in there. But it definitely is not the last word spoken there yet because that is a field where there have been a lot of extensions in the universe or in the WordPress ecosystem that might not fit in where this is going. So it’s just a. It’s a prototype kind of experimental way to do that. But check it out. You just have to enable the experiment in the Gutenberg plugin and then you can kind of try it out and work with it. It uses the common APIs.
The other experiment is the dashboard. We talked a little bit about it because that’s the grid package was created for that. The dashboard to have administ page routes and sidebar menus as a shell to add additional grids on the dashboard. I’m interested to see. I haven’t played with it yet but I want to see if I can. So what are the dashboards? The dashboard right now is just a. The quick edit and the site health and the news that’s on your dashboard right now and a few other things and plugin kind of tap into that as well. But I have never have not seen yet and I’m still thinking about it to. Maybe Claude can help me with that. Having a quick edit that’s a block editor actually. So when you log in into your WordPress site you don’t want to kind of just do all the other admin stuff. You just want to create a new post. So why not have it on the dashboard and create a blog post right there from the quick edit. Quick Edit only gives you text based things but not block editor.
Isabel Brison: So a block based quick edit, do you reckon all the blocks. I reckon it would need to be A very simplified version of the block editor.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah.
Isabel Brison: Maybe images, paragraphs, but yeah, that would be cool.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. Lists. Yeah. Like an outliner kind of. Yeah. Very fast kind of. Yeah. Maybe come back to the white space, but kind of instead of having a classic editor, just build blocks with it. Yeah. So kind of a distraction free, quick edit, full set, toolbar on top kind of thing. I don’t know. When I’m bored, I’m gonna star B. Prototype it. Prototype it. Yeah. And get it in. Yeah. That. That was one of the things that a lot of writers said. I don’t want to deal with all the stuff I’m getting so distracted. Yeah. There’s announcements and all that. So let me just start my blog post. But anyway, and then there is a list of Media editor modal call for testing. We talked about it. There’s a whole in 23.1. There’s a whole list of bigger and smaller PRs that went in. I think the call for testing gives you all the ins and outs of it that I think was. Was it. Did you find anything for 23.1 that you wanted to talk about further?
Isabel Brison: Not. Not really. Apart from the things that you’ve already highlighted. I just thought. I already mentioned that the media editor is also on the site logo block. So you can test it on both blocks and that’s it.
Gutenberg 23.2
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So right into Gutenberg. 23.2 was released on May 21st and also with 204 PRs by 50 contributors and there were four first timers there. Congratulations. You got your first contribution to WordPress core. Yeah. And you got your badge. Well, you got your badge when 7.1 is released, I guess the first feature that is listed is the responsive global block styles with states. This is so cool. Yeah. What does it say? Can you walk us through it?
Isabel Brison: Yeah. So this was the first part of the work towards enabling responsive styles for blocks. And it’s with States because it leverages a style states API that was already built. So Maggie Cabrera was who did that initial work for the States API, and her part was just leveraging it for adding the ability to style pseudo states for very few blocks have pseudo states. Well, this might be extended, but it won’t be super extended because not all blocks need to have pseudo by pseudo states, I mean hover focus and things like that. So usually only interactive blocks would need those.
And so States came about to cater to that pseudo element scenario. But it was always something that could potentially be extended further. And one of the use cases that had been thought out when this initial idea of having the states API was thought it was using it to be able to create responsive styles for blocks was one of the possibilities there. And I had been eyeballing all those issues that have been sitting in the Gutenberg repo for years about creating some mechanism that allows us to define responsive styles. And I finally had the opportunity to pick them up. And having that state’s work already partially done was great because, you know, sometimes it’s starting something is the hard part. And there were endless decisions in the repo about how should we build this and let’s do this and let’s do that and let’s not do that. And it’s like we should take this into account. You know, how you can talk and talk and talk and then it never actually starts because it seems like the problem is too big and too complicated. And the more that’s added to the discussion, the bigger and the more complicated it gets.
But there was this little stepping stone. This states API had already been built. And so I thought, well, it’s already in there for pseudo states, let’s try building responsive. So we call them viewport states. I’ve been working on this with my teammate Dan Richards. We’ve both started working on this and thought, okay, let’s do as sort of a baseline for global styles, but then as a stretch goal, let’s try and do it for actual block instance too. So we managed to do both in the end, but for 23.2, it was only the global block styles that was ready. And this means when you go into the site editor and into the style section, where you have global styles, then you go into blocks. This only works for blocks. It doesn’t work for top level global styles yet. We’re not quite sure. Well, we’re not quite sure if there’s a need to add this to top level stars yet. It’s still something that’s being thought about because for a lot of them, so a lot of really sort of global basic elements like typography, you know, font sizes. Okay, we already have ways of defining them responsively even without using breakpoints. So we are using the clamp function. You can define a maximum and a minimum and you can pretty much, you know, manipulate it so that you get your different font sizes on mobile and tablet and desktop. So there is to some extent you already have that responsive functionality there. So that’s something that might be looked at later on for enabling actual breakpoints for those global styles. But for now it only applies to blocks so for each block you can go into the block, into the block’s global styles and you can pick a state. There’s a new little states drop down at the top and so by default you’ll be styling the default state that’s you know, no media query. And then you have a tablet and a mobile state and the tablet state is only, so it’s, it’s only from you know, the top level. Like what’s your maximum Breakpoint to the minimum, which is the maximum for mobile. So the tablet styles will only apply to tablet to that breakpoint and then the mobile styles will only apply to their own breakpoint. And that’s. Yeah, essentially that’s it.
You can do anything color typography and spacing wise. So for most blocks you know, you have the typography, you have the colors, you have dimensions like not for most blocks you don’t have dimensions, you have, you know, margin, padding, block gap if the block has layout and you can define per break point what you want those values to be. And there are certain features that exist in global styles that do not yet work with, with that responsive logic and those. So when you enter that breakpoint you know, you get, you choose the tablet viewport and you’ll see that some of the tools might be hidden. So for instance, Duotone is one. You can’t set Duotone per breakpoint yet. This is something that will be worked on in the future but it feels like a bit like I’m not sure how many people will need to change the colors per break point. That’s not usually responsive styles are more about spacing dimensions, that sort of thing. So we focused more on those that felt like these are the ones that are really going to be used by most people and the more edge Casey ones if they don’t work out of the box, we sort of. Okay that, you know, that’s a problem for later. We’ll, we’ll figure it out later. And Duotone is one of those awesome.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Well a lot of people have been waiting for that a long time. So glad you, you finally started taking it.
Isabel Brison: I hope it’s useful. I just hope that folks can take this and like ok, okay, I can finally build the thing and yeah, and it works. And please, please, to anyone listening and wanting to try this out, if there’s anything that’s not working, if there’s anything you don’t like or you think, no, no, this should be different because it doesn’t work. Just please give us feedback. We need feedback because this is in the plugin now it’s aimed to go into 7.1. We still have those six weeks until beta one. Those six weeks will be iterating on the feature. The earlier we get feedback the better so that we know if there’s anything that really isn’t working for anyone then we can change it.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. So that’s a 23.2. There’s also a WordPress components called WordPress Theme and that’s actually the theme for the admin section. We have definitely confusion things going on because we use the same term for multiple things that are totally different and have nothing to do with each other except they are now motion design tokens for duration and easing in the WordPress theme component. So if you want to use those for your admin pages and plugins, go have at it. I am really because it kind of gets you a little bit more into a more interactive way to build websites and I think we really like those or I do. Yeah. Although I’m not a motion or animation kind of person. But yeah, I like when it’s nice.
Isabel Brison: Yeah. Little bits of discreet smooth animation here and there can really make a web experience.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. It’s kind of a quality of life kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. What else is in the 23? Yeah, the content types. It was an iteration on. We talked about it on the content types experiments with various improvements and post type and taxonomy management, duplicate view, quick edit actions. A ton of PRs have been added to that so it definitely is maturing and you can with 23.2 also the media editor modal had matured and there is now. I also will share in the show notes a link to an overview issue on the Dashboard experiment so you can go back and read up about it, what it’s all about. Because there’s a whole lot of work still being done with that.
Experiments
There’s also an experiment on the classic block migration notice. I’m just pointing that out because you might see it that the classic block might get deprecated or might not be available in certain situations.
Isabel Brison: Yeah. I believe the plan is to deprecate it and remove it at some point, but it’s a whole process because I guess lots of folks are using it. So it needs to be slow, give people time to adjust, choose alternatives.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, well it has been in Gutenberg for eight years and all that and actually what I found is that some of the AI tools actually create blocks that need to be. That are looking like classic blocks and need to be migrated to blocks before they can be in the block editor canvas. So, yeah, those things also need to be kind of tested in that space.
Isabel Brison: Yeah, that’s a good point. With AI, with AI tools increasingly being used to build websites and create and. Or move content across from other places, it. You don’t want AI sort of adding the classic block to its knowledge base and suddenly deciding that the easiest way to do anything is to just dump all the content into a classic block,
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Which what they’re doing right now. Yeah.
Isabel Brison: So this is a good time to deprecate it so that. Okay, let’s. Let’s ensure that AI works properly, that it’s easier for AI tools to work properly and do things as we expect them to.
Documentation
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It hasn’t been merged yet, but there is also a documentation issue. It’s a big. It was a big undertaking that Juan Margarito took on, was that it was found that an AI can’t really find documentation on the block markup for each of the core blocks. And that was a documentation gap that was kind of found that none of the block library blocks had a readme so it wouldn’t. So what Guan Ma did, he created automatically from the block JSON files a readme for each block on documentation site and then created some tokens where you can have on the readme additional manual content that’s put in there and then have a parser go through that and put it into the block editor handbook. And that is a really. So it talks about the supports, it talks about the, the, the global styles design tool supports about the block markup and also the connection with other blocks. It’s a comprehensive documentation about each block and that’s in the block handbook. It will be merged. We had a hardware hangout on it. We had a proposal on MakeBlog, a core block about that. And I think it’s finally going to be merged within I hope a week, but maybe days.
Isabel Brison: Oh, cool.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’ll be super useful. So it will be in the, in the block edit handbook. It has an additional 80 pages, of course. Yeah. But they’re all connected and categorized by blocks. And so now block developers and there were some comments from the community where people said, well, I wish I had that when I was starting out learning about block development and now it’s finally coming. But it was a huge undertaking because it kind of created a ton of new code and that all needs to be reviewed. And it was so. But there were a lot of people kind of working on that. Guided or spearheaded by Guan Ma but it’s now coming and it’s really cool. I’m so happy that it made it.
Isabel Brison: I mean, you can never have too much documentation, but developers are crap at writing it. So, you know, nowadays we have tools to assist us in the creation of the documentation and we should leverage them.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And the hybrid version, automatic documentation plus a way to have also manual content in that is actually a good combination because for some of the blocks, Joe Dawson from the Accessibility team has said, okay, maybe we also want to have some documentation about the accessibility of blocks. And anybody who has comments on that can add it to the, the readme file of that particular block to elaborate on that. And that is outside of any automation. You can just add it to the page. And it was really cool to see that process working. I post a link to the proposal into the show notes just as a side note here.
Gutenberg 23.3
And now we’re coming to 23.3. That was just released a day ago June 3rd with 270 closed PRs and 57 contributors. So we are ramping up to 7.1 kind of thing. And the first item on that is really cool that you can now that the notes section. And I think it was Adam Silverstein as well who worked on that.
Isabel Brison: Oh yeah, the multiple notes per block. Yeah. Oh, that’s cool. That’s really useful.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, so you can have multiple threads or comments per block. That’s also helpful when you work with AI that comes in and kind of reviews some of your post and posts notes in there. So yeah, it was really helpful. And it’s also. And he found it to be necessary to have that. So what’s missing in the notes in comparison to Google Docs is that you can highlight a section and then comment on that section. So yeah, like, okay, you probably can delete this half sentence or something like that. And that you couldn’t do that up until now. And with the multi threads on the notes for a block you can highlight a section because if the paragraph is, I don’t know, 10 lines or something like that, you might have multiple comments on the, on that block. And now you can have that. So it’s really cool.
Isabel Brison: Yeah. So the note is attached to a part of a block and not to the block itself.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. The next sections are a continuation on your quest for responsive styles.
Enhancements
Isabel Brison: Yeah, that’s part two, part two of the work which is enabling responsive styles for block instances. So again this, this was a part. So Maggie Cabrera had worked on the sudo style states for global styles and she had an open PR to add them to block instances. And Dan and I basically hijacked her PR with her approval of course. We asked Maggie first, can we just take this work that you. She was off doing something else. She wasn’t actively working on the PR at the time. We thought ah, we could just take that over and finish it and then build the responsive styles on top of it. So we did and that obviously there was work already pre-existing so it sort of made it easier to build it step by step on top of it. And now we have in 23.3 the ability to add responsive styles to. So any block, open a post, pick a block, open the inspector controls and then at the top where you have the block name you have this little menu which has a drop down that has the states.
So again just like with global styles we have tablet and mobile. The default is what you get by default what you already had. And then you have a tablet breakpoint and a mobile breakpoint. And for those again as in global styles there were a few things that didn’t really work out of the box, a few of the controls. So we decided to hide everything that doesn’t work. So for now what’s enabled is only the controls that you can actually create responsive styles with. Those are pretty much all the block supports, the standard block supports like color typography, dimensions, block gap. Now layout is also supported and we aside a sort of side effect of that was that we ended up moving the layout panel into the styles tab. And well that was sort of. I’d been wanting to do that for ages I have to say because to me it didn’t make any sense at all that layout was in at the same time. Settings tab and Dimensions, which has controls that are intimately related to layout such as block gap was in the styles tab. And so I felt the. The only thing that makes sense is to have them side by side. If it’s not the same panel, which I still think we could maybe make it the same panel. But that’s another different conversation. But at least they’re side by side. So now layout is in the styles panel. That’s the reason why it’s in the styles panel. So when we have a responsive state enabled we’re only showing the styles panel in the inspector and only the controls that work, which is most of them. There’s a couple of things that we had to hide again, you know, duotonethings like that.
And for block instances there are some blocks have custom controls and some of those custom controls should probably become Block supports. Some are like aspect ratio is a block support, but there’s only one block using it and there’s a couple of blocks that have their own custom implementation of aspect ratio. This is something that should change. I have an open PR to try and enable aspect ratio to work responsively because I feel that that’s one of the important ones that people will want to change aspect ratios for different breakpoints. So that’s in progress and what our plan is basically to try to get as much as we can working until 7.1.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Awesome. So when I want to start testing this, I’m going to add a paragraph to my block canvas and then I go to the block inspector and say, okay, this paragraph, I want a different background for a different viewport. So on the mobile I want it green and on tablet I want it yellow and on desktop I want it gray.
Isabel Brison: Yep, you can do that.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay. Yeah, so that’s how I will change it.
Isabel Brison: You go into. So you give the default. The desktop is the default. I guess we’re not mobile. We were never mobile first really. I mean Gutenberg has from the beginning being a dev stop first experience. And that’s how it’s sort of turned out to be. So you have default desktop and then you can go into the tablet state, you can select the tablet state and then whatever you add to the visible controls in the block inspector in that state is exclusive to that state. And you can go into the mobile and choose a different color for that and save everything and then you can go and do the good old resizing. Well, in the block editor we leveraging the responsive preview, the sort of device specific preview to show you a preview of what the styles are as you’re editing them. And then once you go into the front end, you can resize your window to your heart’s content and see all the changes happening.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right, all right. So that is really cool and I’m looking forward to kind of testing it out and trying it out and have opinions.
Isabel Brison: Yeah, yeah, no, lots of opinions, I’m sure. And one of the things that I feel like we haven’t got 100% right is the previewing because you switch like you go enable mobile state for this block and it switches you to the mobile preview. But then you can select another block while still being in the mobile preview and then you’re not in the mobile state for that blocking. So I feel like this is something that we’re working on. We need to improve that experience and feedback. Again, very welcome. What are your opinions on this and how you think it would be the most intuitive to work with.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, awesome. Yeah. I’m thinking maybe we should actually have a demo hallway hangout about that somewhere. Let me think about that. Well, I have a time issue because I’m going on vacation.
Isabel Brison: Okay. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Coming back to the beginning of July, but yeah, definitely. Maybe find somebody to do a demo video or something like that. Well, the demos are all on the PR, so definitely check those out because they’re the best way to learn how to use that and how what works or what doesn’t work. Yeah. All right. What’s else in 23.3?
Isabel Brison: There was so much. Well, the media editor was stabilized, so now it’s no longer an experiment. You get it by default whether you want it or not. Again, I mean, we hope to get feedback on that. I think it’s a pretty good piece of work, honestly.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it is. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Just wanted to. You said it in the. You talked about it. But if you are looking for the layout panel after 23.3 Gutenberg plugin install, it’s not hidden, it’s not lost. It’s in the Styles tab now.
Isabel Brison: Yes.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Some content creators that are not interested in this, all that, they might have a little oops, where is it? Kind of thing. It’s in the other tab now. Yeah.
Isabel Brison: And that is. It might be weird for blocks that still have a Settings panel. So, for blocks, what happened with the group block? For instance, the group block only had layout and position in Settings, so we moved position into styles. Because it makes sense. Position is a style. And now the group block doesn’t have a Settings tab. So you open the group. I think it’s much easier because you don’t have clicking, clicking, clicking. Everything’s there, everything’s visible. Layout, position, all the other controls in the same tab for other blocks. For instance, the navigation block still has a bunch of stuff in Settings. So if you put a navigation block on the page and suddenly you’re, oh, where’s the layout controls gone? Okay, they’re in the Styles tab. They’re no longer in the Settings tab.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: I just wanted to point that out. People kind of miss that part because they’re so excited about the responsiveness.
And then there’s also. Oh, there was one thing that was fixed. It was a. I would say it was a bug, but it is an enhancement that the additional CSS. If there was an error in there, you wouldn’t see that when you get back into the post again, until you interact with the additional CSS field, you wouldn’t see the error message. So unless you interact with that, you wouldn’t see that it’s actually not working. That has changed. That now has a little notification that there is something in the additional CSS that’s not valid CSS for those who muck about with that. Yeah. And here it is. The PR78653 has the modal media editor, image cropper modal being the default experience for the block editor. It’s out of experiments in. Another thing for 23.3 is that Gutenberg upgraded to React 19. This is important for plugin developers and those who have a very tight handle on the dependencies for their work. React 19 is now the default and there might be dragons out there. Please, please, please, yeah. Give feedback on that. Create issues what works and what doesn’t work. Especially what doesn’t work. So those can be fixed PR 7.1 so you don’t have any surprises later on. What else? I think those were the, the big items.
Isabel Brison: Yeah, I mean I’ve, I’ve been sort of like under, under my responsive styles rock for these past few weeks just working on that. Very, very fixated on getting this thing right.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So I have to say nothing.
Isabel Brison: I mean it’s definitely got a huge amount of attention to. Yeah. What else is out there?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Definitely God’s work.
Isabel Brison: Hopefully it’s worth it.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think that’s it. As I said, there are 270 PRs. So. Yeah. And it just has been released for a while ago.
Isabel Brison: There’s a lot of enhancements and bug fixes and stuff in here.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that’s it. I think we are good. So, dear listeners, you will see on the Weekend Edition and the Gutenberg Changelog will pause during my vacation. I’m going on vacation next week, which is June 15th and I’m coming back in beginning of July. So in time for 7.1 beta, you’ll hear us again and you will read us again.
I’m so happy, Isabel, you are here on the show to walk us through all the good things that come with Gutenberg to 7.1, especially the responsive parts. The responsive parts. I like that. Responsive parts. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy work schedule and be on the show and walk us through that.
Isabel Brison: No worries. You always enjoy this show.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, thank you so much. And as always, dear listeners, the show notes will be published on GutenbergTimes.com podcast. This is episode 1311 31st. And if you have questions or suggestions or news you want us to include, send them to changelogutenbergtimecs.com that’s changelogutenburgtimes.com.
Thank you all for listening. And until the next time, and I see you in July.
This is the time of the year when publishing on the Gutenberg Times becomes less frequent. I will be on vacation and back at the beginning of July with the weekend edition, just in-time for Beta 1 of WordPress 7.1. Three more Gutenberg plugin releases will happen before that.
What also happened was that someone grabbed my instagram account in this AI hack at Meta. Although Meta reports this as resolved, I probably won’t get my account back. I am now actively looking for a better way to share my photos without the overlords that can’t keep things tight. It’s not that I didn’t know better. <sigh/> It’s a cautionary tale for what’s in store for all internet services handing over crucial business processes to a gulliable AI.
I had the great pleasure of going on the OpenMakers show with Abha Thakor to talk through what WordPress 7.0 “Armstrong” means for you. First, the safety bit: test on a staging site or Playground before updating, and check your PHP. Then the good stuff. Visual revisions show edits in context with color coding. Notes keep feedback inside the editor. Patterns gain content-only editing, blocks can hide by device, and new AI connector APIs give developers a unified foundation. Real-time editing waits for a later release.
On Saturday, Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic will close out WordCamp Europe 2026 with his keynote. Afterward, the organizers will reveal where WordCamp Europe 2027 will take place. Tune in around 2:15 UTC / 8:15 am EDT.
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
Arthur Chu walks you through what’s new in Gutenberg 23.3. The modal media editor is now the default for cropping. It pulls cropping, flip, rotation, and metadata into one place. The experimental customizable dashboard grows too, with five new widgets you can drag and resize. Responsive styles now reach individual blocks, so designs adapt per screen.
Rae Morey reports that Gutenberg 23.3 brings an experimental, customizable WordPress dashboard. It’s the admin’s biggest structural shakeup in years. You can drag, resize, and rearrange widgets like Welcome, Activity, and Site Health to fit how you actually work. It’s the first testable preview of a long-discussed overhaul. Enable it under Gutenberg > Experiments to try it.
Jarda Snajdr reports that the React 19 upgrade has been reverted in Gutenberg. Shortly after 23.3.0 shipped, many plugins built for React 18 started crashing. The APIs barely changed, but the runtimes clashed: React 19 rejects elements made by a bundled React 18 JSX helper. So 23.3.2 rolls back to React 18. The team still plans the upgrade for 7.1—this time with a feature flag and a compatibility layer.
Isabel Brison and I chatted extensively about the latest Gutenberg plugin releases 23.1 to 23.3 and discussed the responsive controls now available in the Gutenberg plugin for desktop, tablet and mobile view ports. The episode will drop in your favorite podcast app over the weekend.
Rich Tabor shares a few “little big things” for WordPress editing. The idea is simple: complexity has piled up, and small fixes can clear it. His PRs make block locking a one-click job in List View. They keep you in place when editing synced patterns, instead of whisking you off to another view. And zooming out reuses the familiar Patterns Explorer. He’s not precious about them—contributors are warmly invited to take them over the line.
Dave Smith walks you through an interactive prototype reimagining the WordPress Site Editor around user goals rather than system architecture. Built during Automattic’s Radical Speed Month, it keeps the same blocks, templates, and data model intact while changing entry points, language, and defaults. Since internal research flags the Site Editor as the top driver of negative support outcomes, you’ll see how remapping it around what you want to do could ease that friction. It’s an experiment, not a roadmap.
Calls for Testing for WordPress 7.1
With WordPress 7.0 out the door, contributors shared a series of Calls for testing this week to prepare for WordPress 7.1. The schedule is tight with Beta 1 slated for July 15, 2026.
Ramon Dodd puts out a call for testing the new Media Editor Modal. Cropping in the block editor hasn’t changed much in years, and the old inline tool leans on a limited third-party library. This new standard way of Image edition inside the Block editor replaces it with a WordPress-native one. You get freeform and aspect-ratio cropping, flip, rotation, and metadata editing in one place. The quickest way to try it is a ready-made Playground link. Feedback is welcome via the comments or GitHub.
Anne McCarthy announced a collaborative editing outreach effort for WordPress 7.1. After real-time collaboration was pulled from 7.0, this gathers real-world early adopters across many hosting setups to find bugs faster. It lives in one Slack channel, #collaborative-editing-outreach. If you’d use collaborative editing regularly and run the latest Gutenberg, you’re invited—through the cycle, with a test team badge at the end.
Adam Silverstein puts out a call for testing client-side media processing, now targeting WordPress 7.1. Here’s the idea: when you upload an image, your browser resizes and encodes every size locally using VIPS in WebAssembly, before anything reaches the server. That eases CPU and memory load on hosts and brings modern formats like AVIF, WebP, HEIC, and JPEG XL to every site. Browsers that can’t cope fall back quietly to server-side. Try it in Chromium with the latest Gutenberg.
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
Brian Coords invites you to a live panel on practical AI workflows for WordPress and WooCommerce on Tuesday, June 30, 2026, at 10am PDT. Hosted with Shani Banerjee and featuring Nik McLaughlin, Kyle Runner, and Suzanne Kolpakov, the conversation covers WooCommerce MCP, the WordPress Abilities API, Pressable MCP, and making your own plugins more agent-ready. You’ll come away with practical ideas for managing stores and guiding cautious clients, plus open Q&A. Can’t make it live? Register anyway for the recording.
Nathan Wrigley talks with plugin reviewer Luke Carbis about the future of WordPress plugins on the Jukebox podcast. Here’s the worry: plugin submissions have quadrupled in a year, largely AI-generated, so good plugins struggle to stand out. Carbis floats ideas you can test: logging into your site with your WordPress.org account, installing from your own Git repos, or a commercial marketplace funding contributors. They also weigh AI ethics, a generational backlash, and his proposed AI-disclosure header for the directory.
Wes Theron published a new training video and you can learn how to customize your site’s navigation menus with AI. Once your site is connected, you describe the change and the agent makes it. You’ll learn to add a page to your header, remove an outdated link, and reorder items. It also covers building dropdown menus under an unclickable parent, adding a footer menu, and linking to blog categories. The point: clear menus help visitors find what matters.
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
Ajit Bohra and the LUBUS team released Color Palette Block 2.0, a free plugin for building and sharing color palettes in the block editor. It grew out of their own client and internal documentation needs. It’s handy for brand kits, design systems, and style guides. You add swatches manually, pull from your theme, or generate random ones. Pick from four display styles—Square, Polaroid, Circle, or Droplet—and copy each color as HEX, RGB, HSL, or a CSS variable.
Justin Tadlock shares a playful tutorial on registering custom icons for WordPress 7.0’s new Icon block. Since the public registration API won’t land until 7.1, you’ll learn a clever workaround using PHP Reflection to reach the protected WP_Icons_Registry::register() method, bundling SVGs in your theme through an Icon enum and registrar class. Built on work by Ryan Welcher and Nick Diego, it’s educational fun—not for production, where Nick’s Icon Block plugin still does the job properly.
“Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2025” A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test, and Meta team from Jan. 2024 on. Updated by yours truly.
Casey Burridge introduced Block MCP, GravityKit’s open-source WordPress MCP server. The problem it solves is familiar: existing MCPs treat a post as one HTML blob, so AI edits strip block markers and break your layout. Block MCP exposes each block as an addressable unit with a stable ID. Your agent can make surgical edits, batch up to 50 changes atomically, and undo any of them. In their tests across Claude models, only Block MCP worked reliably.
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.
It’s good to be home again. It was an unusually long break, but I appreciate the series of official bank holidays that morph into long weekends away from the computer.
And of course, the catch-up is overwhelming. The creativity inside the WordPress community around content creation, development and design is highly energizing.
And it’s WordPress 7.0 release week! It’s finally here!
So don’t let me keep you any longer. Enjoy!
If you want to stop long enough to send me a note, I’d be delighted to hear from you.
Yours, Birgit
WordCamp Europe is coming up fast. It’ll take place Jun 4 to 6, 2026. The schedule just was posted. If you still are on the fence about getting your ticket. Here are another 49 reasons to head to Krakow. The schedule lists 34 Talks, 3 Panels, 10 Workshops and 2 Keynotes.
For armchair WordCampers, like myself, there will be a livestream. After the WordCamp recordings will be uploaded to YouTube and WordPressTV.
Closing Keynote with Matt Mullenweg on Saturday June 6, 2026.
if you rather stay in North America, WordCamp US just opened up the online ticket booth. It’ll take place from August 16 to August 19, 2026, in Phoenix, AZ. The calls for sponsors and speakers are also available now. The deadline for speaker submissions is next week Friday May 29, 2026.
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
WordPress 7.0 “Armstrong”
After the decision to remove Real-time Collaboration from the release because it needs more time in the oven, so to speak, the release squad was really busy to produced RC 3 – 5 before the final release on Wednesday May 20, 2026.
Abha Thakor and I talked through a few features for the OpenChannels.fm episode to come out on Tuesday, May 26, 2026.
Justin Nealey product manager at GoDaddy breaks down why WordPress 7.0’s three new APIs matter far more than the headline features for plugin developers. The Connectors API means site owners manage their own AI provider keys centrally; WP AI Client gives you a single provider-agnostic call to invoke any model; and the Abilities API turns your plugin into something the site’s AI agent can reach for autonomously. Together, Nealey argues, your plugin stops being a destination users visit and becomes a verb the agent performs.
Ronak Vanpariya, web developer on Gujarat, India digs into why Real-Time Collaboration was pulled from WordPress 7.0 with a five-point technical post-mortem. You’ll learn how RTC had to work across every corner of the Site Editor, how simultaneous edits triggered race conditions corrupting block data, and how the feature’s reliance on persistent server connections would have overwhelmed shared hosting environments. Memory bloat on older devices and recurring block-tree breakage uncovered by fuzz testing sealed the decision. The feature lives on in the Gutenberg plugin.
Mike McAlister, creator of Ollie, released a video walkthrough of WordPress 7.0covering the features he sees as most impactful for site builders. He walks through the new AI infrastructure — WP AI Client and the Connectors API — content-only pattern editing, customizable mobile menu overlays, block visibility controls for responsive design, per-block custom CSS, visual revisions, the new Icon and Breadcrumbs blocks, an upgraded Font Library screen, and a command palette shortcut.
In other WordPress Core news:
Immediately after the release of WordPress 7.0, Jeff Paul published the WordPress 7.1 Call for Volunteers. Work has already started since the firsty 7.0 Beta in February. The first beta for WordPress 7.1 is roughly eight weeks out and scheduled for July 15, 2026, and the final release for August 19, 2026 aimed at the last day of WordCamp US.
In addition to the punted Real-time collaboration feature, I discovered a few tracking issue for WordPress 7.1 already:
#76525: Block Supports and Design Tools in WordPress 7.1 Opened by Aaron Robertshaw, this tracks new and enhanced block supports for 7.1, carrying over items descoped from 7.0. A living issue is updated as supports are added or dropped from the release scope.
#75707: Block Visibility: Configurable Breakpoints and theme.json Integration The follow-up to 7.0’s block visibility work. The goal is to let themes define custom breakpoints via theme.json and make visibility extensible for future responsive features — laying a solid foundation before more viewport-aware tools arrive.
#76045: DataViews, DataForm, et al. in WordPress 7.1 Tracks continued iteration on DataViews, DataViewsPicker, DataForm, and the Field API. Key work includes migrating @wordpress/dataviews to the new Design System primitives and extending DataForm to PHP-only blocks.
#77199: Block Bindings in WordPress 7.1 Narrowed in scope to match contributor availability. The headline goal is integrating the Block Bindings UI into Block Fields and removing the previous Block Bindings UI, plus adding Block Bindings support for the Cover block.
First-time release lead Paulo Trentin brought us the latest version for the Gutenberg plugin, 23.2. In his release post What’s new in Gutenberg 23.2? (21 May he highlighted: You can now style blocks differently for tablets and phones right from Global Styles, so your designs adapt to each screen. Pop-up dialogs slide up from the bottom on mobile, making them easier to tap one-handed, and animations across the editor now share a consistent feel. You’ll also see smoother Content Types management, friendlier Shortcode handling, clearer Revisions diff markers for better accessibility, and steadier real-time collaboration when teammates edit together.
Justin Tadlock rounds up what’s new for WordPress developers in May 2026, with WordPress 7.0 landing on May 20. You’ll find early details on the Content Types experiment for managing custom post types and taxonomies in Core, a new @wordpress/grid package for building grid-based editor UIs, revisions support extended to templates and patterns, and a wave of block fixes covering the Tabs block, Image alignment, Search block styling, and Global Styles rendering.
If you are interested in learning more about this, the Content Types tracking issue outlines the experiment to bring custom taxonomy and post type management into the WordPress editor. The initial focus is on simple use cases — complex ones stay in plugin territory — with open tasks including a dedicated creation page, richer fields, a quick-edit versus full-edit distinction, and deeper DataViews integration. It’s a living issue and community input is welcome.
John Blackbournclarified WordPress’s PHP support stance in a post that’s worth flagging for developers and hosts. The “beta” label for PHP 8.x support has been retired and removed retroactively from all WordPress versions. It was discouraging hosts and developers from upgrading. In short:
The minimum recommended version remains PHP 8.3;
the minimum supported version is PHP 7.4.
Versions 6.9 and 7.0 now officially fully support PHP 8.5,
Request Logging gives administrators visibility into every AI request fired across Core, plugins, and themes;
Connector Approvals lets admins control which plugins can access configured AI providers.
Beyond governance, you’ll find comment moderation upgrades with sentiment and toxicity sorting right in the dashboard, AI alt text generation baked into the media editor workflow, and editorial workflow terminology tidied up. Looking ahead to 1.1.0, the team is exploring type-ahead suggestions, focus-aware crop suggestions, an AI Playground, and C2PA content provenance tracking for both text and images.
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
Jay Walsh, Director of Communications at Woo, announced that WooCommerce stores can now sell directly on YouTube via the Google for WooCommerce extension. You connect your store, tag products from your catalog in videos and Shorts, and they surface as shoppable cards while viewers watch — and also appear in your Channel Shopping tab. The same Merchant Center product feed that powers Google Shopping and Performance Max campaigns keeps everything in sync automatically, with AI-generated ad creative variations across formats included in version 3.6.
OpenRouter for routing across hundreds of models with cost optimization,
LM Studio for fully local inference suited to GDPR-sensitive workflows, and a
Universal OpenAI connector for any OpenAI-compatible endpoint including Ollama, Groq, and Mistral.
All three are built on the same PHP AI Client SDK heading into WordPress Core 7.0, so your setup today carries forward without code changes after the upgrade.
Artur Piszek explains how he uses WordPress as a sync backend for Obsidian with PushMD. This plugin was created with Adam Zielinski, the maker of Playground. It allows you to treat your WordPress site as a git remote using the REST API. You can git clone your blog as plain .md files. Write in Obsidian and push updates to sync. This setup turns your site into a repository without needing an external service. It is also compatible with the upcoming Guidelines/Artifacts system in WordPress Core, which lets you store private notes and configurations there too.
Seth Rubenstein at Pew Research Center shared a preview of PRC Block Bits, now open-sourced on GitHub. Block Bits solves a specific gap between block bindings and RichText: where bindings replace an entire block’s content with dynamic data, a “bit” lets you embed small dynamic pieces — an inline icon, a copyright year, live text — right in the middle of a paragraph or heading. You register bits via a PHP and JS API, choose between a pure-PHP callback or Interactivity API strategy, and an editor toolbar dropdown handles insertion. Built-in bits for icons and copyright ship out of the box.
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
Damir Tahiri of Rareview has open-sourced the WordPress starter theme that underpins every one of the agency’s builds. It’s Gutenberg-ready, ships with global style variables, includes a one-command Figma sync, and runs an interactive setup that renames and configures everything automatically. You can grab it on GitHub and use it as the foundation for your own projects.
“Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2025” A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test, and Meta team from Jan. 2024 on. Updated by yours truly.
On the WordPress Developer blog, Róbert Mészáros shows you how to get started writing WordPress E2E tests with Playwright, using a book review site built on Block Bindings as the test subject. You’ll set up wp-env and Playwright, write your first test against the admin dashboard, then progress to inserting block variations, verifying patterns with aria snapshots, and testing front-end output by creating posts via the REST API.
Also on the WordPress Developer Blog, Felix Arntz, Senior Software Engineer at Vercel, walks you through building a provider-agnostic image generation plugin using WordPress 7.0’s built-in AI Client. You’ll see how a single wp_ai_client_prompt() call handles provider routing, how support checks gate your UI gracefully when no image-capable provider is configured, and how the REST API and Media Library integration come together. The full source code is on GitHub at wptrainingteam/ai-client-imagegen.
Sérgio Santos, Lead Engineer at 10up/Fueled, diagnoses three specific bugs you hit when using RichText outside a block — in InspectorControls or a Modal. The format toolbar fills route to the wrong slot, the inline toolbar is opt-in via inlineToolbar, and isSelected never turns true outside a block context. Each problem gets a targeted fix, and the pattern has since been packaged as a reusable component in 10up Block Components.
Eric Karkovack walks you through using my.WordPress.net as a safe AI sandbox — no production site at risk. You install WordPress in your browser in two steps, add the AI Assistant app from the apps menu, connect it to Anthropic, OpenAI, or a local Ollama model, and start prompting. It’s a low-stakes way to explore what AI can do inside WordPress before committing it to a live environment, though API costs from OpenAI or Anthropic still apply.
Fresh from last week’s WordCamp Portugal:
Imran Sayed presented The Fastest Way to Build Gutenberg Blocks: Modern Tools, Scripts, and AI at WordCamp Portugal 2026. The talk cuts through the complexity of custom block development by focusing on practical, immediately usable workflows built around modern WordPress tools and scripts.
Milana Cap presented WordPress Gems for Devs: Accessibility with Interactivity API and makes the case that it’s one of the most exciting APIs to land in WordPress in recent releases, with positive implications not just for developer experience but for performance and user experience too.
Jorge Costa presented AI is in WordPress Core. Here’s How to Use It. The talk digs into the AI building blocks already shipped in WordPress Core — the WP AI Client, the Abilities API, and the MCP adapter, and shows you exactly how to bring AI-powered features into your own plugins, themes, and sites.
JuanMa Garrido presented WordPress Development and Management with Claude Code. The talk treats Claude Code as a command center for WordPress work, generating block themes from HTML designs, querying a production site in natural language, installing plugins, and reading error logs, all from the terminal. Three concepts are at the core: Skills, MCP, and the Abilities API.
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.
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…
Estimated reading time
19–29 minutes
at
4,552 words
Table of Contents
Changelog
Any changes are cataloged here as the release goes on.
WordPress 7.0 has a new release date: May 20th, 2026! (see post).
The RTC performance testing script automatically tests all 4 possible architecture approaches. Follow the instructions on the repository. Still under development, though. Release and Call for hosting testing planned for Friday April 24. (See Slack discussion)
RTC: Added Introduce filters for the polling intervals (76518)
March 27, 2026: First edition
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Short video on how to use the tags to navigate the post.
Priority items for WordPress 7.0
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.
Anne McCarthy also gives a great walk through the screens on Youtube:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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)
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.
Chris Huber, developer at Automattic, released Block Format Bridge, an open-source plugin that addresses one of the more persistent friction points in AI-assisted WordPress workflows: getting AI-generated content into the block editor reliably.
The plugin takes a pragmatic approach. Block markup is notoriously difficult for AI to produce correctly — not because AI models lack capability, but because of how the format works. As Dennis Snell explained back in 2017 in his still-essential post Gutenberg posts aren’t HTML, a Gutenberg post is a serialized tree structure that happens to be stored as HTML with JSON-carrying comment delimiters. It was never designed to be written by hand — or by an AI inferring its way through a save() function it can’t actually execute. The result, for anyone building publishing automations, REST API integrations, or agent workflows that call wp_insert_post(), is a familiar failure mode: content that saves fine, then opens in the editor with invalid blocks or silently falls back to the classic editor.
Even a block as common as a styled quote illustrates the problem:
The generated HTML should be treated as throwaway code.
Dennis Snell
JSON
<!-- wp:quote {"className":"is-style-large"} --><blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-style-large"> <p>The generated HTML should be treated as throwaway code.</p> <cite>Dennis Snell</cite></blockquote><!-- /wp:quote -->
The className attribute in the comment has to match the class on the HTML element. The cite tag must follow the exact structure the block’s save() function produces. Get either wrong and the block is invalid — and with more complex blocks like wp:cover or wp:columns, the surface area for errors grows considerably.
HTML to Blocks converter and vice versa
Block Format Bridge sidesteps the problem by letting AI output what it does well — Markdown or plain HTML — and handling the conversion to block markup server-side, using established PHP libraries. It builds on chubes4/html-to-blocks-converter for the write side, WordPress core’s do_blocks() for rendering, and league/commonmark and league/html-to-markdown for Markdown support.
It also adds a ?content_format= query parameter to the REST API, so AI agents can fetch existing post content as Markdown — not raw block markup — which makes edit workflows considerably more reliable.
The architecture is extensible. New formats can be added by registering a new adapter without touching the core bridge, and the bfb_default_format filter lets you declare that a custom post type writes in Markdown by default, so any code path calling wp_insert_post() gets the same conversion behavior automatically.
Does This Need a Skill?
After sharing an early draft of this post with Chris Huber, he offered a perspective worth sitting with: this plugin is designed to eliminate a skill rather than add one.
When Block Format Bridge is bundled as a dependency and the system prompt simply instructs the agent to insert post content as Markdown, the AI doesn’t need to know the plugin exists at all. A single line — “post content should be inserted as Markdown” — is enough. The conversion happens automatically, invisibly, in PHP. The complexity disappears into infrastructure rather than into instructions.
That’s a different philosophy from agent-skills, which is about making AI aware of patterns and tools. The more elegant approach here is the opposite: good tooling that makes the AI less aware, not more. An end user of a plugin built on top of Block Format Bridge would never know it exists — they’d just see valid blocks in the editor.
A skill may still have a role for developers who don’t control the system prompt and need to guide agent behavior through other means. But for anyone building AI-powered WordPress plugins or automations, the cleaner pattern is to bundle the plugin, set the default format, and let the infrastructure do its job.
A draft skill is available below for those who do want to experiment with the agent-skills approach.
A draft skill can be downloaded to use the Block Format Bridge .
All is still a work in progress so there might be dragons
As a small footnote, this post was drafted with AI assistance and had to be converted to blocks before I could edit it. —which felt fitting given the subject
Login
