If you’re a regular reader, you might be wondering why I’m in your inbox instead of Birgit. She’s off on a well-earned three-month sabbatical and handed over editorial duties to me while she’s away. The one change: for the next few months, the Weekend Edition will arrive every two weeks or so instead of every week.
As an Automattic employee, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t feeling a range of emotions about the shifts in the company. I cannot talk about internal company conversations, but I can’t exactly avoid the biggest news in the WordPress world, either.
So, for my first Weekend Edition, I want to offer my support to Matt, my fellow Automatticians, and the people in the WordPress community. I’m just as passionate about the WordPress project today as I’ve ever been. Neither the core philosophy of democratizing publishing nor our principles around free software have changed. The only thing we can do is push forward and keep building a tool that so many people’s lives and businesses rely on.
With that, let’s get down to the latest news.
WordPress 7.1.1 is on track for Thursday, September 17. It’s a bug-fix release, so if you maintain anything built on 7.1’s newer features, grab the release candidate and give it a spin before then. More on that below.
And if you need a break this weekend, WordCamp World is an unofficial pixel-art adventure set at a fictional flagship WordCamp, complete with a Contributor Day and a closing ceremony. The game was released by The WP World, an independent community project run by Marcus Burnette. Jonathan Bossenger took it for a spin in his latest stream.
Have fun this weekend and enjoy life!
Your friendly WordPress developer advocate, Justin Tadlock
Table of Contents
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
Finding the inserter on some block selections has been a small, constant annoyance, and Gutenberg 23.9 finally fixes that. The what’s new in Gutenberg 23.9 post leads with inserting blocks straight from the block toolbar. Global Styles also gets dot indicators for blocks with custom style overrides, plus a filter to show only those blocks. Theme authors get separate vertical and horizontal gap control for the Group block, theme.json styling for <label> elements, Global Styles controls for citations, inputs, and selects, and custom Duotone colors.
WordPress 7.1.1 RC1 is out, with the final release scheduled for Thursday, September 17. It’s a bug-fix-only maintenance release covering 16 Core tickets and 22 Gutenberg pull requests, all for issues that surfaced during the 7.1 cycle or were deferred at the end of it. Adam Silverstein, Adrian Duffell, and Andra Ganescu are co-leading, and the 7.1.1 release schedule has the details. If you maintain anything that leans on responsive styles, the Icon Registration API, or the iframed editor, test the RC now.
On the Developer Blog, I rounded up what’s new for developers (September 2026). The consistent theme this month is things that already existed have become more declarable, documented, or schema-valid. You’ll find blocks declaring their own keyboard shortcuts through variations and transforms, theme.json schema fixes so valid responsive styles stop showing up as errors, and schema support for PHP-only blocks.
Contributors, check your local setup. As of September 8, trunk in both wordpress-develop and gutenbergrequires Node.js 24 and npm 11. Manzoor Wani shared the specifics: the minimums are Node.js 24.18.0 and npm 11.16.0, and the required CI checks now run on Node.js 24. If you have a pull request based on an older trunk, rebase it to pick up those checks. Older branches keep their previous requirements.
On the road to WordPress 7.2
The 7.2 cycle is officially underway. Jeffrey Paulannounced the WordPress 7.2 release squad, with Matt Mullenweg as release lead, David Baumwald on release coordination, and George Mamadashvili and Peter Wilson as tech leads. Theme folks will want to note the default theme leads: Henrique Iamarino on design, and Maggie Cabrera and Carolina Nymark on development. Beta 1 is scheduled for October 20–22, with the final release set for December 8–10. Jb Audras also posted the bug scrub schedule for 7.2 if you want to pitch in.
Notes has grown a lot since WordPress 6.9, picking up @mentions, rich text, and the ability to resolve and respond along the way. Anne McCarthy explains where it stands: “Notes are hard to discover, cumbersome to use, and tricky to track where and when they are left.” Her plan for elevating and refining the WordPress Notes feature aims to fix that by 7.2 Beta 1. It calls for a more visible spot in the block toolbar, a suggestion mode, Notes open alongside the Settings sidebar, and emoji reactions. If your clients or editorial team use Notes, now’s a good time to weigh in.
Icon fonts have had a good run but are feeling very dated in 2026. Joen Asmussen makes the case for replacing Dashicons in the admin bar and menu with SVG icons rendered through wp_get_icon(), which was introduced in WordPress 7.1. Screen readers handle icon fonts inconsistently, and they don’t render properly in Windows High Contrast Mode. SVGs with aria-label and currentColor behave predictably. A couple of design questions are still open, including whether the Posts icon becomes a quill pen. Block developers, take note of the follow-up: future work to let block.json icon registration use WordPress icons instead of Dashicons.
Share your feedback
How did the 7.1 cycle go in your opinion? Benjamin Zekavica opened the WordPress 7.1 release retrospective, and it isn’t only for people who contributed code. You can share feedback through the linked form or in the comments until September 30. Submissions are anonymized in the follow-up summary.
Joe Dolson shared the next steps in planning for the Accessibility Lab plugin. The plugin, which recently moved to the WordPress GitHub organization, is a space for exploring and experimenting with accessibility solutions. The team wants input on features, priorities, and how to measure success, in the comments or as issues on the repository. There’s also a planning meeting on Thursday, September 17, at 15:00 UTC.
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
WooCommerce 11.1 is out, and the big news for store owners is that variation image galleries are now on for every store. Karol Manijak explains that additional variation images are now part of WooCommerce core, so the standalone extension deactivates itself on update and existing galleries migrate automatically. The release also adds an opt-in right of order withdrawal for EU compliance, beta support for video in product galleries, and noticeably faster Store API requests (more on that below). Test the update on staging first, especially if you have a large catalog of variations.
Looking ahead a bit more: WooCommerce is prepping to drop PHP 7.4 and 8.0 support. Brian Coords shared a proposal to require PHP 8.1 or newer starting with WooCommerce 11.5, targeted for January 2027. If you’re an agency, host, or extension developer, the team wants to hear about migration barriers before the decision is final. Given one of the most-used WordPress plugins in the world is ready to make this version leap, I’d say it’s worth other plugins following suit.
Should you create a post type, a taxonomy, or a custom field? It’s one of the first questions you’ll face when structuring content models. A guest author on the Meta Box blog answers it with a three-question framework for choosing between custom post types, taxonomies, and custom fields. A book library example ties it together with a book post type, a genre taxonomy, and fields for the ISBN and page count. The rule of thumb: plan early, because turning fields into taxonomies later can get complicated.
The latest WordPress.com changelog rolls out a redesigned Hosting Dashboard, WordPress 7.1 arriving on WordPress.com sites, and a new MCP-based integration. That integration lets ChatGPT, Claude, and other compatible agents connect to your site to draft posts, moderate comments, and fix alt text. Two smaller updates are worth checking out if you work with clients: you can share a link to a specific post revision for review, and the Playlist block now has per-track toolbars.
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
Patterns or synced patterns or template parts? WordPress has several ways to build a reusable component, and each comes with its own constraints or drawbacks. In his recap of agency workflows, components, and highlights from WCUS, Brian Coords digs into what that overlap means for agencies building block themes, including governance and version control in the Site Editor. He also points to a pull request that lets registered synced patterns be used inside PHP-only blocks, and floats it as a proof of concept for a future component model.
WordPress now has multiple ways to say, “make this look right on mobile,” such as fluid typography and spacing, hiding blocks by viewport, and the responsive styles that shipped in 7.1. Anne McCarthy has a plan for bringing together responsive features into one connected system. As she puts it, “We’ve built some great individual features but they don’t work coherently nor are they connected well visually.” She links the open issues and a pull request reworking the switch between responsive styling and preview modes, so theme builders have a clear place to weigh in.
“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.
Why pay for block registration on a request that will never render a block? That’s the thinking behind WooCommerce 11.1 skipping block registration on Store API, REST API, variation AJAX, and product webhook requests, which are now 13–18 ms (30–42%) faster. If a description contains WooCommerce blocks, they’re registered on demand, so rendering isn’t affected. If your extension relies on those blocks being registered during API requests, the new woocommerce_should_register_blocks filter lets you opt back in. The post also marks AbstractBlock as internal and points you to the standard Block API and block.json instead.
What if an AI agent could work with WordPress right in your browser tab, with no server in between? Fellyph Cintra introduces WordPress Playground and WebMCP, which lets Playground expose its actions as tools that agents can discover. There are 16 of them, covering site management, running PHP, navigation, and reading and writing files, and plugins can register their own. You can try it in the ChatGPT desktop app’s built-in browser, where the demo has an agent build a full landing page from core blocks like Cover, Columns, and Button. WebMCP is still a W3C Community Group draft, so expect it to change.
Playground is quietly becoming the thing WordPress documentation runs on. Adam Zieliński announced that runnable code examples are now live in the Code Reference. Open a page with an interactive example, click Run, and the snippet executes against a real WordPress install in your browser. The examples are written right in the DocBlocks with a php interactive code fence, so each one stays next to the function it documents. More examples are planned during the 7.2 cycle.
AI in WordPress
The Core AI team’s weekly summary for September 2 is a good snapshot of where things stand. Jeffrey Paul reports that the MCP Adapter is ready for submission to the plugin directory, the next AI plugin release is expected later this month, and embeddings work in the PHP AI Client is heading toward a 1.5.0 release. The team is also collecting input for the 7.2 roadmap and looking for more maintainers for the AI Client packages and connector plugins. If that sounds like you, the #core-ai Slack channel is the place to start.
Rae Morey shared the story of Andy Peatling leaving Automattic after 17 years and building Miles, an AI design agent for block themes. Miles works only with native blocks, global styles, and theme settings, so what you get is a standard block theme you can keep editing. It’s designed as a back-and-forth rather than a one-shot generator, and you can start free at bymiles.ai with monthly credits.
Nathan Wrigley had AI on the mind for two straight episodes of the WP Tavern podcast. Chris Reynolds, Senior Manager of Developer Relations at Pantheon, explains building trust with project contracts for reliable AI development: Markdown checklists, reviewer agents, and pre-commit hooks that keep AI-written code from skipping your standards. In the episode before, Aaron D. Campbell of Monarx covers navigating WordPress security in the AI era, from AI-chained exploits to shrinking patch windows.
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.
The good news for me: with my five-year anniversary at Automattic, I get to go on a 3-month sabbatical, starting this week. It also means not only a break from Automattic but also from the WordPress community, a place that kept me engaged for the last 17 years. So that’s going to be a little weird for me. When I get back, I’ll let you know how it went.
The good news for you: my colleague Justin Tadlock will keep publishing Weekend Editions on Gutenberg Times while I am away. If you’ve read his tutorials on the WordPress Developer Blog or his earlier posts here on the Gutenberg Times, you know you’re in excellent hands. Not every week, but enough to tide you over during my pause.
And, just to give serendipity a chance, I will be at WordCamp Athens in December. Until then, all the best to you, your business and your family. I’ll be back.
Yours, Birgit
Table of Contents
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
Karol Król‘s first look walks you through six features of WordPress 7.1 worth your attention: responsive styles, the new Tabs block, the Media Editor, the admin bar’s wider reach, hover and focus pseudo states, and the latest Notes updates. A useful orientation if you’ve been meaning to sit down with the release but haven’t had a chance to click around in the editor yet.
Plugins and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
Change one header and it changes everywhere — that’s the part templates make easy and the part that trips people up. Wes Theron’s seven-minute walkthrough on editing WordPress templates covers the difference between editing a page and editing its template, how to tell which template a page uses, and how to work through List View. Along the way you’ll remove titles across pages, add a site-wide banner, drop featured images from all posts, and reset a template when you’ve gone too far.
Your wp-admin, but as a desktop: OpenStation opens admin screens as draggable, resizable windows with a dock built from the admin menu, plus virtual desktops, snap-to-grid, wallpapers, and a Cmd+K palette. It’s opt-in per user, patches nothing in core, and reverts completely on deactivation — the classic admin stays untouched for everyone else. Bundled extensions add a Monaco code editor, a cron manager, and an RSS reader. Available on the plugin directory as Desktop Mode, or try it in Playground. The plugin also inspired contributors to create three additional features for the Desktop mode:
Built at WordCamp US Contributor Day, the Photo Directory Importer lets you search wordpress.org/photos from inside wp-admin and pull CC0 images into your Media Library. No API key, no account, and imports are deduplicated. In the block editor it’s a tab inside the Media Library modal rather than an entry next to Openverse and Pexels — so look one level deeper. Topher DeRosia and six co-contributors want testing before it goes to the .org repo.
The admin bar takes up viewport space and makes every page you view slightly not the page your visitors see. The official WordPress browser extension hides it while keeping the shortcuts in your browser toolbar, and adds block outlines, a phone-sized preview, cache-busted reloads, and cookie clearing. Jake Goldman of HumanMade writes that nothing leaves your device. Chrome and Safari now, Firefox next. Ray Morey of The Repository has more on its origins as Goldman’s WP Detective side project.
Anne McCarthy‘s Accessibility Lab plugin prototype arrives with the Accessibility Team’s buy-in and a clear boundary: it’s a testing ground for features headed to core, not a substitute for fixing core. Three modules so far — Media Library view controls, real-time heading-order validation, and Troy Chaplin’s Block Accessibility Checks. Rae Morey traces how the idea won conditional support after 2025’s pushback, and where you can contribute.
Theme Development for Blocks
Mitch Canter‘s field guide to responsive block styles in WordPress 7.1 gets into the details the announcement posts skipped: the theme.json syntax, the two default viewports (@mobile at 480px and @tablet at 782px), and how to set your own breakpoints. You’ll also see :hover and :focus states — official only on Button and Navigation Link blocks so far — how the feature coexists with fluid typography and clamp() tokens, and a quick-reference table worth bookmarking.
“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.
“This block contains unexpected or invalid content“; if you maintain custom blocks, you’ve met that message. Paulo Carvajal collected five WordPress block deprecation patterns in a GitHub Gist that cover most real cases: markup-only changes, attribute renames paired with isEligible() and migrate(), source changes, InnerBlocks restructuring, and stacked deprecations ordered newest-first. Each comes with copy-ready code, plus a reminder to test against real database content and keep old save() functions intact.
You might have heard that building a custom block no longer requires React or a build pipeline. Fränk Klein tests PHP-only block registration in WordPress on CSS-Tricks: an autoRegister flag generates the editor JavaScript and sidebar controls for you, straight from the PHP registration. He’s honest about the limits (no in-preview editing, no live post data, three attribute types) and argues the real win is porting legacy widgets, shortcodes, and template parts into block themes with PHP skills you already have.
WordPress and AI
Ask ten agencies whether they use AI and you’ll get ten yeses, Brad Williams, Co-Founder of WebDevStudios, notes in explaining what agentic AI development means for your WordPress project. Building on Alfredo Navas‘s WordCamp US talk, “the model knows WordPress, it doesn’t know your WordPress”, William’s the post lays out three prerequisites: written project rules, documented processes, and scoped tool access, with a human reviewing everything. You also get five questions to ask any agency, including where your project’s knowledge lives when people leave.
Jonathan Bossenger‘s latest live stream puts three viewer-suggested plugins through a WordPress AI plugin showdown: Cross AI MCP Manager, Albert, and WP Vibe, judged on whether you can set each up without reading docs, connect it to a local site, and tell what data it sends home. WP Vibe routes everything through a third-party server, Albert won’t connect locally at all, and Cross AI — after real troubleshooting of its separate abilities and tools — is the only one working end to end.
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.
In this 134th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog Podcast, Birgit Pauli-Haack hosts Jessica Lyschik , senior developer at Greyd, to discuss recent Gutenberg and WordPress developments. The conversation centers on the releases of Gutenberg 23.7, 23.8, and WordPress 7.1 (“Mary Lou”), highlighting user-facing enhancements and developer-oriented changes.
WordPress 7.1 introduced notable features, including new styling tools, updated media flow, notes functionality for collaboration, and improved support for AI-driven workflows. Jessica Lyschik emphasized the impactful addition of pseudo states (hover, focus, active) in buttons and navigation links, though global style options for navigation states are still being developed for 7.2. The new icon API was also discussed, which currently requires plugins for full editor integration.
Both speakers observed an ongoing shift: features first become available via theme.json for theme builders, then gradually get exposed in the UI for broader audiences. They also touched on the evolving approach to child themes, font management, and the need for clear style inheritance indicators. Specific enhancements in Gutenberg 23.7/23.8, like responsive editing toggles and improvements to dynamic galleries and block inspector controls, were covered alongside new opt-out mechanisms for block controls.
The episode closed with a look toward WordPress 7.2, highlighting efforts to address “block editor paper cuts” (small annoyances) and improved tracking of in-progress features. Birgit Pauli-Haack announced a three-month podcast hiatus for sabbatical, promising a return for the 7.2 release. Listeners were encouraged to follow GitHub tracking issues and stay current with upcoming Gutenberg releases.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Welcome to our 134th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. In today’s episode, we will talk about Gutenberg 23.7 and 23.8, and also, of course, WordPress 7.1, which was just released, and also what’s in the pipeline. Not very detailed, but we’ll see. 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. It’s again a special treat for me to have Jessica Lyschik to join me on the show again. Jessica is a senior developer at Greyd, which is a German WordPress company that builds Greyd.Suite, an all-in-one toolkit for building and managing professional WordPress sites. Welcome to the show, Jessica. How are you today?
Jessica Lyschik: Thank you. I’m very good today. And thanks for having me yet again. I don’t know how often have I been here now?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: I think it’s either the 6th.
Jessica Lyschik: 3rd, 4th?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, I think we’re coming up to 6 or 7.
Jessica Lyschik: Is there like an ongoing list of people how often they have been on the show?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Of course. Of course there is a list.
Jessica Lyschik: Probably I’m very at the top.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It feels like. Absolutely. Yeah, you are. Top producer here.
Jessica Lyschik: Nice.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So Jessica, you are not only working on Greyd, you also work co-organizer on the WordPress Germany, and you also are a co-organizer for the German-speaking DACH Online WordPress Meetup. DACH, for those who don’t know it, is Deutsch, Austrian, also Österreich and Schweiz, Länderkennung.
Jessica Lyschik: Yes.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And the meetup comes together every other month, right?
Jessica Lyschik: Yes.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: The 3rd Wednesday in a month in odd months. Yeah.
Jessica Lyschik: Correct. Yes.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So what are you doing there? What’s coming over next?
Jessica Lyschik: So our next meetup is, well, it is all in German. So for those listeners who are not speaking German, it’s unfortunately not for you, but you can try and come over and practice and listen. But we mainly held a whole day meetup in German. So for the German, Austrian, and Swiss communities. And yeah, the next meetup is in September and it is, yes, on the 16th. And we are talking about WordPress 7.0 and 7.1 as the latest releases. We will have Benjamin Sekavica with us who was also the, I think, release coordinator for 7.1, if I’m not mistaken.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes.
Jessica Lyschik: So he will share a bit more because he has been fairly involved into the last past 2 releases and he will share a few insights and everyone can share their experiences. We can answer each other’s questions. And yeah, that’s what we are going to do. So we aim for more of a professional audience with the online meetup.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: You mean developers and agencies?
Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, or also anyone who is working professionally with WordPress. And we are not focusing too much on like beginners, but this is our area where we have our target audience, basically.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. Awesome.
Announcements
Well, thanks for letting us know about that. We’re coming to some announcements. I only got one that I wanted to share with you, dear listeners. Jeff Paul opened the call for volunteers for WordPress 7.2 release squad, and the release is scheduled for December 9th. So that’s kind of the timeframe that you’re looking at. December 9th means there’s 4 weeks beforehand is release candidate, and 6 weeks and 7 weeks is beta before that. So by October, you’re probably gonna be part of the— ongoing work to get this release over the finish line 2 months later.
Jessica Lyschik: Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So experience being on the release squad, you had experience with that and I had too. I don’t think that’s a job for someone who hasn’t been part of core for a while because it’s a very fast-moving process and you need to know a lot about how WordPress is actually managed, developed, and released.
Jessica Lyschik: Mm-hmm.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: There are quite a few release squads from previous releases that could come up and volunteer again. Yeah.
Community Contributions
So speaking of first-time contributors to core, there is a new WordPress Contributor Toolkit that has been tested quite a bit, and it’s out in the first version. The first contribution does not start again with installing Git, Node.js, and Docker, and kind of takes the whole Contributor Day morning or in the afternoon when you start doing that. So this is a desktop …
Jessica Lyschik: I remember this.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And not everybody has their computer set up so it all goes smoothly. Yeah. So I have always had trouble with all the installations because my computer is not on the latest stuff. Yeah. So this desktop app handles it all. And after you run the setup wizard, Contributors can link to a track ticket and apply or test existing patches on the running site. It’s also based on Playground. And then open a pull request or attach a patch or hand their work to a mentor or— yeah, there’s quite a few features in there. And Juan Margarito is the project manager, so to speak, but he had input from quite a few core contributors. And I have not heard yet how it all went on WordCamp US, but I think the next version for WordCamp Asia is already in the works. So yeah, test it out. Then if you see something that needs to be fixed or that doesn’t work, yeah, find your way into the GitHub repo so you can leave an issue or, yeah, have some discussion there.
Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, that sounds actually very promising to speed up the process. As I said, I remember like being on Contributor Day and now you have to install this, now you have to install Docker. Now you have to do this. Docker doesn’t work properly. What is the issue? It was a never-ending story. And having a setup that is like ready to go, I think this is very interesting. Yeah, I have not been at WordCamp US either, so I don’t know how this worked out, but I heard only good vibes so far from Contributor Day. Right.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: They published quite a few.
Jessica Lyschik: I think it will speed up the process.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, WordCamp US was, the Contributor Day were about 400 people out of 1,000. So that’s a phenomenal ratio there. And they changed the format a little bit from what I read, that they actually were project-oriented. So they actually were able to finish a few projects. And it’s more like a hackathon rather than kind of everybody picks something up and works on things. And that’s what I heard from a lot of people that were at the contributor day.
Jessica Lyschik: Yeah.
What’s Released – WordPress 7.1
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And on August 19th, WordPress 7.1 was released called Mary Lou. After the jazz musician Mary Lou Williams, who has over 100 records. So she was very prolific in producing her music. And I’m glad that we found another woman to be part of the jazz naming for a WordPress version.
We talked quite a bit on this show about the various features. Just a reminder, there’s a lot packed into new styling tools. Updated media flows, added notes functionality, some changes to the new capabilities for AI, other tools and workflows. Anne McCarthy was the first-time release lead for it, and I must say she did a fantastic job, probably better than any other of the release leads because her communication style was very upfront, and it was also always kind of keeping everybody in the loop, and it was really nice to see. And for me, working on the source of truth, truth, it was really helpful that she was the release lead and I could bounce off some things like, how does it work? Or did I get this right? Or yeah, what is missing? What are your most favorite features from 7.1? Or what is it that tripped you up as a developer? Kind of, we can have both ways of talking about things.
Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, we can, we can do it. There’s, uh, some things that have happened. So what I’m really happy about is the pseudo states. So hover, focus, active on buttons. For when I saw that, I went in there and during the release candidate phase and was like, hmm, I read something about navigation and if in the source of truth, what is going on? So I figured out that navigation links do have on the individual navigation links, you can toggle it on. But then I thought like, hey, for navigation, it would just make so much more sense if you would do that in the global styles. But it was not there. So there was nothing in the global styles to change these states. And I was a bit confused about that. But glad we figured it out in the outreach channel. I think I posted it on Slack. And it was actually not done yet because there’s one more addition coming to it, which is the, the active state.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Mm-hmm.
Jessica Lyschik: So it’s not the, it’s not the pseudo state active, but when you have in WordPress, when you click on a navigation item, then this specific navigation item on the page you’re on gets the class current menu item as of now. I don’t think this is going to change in the future, but then what’s being worked on is that this also can be, this color can also be changed or this settings for when this state is actually happening.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Mm-hmm.
Jessica Lyschik: And now for the navigation items, you would have then 3 states. So you have the responsive styles, you would have the pseudo styles, and you would have this active style. And because these are kind of intertwined, this was the reason why it has not been coming into 7.1 yet, but it’s being worked on for 7.2. So Maggie is on it. Maggie Cabrera, who I did the Twenty Twenty-Four theme with, she’s working on that. So that’s very cool. And yeah, that’s something to look forward because I just remember like the last week been talking about it with someone and it was in Torino Twenty Twenty-Four on my talk when at Workcamp Europe where I think it was Rich Tabor who asked the question what I would like to see, and I was like, pseudo styles would be great.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Jessica Lyschik: So 2 years later, we are finally here. Of course, it’s not everywhere yet, but I think it’s a very good start. We have it on buttons now, and it can only extend to other blocks as we have seen it with many features before. They start out on one very specific area and then got released to the rest of the items that are there. So yeah, I’m very much looking forward to that. The new icon API is also something that’s very interesting. And I just had an email from a client today saying, hey, there’s this new icon API. What’s, what’s the matter? So I was curious too, of course, can I just do this in the editor? Because this was probably most people are going to ask. And no, you cannot, but you technically can through a plugin. There’s also an article from Justin Tadlock on the developer blog about this, right? I saw that this week.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Jessica Lyschik: I have not tested it out yet. I had not had the time with this, but it definitely looks promising to— we’re getting there to like all these little changes that are kind of not just nice to have, but kind of sort of life improvements to how you would otherwise work that. I mean, there’s the icon block, of course, from Nick Diego, who is like the base for all what is in Core now, but you still can do a lot more in terms of customization with it. But yeah, we’re getting there. So yeah, we’re looking forward to that.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So when you say it’s not there yet for the navigation link, it’s also not there. Well, you can do it in the theme.json. So it’s just the UI or the interface wasn’t finished. But the feature is there for theme builders that use the theme.json to style their stuff. They don’t have to rely on the global styles interface.
Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, but that’s always the first route you go. So you go first in the editor. Can I see it? Is it there? And it was like, eh, disappointment. Yeah, but that’s what I forgot to mention. You can use it through theme.json, but then it’s like a bit of a, how to say, it’s, yeah, like you need to have your own theme.json. You just cannot go into any default theme or any existing theme that is from another author and then change it there because with the next theme update, your changes will be gone. So this is something you have to watch out for. And then for most people, it’s like also the feedback I often get from clients, from colleagues, it’s like, is it in the editor? No, sorry.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Not yet. Still have to code. Not yet.
Jessica Lyschik: Not yet.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: But that’s pretty much the cadence of any of the styling things, that they are first coming into theme.json for theme builders, because that’s the basis of it. That’s kind of the API. That’s the— yeah, how it all fits in with the rest of it. And then it’s a whole different mindset to figure out how the interface is going to work, because the interface also needs to kind of figure out not only for those that are advanced builders, but also for those that are actually beginners or don’t know what a pseudo-state is. Yeah, so you have a language issue there, and it’s a whole different mindset to get this right for the interface. And I’m really glad that we finally have it in the theme.json and people can work with it from there. But yeah, you’re right, it’s not for one of the default themes where you can change the theme.json. Yeah, but it’s your own. Yeah, like I did for the Gutenberg Times. I have my own theme and I can kind of change things there.
Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, it just depends how comfortable people are with using it. So if some are just, give me an existing theme that does get updates every now and then to do changes. And some just code their own because they feel comfortable with it. So It’s, it’s just that as long as we communicate, hey, that’s the current state of this. You can use it there, here and there, but here, watch out. This is the catch. Then I think it’s all fine because the more you know, the more you can adjust to your needs.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And some who are longer in the WordPress space than just 4 years or so, so since it’s block themes, there is also the idea of a child theme that a lot of people go that route, which has its own theme.json. that is then combined with the parent theme and the global style. It gets a little bit unwieldy. Yeah, kind of figuring out where things are changed and how do you revert something and where does it go? Because you also have the additional CSS and then the block-level CSS. So yeah, there’s a lot of things that you can change and confuse everybody.
Jessica Lyschik: Or even yourself. So it does happen that you change something somewhere, then forget about it and come back like 6 months later and be like, Why does this not change when I change the setting here? Now I can change the setting, but nothing happens. And I’ve been there. Don’t worry. It happens to the best. So it’s a tough one, but yeah, you just have to find your way in how you approach things. And again, everyone’s different. Everyone has different knowledge, different base on it. Child themes, definitely you can use them. Some people say child themes are dead. Well, it depends.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It depends. Yeah.
Jessica Lyschik: I mean, the most cases are slowly like, for example, if you wanted to use fonts, special fonts, then a child theme was always the best option to just have the files there, implement them and queue them correctly and so on. Well, now we have the font library. So. With a little exception, if you cannot upload certain fonts or do not want to use Google Fonts, for example, like there’s Adobe and like Adobe Fonts and another font places. where we, where you can get fonts from, you still need to implement them in a sort of hacky way. It does work. It’s not perfect, but it’s one of those things where a child theme would, or is still useful in my opinion.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Jessica Lyschik: And yeah, there’s just so much variety around it. So yeah, everyone will find its way or their way too.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: I made the decision to not go with child theme, although the Gutenberg Times theme is based on Twenty Twenty-Five. Okay. I don’t, I don’t wanna kind of have this whole mental load, like figuring out where my patterns live or what are the theme.json settings that I need to override. And so I said, okay, I will make a copy and delete everything else that I need— don’t need, and then take it from there. It’s so robust that I don’t think I’m running into any problems that I didn’t make myself. Yeah.
What else? 7.1, I wanted to interject that with— so 7.2 is of course coming. We talked about it on December 9th. There is not a roadmap out yet, but what’s already in the works is what you mentioned is that we get ourselves confused when we don’t know where things are in styling. There’s actually an effort to have in the inheritance of styles be marked in the interface. There is a discussion on how to make that, and the designers are still kind of figuring it out. But you get an indicator in either the global styles or in the block settings in the sidebar if that’s a changed style. So it’s not the global style, but it’s kind of an individual style. So you can at least manage that.
Jessica Lyschik: Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Or at least recognize it. How far it goes, we don’t know, but the discussions are there. And I will link that particular issue in the show notes so you can kind of check it out if you want to and kind of see how that’s gonna come out. So anything else you wanna kind of say what you like about 7.1? What about the responsive styles? Do you like them?
Jessica Lyschik: They look promising. I have not tried them out yet. I mean, it’s been just 2 days. I have been very busy with keeping up and, well, not having things break for great customers. We did have a little release. I was doing a little release yesterday for a little fix. No fatal errors or anything.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, you are on your tippy toes when a new release is out. And of course, I have had it running on my local environment for quite some time, the release candidate, just to make sure that if I work or test things that I do not run into any issues. No, no deep dive yet, but what I noticed is that quite a few things moved around. For example, I was just made aware of yesterday that at the group block, you now have these settings that were usually the first thing. It’s like the blocks should inherit the site width or content width or something like that.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh yeah.
Jessica Lyschik: This, this, the layout. Yeah. The layout part, it has now been moved from the settings to the styles. And I think this was because of the responsiveness, because then you have everything together in one go and do not have to switch the tabs back and forth for this.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yep.
Jessica Lyschik: I mean, there is some refinement in the, in the UI of how things look. I think the notices got quite an update. They are looking different now. And it’s just like the little details from what I noticed in working on it, but I did not do yet, unfortunately, but I hope I can. Yeah. Dive a bit more deeper in this weekend. What’s new? I’ve been just reading on, just checking technically if there’s anything. I mean, one big thing is definitely the enforced iframe in the editor.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I was about to ask you about that, if you had any issues there with your—
Jessica Lyschik: We actually prepared for 7.0 already because it was first said, hey, we are doing this for 7.0, and then it was rolled back. It’s like, okay, we are not doing this for 7.0, but we are doing this for 7.1. So we were kind of prepared.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Mm-hmm.
Jessica Lyschik: We just had to catch up with, I think, 2 blocks that we offer, but all, all works fine. So we are, we are good now there. And we did this ahead of time. So we were aware of these changes. And this is what I’m looking out specifically. Sometimes the fancy details as well, because I have to know, because most people come to me in my company saying, hey, why is that? What, what, what have, what has changed here? Tell me. And then I have to go to deep dive. I did it. I did this yesterday to say, why did things move? Ah, things move because of the responsive styles. Okay. So then you have the train of thought and know what’s happening, like kind of reverse engineering it, if you will.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Mm-hmm.
Jessica Lyschik: But yeah, I will have a deeper dive into 7.1 and testing out a few things because I’m curious myself. I mean, of course we still work in, in and with WordPress, so we need to be aware of what’s happening.
Gutenberg 23.7
Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right. Yeah. So Gutenberg 23.7 was released and it has a few enhancements that we can talk about. Some of them actually made it into 7.1, which is actually a little bit unusual because normally after beta there are no enhancements. But if that’s a blessed, so to speak, feature, then still enhancement can make it into beta. And even if a release candidate, if it’s important and it needs to be fixed.
Enhancements
So there were not a whole lot of things that I would point out, but the first one was the responsive editing enabled setting.
Jessica Lyschik: Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: With that, you can actually turn off the responsive styles option, and that made it into 7.1. It’s just a setting in your, in your block.json file, there, I think there’s also a filter where you can do that.
Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, you can use a filter in the functions.php of your theme or child theme, preferably child theme in this case.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Jessica Lyschik: Just where we had it. So you can, but then it’s, I think it removes it completely if I’m not mistaken, because the way the filter looks to me looks like it would disable it for everything.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right.
Jessica Lyschik: When you use it on the block itself in the block.json, then it’s just for that one block.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right, right. The filters goes for everything. And it could be custom blocks, yeah, that you don’t want the responsive editing to come in, or you want them enabled. You know, it’s kind of the other thing. What is not turned off is the styling that you already put in. Yeah. So those are not affected by that filter. So if you come from a theme that already has them in the global styles or in the theme.json, they’re not turned off. It only turns off.
Jessica Lyschik: Yeah. So it’s just basically in the user interface that you do not have this option anymore. You cannot access it anymore. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So it, it came out of the feedback loop from a lot of agencies that kind of said, okay, can I have my user not use that? So, which is pretty common for WordPress. Yeah. If you have a new feature that you also need to implement a turnoff thing for a lot of people.
The next one. is to extract— well, I’m reading that— to extract the preset management from shadows and font sizes. To implement those presets for shadows, so you have your own shadow configuration or your own font size configuration in the global styles or in the theme.json, those are actually handled pretty similar. And the developers said, okay, we don’t want to have too many same-looking files in our codebase. So let’s unify things and make it available so we can actually add additional presets with the same management kind of system. It’s a codebase and it’s on Gutenberg behind the scenes, but I think it will actually change a little bit how you code that for your custom blocks if you want to also have preset management enabled with that. So I wanted to point that out. I don’t know if that makes any sense to you.
Jessica Lyschik: I have to deep— deeper dive into it because I actually don’t— it was not on my radar, to be honest, but it sounds fairly interesting. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Do you wanna take the next one?
Jessica Lyschik: Reflect inherited global styles values and block inspector controls. This was what you were just talking about, right?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right.
Jessica Lyschik: Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So it is already in 23.7. Yeah.
Jessica Lyschik: Yeah. I think when you scroll down further, I think this is with the kind of, how do you say, flipped squares or diamond sort of shape. I wonder if this is maybe not too— it’s not too visible. It’s like very hidden and kind of very much blends in. I would be curious to see what that actually looks like. So, okay, I do not have only 7.1 tasks for me for this weekend, but also Gutenberg tasks. Coming from the, what you just described before, that you don’t know where things are coming from, if things have changed locally, I think this is a very interesting user interface change that I assume will be kind of helpful for people to figure out, okay, apparently this is not the global style. Something has changed here. The question is then where?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Jessica Lyschik: It will be interesting to see how good this particular style or sort of indication will be, will be kind of recognized because I find it very, it blends in too much from, in my opinion.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Jessica Lyschik: I think there needs to be a pop of color because we have this purple color as well for certain things in editor. And I think because if it’s just black and white, it’s kind of, it blends in too much because you have the, there’s screenshots from the typography panel when you choose the font size, when it’s You have only 5 options, S, M, L, XL, and XXL. And then it’s just a little dot or an outlined dot sort of, because it’s fairly small and it kind of blends in with the toggle next to it where you can toggle the Preset selection. Yeah, the sizes. So yeah, you’re right to see what other people will think about this.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it will come with a tooltip definitely for that. And it also will open a modal or will open the same modal that you have where you can reset a setting. So if somebody says, okay, we changed the theme update and you didn’t see— that’s the case where it really makes sense is, oh, and you don’t see the new styles or new things is because you have an override in the database and you can reset that to theme style and then you get the new new stuff in there. So that’s kind of the use case that I can think of. And I think it makes fairly sense. And once you know what that little diamond or whatever does, but you’re right, it’s not in your face and it’s not very …
Jessica Lyschik: I mean, it shouldn’t be like in your face, like kind of be like a giant billboard, you have made a change here, but it should be like a bit more coming out a bit more because right now I think it blends in too much. And I would probably be wondering if this is maybe a bug or if that neighboring icon may be having some sort of display issue or something because it’s too— not distinct enough, I think is the right term.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s very subtle. Subtle, yeah. Yeah, I— when I first looked at it, was it a scratch on my screen or something like that?
Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, exactly, exactly. So I was like, It looks a bit small, so I have to check it out on, on like on an actual installation and see what happens. If I notice it or if I just wonder where I did the change and it did not happen for whatever reason.
But Fixes
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, the next item is, it’s one of those quality of life things that you mentioned. It’s that the COVID and accordion blocks have now an exit on enter. So you hit enter once, you get to the next one, and then enter twice and you’re out of that whole container block. I only want to mention it because it’s— I found it missing on quite a few ones, except especially one of the cover and accordions. But it’s also when you— if you’re a developer and you want to learn how to do this, this is also a PR where you can actually check out how that’s going to work because it’s actually just a block support, yeah, that you need to put in there. It’s an experimental API, but it has been around for I think about 2 years now. And as long as Core is using it, it’s probably gonna stay there. So it could be also a good way for the block developers to kind of learn that little quality of life feature that you give the user out on the, on the block without having to do after and before kind of thing. Yeah. That I have to refer to once in a while.
Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, but I didn’t know about it. I learned something today.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So, yeah.
Jessica Lyschik: Mission accomplished.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes.
Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, but it’s actually, yeah, I can totally get it for the COVID block because like what I am, I’m hon— I wanna be honest here. I am very much, I click away. I click somewhere outside because it does not work in, quote, in air quotes that, uh, you can exit a block and go up the next level outside of the block. So yeah, that’s good to know.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right, great. Yeah. Do you want to take the next one?
Jessica Lyschik: Yeah. Dynamic gallery. Rename toolbar button to detach and add a modal explaining what will happen.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: The dynamic gallery is the one where you can have a gallery automatically created from your attached images. And that’s especially interesting for those that have been blogging for a long time and have been there. Photos all over the place. And now they can, you can, you don’t have to take one image at a time. You can do it all in one swoop. But the problem is when you want to add an image that’s not attached to it, or if you want to delete one, you need to break that dynamic thing.
Jessica Lyschik: Oh yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So you can do singular image things with a gallery. So you need to detach it. And then the modal explains that particular context. Kind of comes up and say, you say okay, and then be done with it. That detached image also comes, and we see it probably in 23.8 when we talk about it later. That’s also the same method how you can, for the page list in the navigation, that’s at first a dynamic one, but once you change things and add another link in there, it’s kind of not dynamic anymore. So it will, new things will not be added is also a downside of that. And it’s the same thing for the table of content block has instead of the, it had a long time convert to a static list. So it’s also not dynamic anymore. It’s now also called detach. I don’t know if it’s the same modal. I haven’t tested that yet, but it’s kind of a switch in. How, how we teach people about the attach and detach kind of thing, kind of the, the context of this is a dynamic block that you can actually free from the, from that automation.
Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, we actually have the similar wording in the Grid plugin. So it’s, it’s very familiar to see here, detach this. Because we also have sort of like these dynamic features and you can detach stuff from these dynamic features to make them static. Basically what you just explained. It’s interesting to see that even though I don’t think anyone has ever, like I was not involved in this, but seeing this basically turning out exactly what we’ve been doing in a product already, it’s kind of interesting. So it’s, I guess, not the worst idea to do.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. But like, especially when it’s kind of already done by you.
Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like, it’s like to have a— not really consenting, but like to have a general understanding of that, this wording of detaching stuff and like having it dynamic is like universal, sort of. So, and this is kind of the language where we are going to. Yeah, it’s just great to see that there is not much that you have to reteach people because plugins have it done this way, but now core is like kind of catching up and you can use that knowledge that, okay, if I detach this, it’s no longer connected to it. And if it’s kind of dynamic, then okay, maybe there is some sort of connection. I mean, in a very broad sense now.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. Glad we can kind of continue in the consistency that you brought to your product in core.
Jessica Lyschik: Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Jessica Lyschik: It’s really, it’s my, And I was not involved. I just want to say that I was not involved in this one.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Don’t blame me. Yeah. So, so what’s next? I don’t know why I looked at that.
Jessica Lyschik: Dynamic mode conversion, a single undo level. I think this was also part of that.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I tested this dynamic gallery quite a bit because I couldn’t get my head around why that was important because I don’t— every time I’m in my block editor on a post, I upload images and I know they’re automatically attached, but I wouldn’t upload images in bulk in my editor. And then I kind of, it flipped for me that, okay, in the media library I can upload images in bulk and I can also in bulk attach it to a post. There’s a column there where you can attach it. And I said, okay, when you do that, then you really appreciate that you can have a gallery with that. So It took me a while to kind of get that because it’s a, it wasn’t a workflow that I wasn’t familiar with and I wouldn’t, wouldn’t have used. So what’s the dynamic mode conversion thingy? Undo?
Jessica Lyschik: I think it’s just a sort of small life improvement that you, when you undo, so you have a dynamic gallery, then you kind of make it detached to stay with the, with the wording here. And then when I go back and said I made a mistake, Then you only have to press undo once instead of 15 times, twice, or multiple times for every image. Now the entire gallery gets basically back to the state it was in.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Pretty neat. Yes, I like it. So there were quite a few changes to the background image and to the global styles, but they are also minor. Yeah, there’s one thing that theme builders that use theme.json probably need to know about that is that the level block level preset class specificity has been changed through the :where command. So that is certainly something when you— that you might come across when you have a custom theme and you have some custom CSS and try to work with that.
Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, I think we had this kind of big thing last year when things got changed with the :where selector, and then you had to redo stuff because things were not applying or Again, applying to things depending on what it was. So yeah, that’s something we have to look out for to see. Because every time core is like changing something like this, you just need to double check that your stuff still works. Because I think, I wouldn’t say a lot, but I know it from the Greyd WP theme. We do use quite some extra styles to make the theme happen and have the blocks styled the way we would, we imagine it in our theme. And yeah, it’s just like revisiting your theme again to make sure things still work. To-do for the theme developers, definitely.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right, right. Absolutely. And that is actually in 7.1. This was patched back to core during the release. Yeah. So that’s why I’m pointing that out.
Experiments
And then the last thing I think is in the experiment section that the inheritance UI that we talked about quite a bit in this show is actually now only visible through the Gutenberg experiment screen. Yeah. So you need to switch it on to actually test it for yourself.
Jessica Lyschik: Good to know because, and I would’ve been very confused again if I just went, oh, let’s update to Gutenberg plugin. Why does this not show? Okay, let’s do a deep dive once again.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right. Yeah. So now you know.
Jessica Lyschik: But that’s why it’s so helpful to have all these What’s New in Gutenberg blog posts, I have to say. Because they highlight everything and then you can go back and just like yesterday I was searching for something, why did this thing change? And that’s how I got back into like, okay, this was the change. Then obviously whatever is in the pull request is quite a kind of technical. And if you do not have technical people asking you the question, you kind of need to translate, okay, this happened because of that. And this is the reason for it because you just cannot send them a link to the pull request and here is it. And then they go back, what is it about?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So yeah, well, it’s always— There’s one step that I use now is I share that URL with Claude and say, explain it to me like an 8-year-old or something like that. And then it kind of tells me what’s this about. I mean, and that’s when I know.
Jessica Lyschik: It does work. But if the person is already with you and like, Jessica, what is—
Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, no, of course.
Jessica Lyschik: What is going on here? Then you’re like, Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s how I get smarter.
Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, it’s definitely, it, it helps me also. So I’m not just saying that this is, I did not use it in that case. I probably should have done this yesterday, but I like to search for things and find, figure things out, why, why things change and how they work. AI is like the shortcut to it.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Jessica Lyschik: And I do use it sometimes. Yeah, definitely. And, but I still like to. tinker and figure things out myself because that’s what I enjoy.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that’s one thing. That’s also when you learn, you know, if an AI kind of gets you something back, you have it for the moment, but it’s harder to retain that information for a longer period of time. You know, that’s how our brains work.
Jessica Lyschik: That’s true.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. If we, we need the challenges to overcome to actually learn something. Yeah. All right. That was our fast go through 23.7.
Gutenberg 23.8
23.8 came out just this week. This week was the whole release week. Yeah. With, or last week with 7.0.4, 7.1, Gutenberg released 23.8.
Jessica Lyschik: Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s kind of a lot of information to disseminate. And I have found that the Gutenberg releases have more PRs in them than previous. Last year or something like that. So there are a lot of, a lot more people or the same people pushing more PRs into the release. It’s really interesting to go through all the changelogs and all that. So we might miss something. So in terms of collaboration, the notes feature got a new method, that is the email— that it emails users now that are mentioned in a note. So you have now— you can now mention people that are on the blog with an @ sign. And then once you save the note, it emails those users that they were mentioned and that there was a note for them to do or to look at, which is quite nice because not everybody goes to every site every time.
Jessica Lyschik: So, yeah, or this specific blog post, because if you do not, are not working on that because you don’t know that your attention is needed there, then this is definitely a way that you can actually get to know that people are waiting for a reply for you.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Jessica Lyschik: Of you.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I’m still looking for that place where I can see all my comments on posts in one swoosh and not have to go into the post. I don’t know if it’s coming, but it’s definitely plugin territory. So if you want to have a good plugin, that’s definitely a feature request for me. Let me know if you start it out. Do you want to do the next one?
Enhancements
Jessica Lyschik: Visual revisions, add shareable URLs. Ooh, this is interesting. Yeah, I have been quite a fan of the visual revisions so far. I mean, I have not used them too much yet, but—
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Me too.
Jessica Lyschik: It’s like, it’s just a whole new experience. And now you can actually get a shareable URL of that. So you can basically say, hey, here’s the URL to that specific change set. Here’s what I’m having trouble with, dealing with, whatever it is. This is actually kind of cool.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s the one thing. And what I also can see is that you say, okay, this was the version before and this is it now. Yeah. So people say, what changed? Or wasn’t it better before kind of thing? Yeah. And then you can actually see it side by side or you say, okay, I have 2 versions of it. This is one version, this is the other one version. Which do you like? Yeah, kind of. So you don’t have to do the staging site just for little changes. You can actually put it on site, but you always have a main version there. So a live version. So yeah, be careful with that.
Jessica Lyschik: And that’s why you have revisions. So whenever you do something wrong, you can go back if you have revisions. So it’s that custom post types sometimes do not have revisions.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Jessica Lyschik: And you have to turn that on when you register the post type. I think most plugins let you do that. And if you do not do it and you have no revisions.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yep.
Jessica Lyschik: And it’s a bad thing.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I also learned that some of the shared hosting providers actually turn revisions off or just limit them to 3 revisions or 10 revisions. And then, yeah, I would be doomed because some of my posts have 100 revisions. For especially the source of truth. Yeah. So. Yeah.
Jessica Lyschik: Yeah. You need to be aware of that sometimes. So there are different ways, not different ways. The way to limit the post revisions is through the, a constant in the wp-config file.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yep.
Jessica Lyschik: And yeah, it’s true that shared hosts, they limit it probably because they do not want the data, the databases to blow up because every time a new revision is added, it is basically like a post in a database. You just do not see it, but it’s connected to the post. I think it’s, the post type should be revision or something. It’s not post. Yeah, it’s post type revision. So that’s why it’s filterable. And yeah, so yeah, if you have 100 revisions, you have like this blog post 100 times essentially in your database. If you just have a few blog posts, no one cares. But if you have a very huge site with a lot of posts and a lot of pages and maybe even WooCommerce running, for example, then your database goes whoosh and everything is huge. And yeah, so there is a good reason for it.
And the next thing we actually talked about it, that the rename of the edit action to detach for page list and table of contents, that’s now in 23.8. So you can see that in your interface. Oh, and here it is also the opt-out for block style state controls. We talked about the opting out of the responsive styles. And in 23.8, you also find an opt-out method from the state controls, which is, I think, going through the same— no, it says block states enabled opt-out. So there is another variable filter for that on the block editor settings.
Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, it basically follows the other one for the responsive styles. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So it’s responsive styles editing enabled is the variable. And the other one is block states enabled. And setting that to false. What else is next?
Jessica Lyschik: Oh, more revisions. Add a code diff view inside the editor. Ooh, is it what it is? I think. Yeah, it is. It is actually what I think it is. So it’s kind of bringing back the old view that we had for revisions where it was just like this, like you know it from, if you’re a developer, you know how diffs look like. And now that we have the new visual revisions, now we can actually go back to that specific thing and maybe see if, I don’t know, any HTML tags have changed or any settings in there have changed, which is true that these are not as visible. With the visual revisions. So the visual revisions are great for like scanning the content and making sure like the content is as you wish or wanna go back or whatever. But yeah, I think this is actually a very good change to bring this kind of view back. Because if you need to go a bit more technical and see, okay, have block settings changed, for example, it’s not easy to see on the, on the visual.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right. And they have tried to make this also available in this, in the inspector controls in the sidebar, if there are any block attributes changed. But I think it’s helpful to see it in a, in a code edit view better than just to name the block attribute how that changed. So it’s, yeah, I think it’s a good, good feature set to bring back.
Oh, and there was, I didn’t highlight that, but it’s, we talked about Presets management in 23.7. Now the— in 23.8, there’s also that font size presets and the shadow presets actually use this new preset management layer. So that’s actually already implemented and is now— it’s a code change in the background, but it’s actually streamlining the whole thing and makes it available for extensibility later on.
Yeah, that was 23.8, and we are also almost coming up on the end of the show. It’s not the end of the changelog. This changelog was also really huge.
Jessica Lyschik: The lists are endless for both 23.7 and 23.8. It’s probably also because of AI, I guess, has accelerated it quite a bit to get the pull requests done and finding things, fixing things, doing things. So it’s a lot. There’s a lot to go through, definitely.
What’s in Active Development or Discussed
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. So I have 2 things that are for active development and what’s discussed, and they’re both for 7.2. So Ella van Durpe has a tracking issue of block editor paper cuts, which means to, to list all the small annoyances that she could find that people have issues with and put them all in a list to be fixed.
So it might be big tasks like rethinking the appenders and inserters, how they actually behave, or writing flow, writing flow improvements, or even longstanding bugs that have been passing Excel to in the block editor, or selection quirks with Safari, or multi-block selections on iOS, or yeah, these kind of things. She found 48 issues to be fixed. If you have one that is not listed, feel free to put it in the issue and have it also on the list. She already fixed 9 items when I was putting this together. There might be even more now. So she definitely needs help with testing and commenting on those issues. So yeah, it’s a nice little literature for you if you have been working with the block editor for years and years and years, what you see that comes up. So I will share, of course, the link in the show notes.
And then, Anne McCarthy for 7.1 had actually said, the release lead, that it would be great to have, because it’s hard to follow which feature comes in and what are the plans and all that. And she needs it for roadmap. And other people like Jessica and I, we need to kind of see what’s going up, ongoing issues or features that are in the works so we can test them and we can kind of figure out things. So she asked the teams that are working on features to actually put tracking issues together for the certain versions.
So quite a few actually have already put in the tracking issues for 7.2, and I will share the search link. I haven’t gone through them yet to study them, but there’s an iteration issue for the notes features, for the dynamic galleries, for the media editor modal, for the pattern editing. Also how to extend the site editor. I’m really very happy to see that. Then of course for the responsive styles. And so all the ongoing things. Or Maggie’s custom states for blocks tracking issue. So you can follow along on the things because then they have sub-issues and you see which ones have already been merged and which ones are already in the works and are in review or these kinds of things. So it’s really good to follow along. It’s not for everybody because GitHub is not for everybody, but it’s definitely something to go there. And if you want, I haven’t mentioned it yet.
Dear listeners, this will be the last episode on the Gutenberg changelog until December. There will be a break. And I’m very grateful for the break because Automattic, after a 5-year anniversary, allows you to go on sabbatical for 3 months. And I’m starting mine next week. So this is the last episode of the Gutenberg changelog.
There will be a Gutenberg Weekend Edition, certainly not every weekend, but Justin Tadlock is going to take that on and he will do it either biweekly or monthly. It’s not quite sure yet because he has other duties, but he’s definitely looking forward to writing those weekend editions.
So, dear listeners, take the link to the tracking issue as your homework for the next 3 months on my break. And of course, study every Gutenberg release in the meantime. I think I checked it out. So this was 23.8. And in November, when I get back, we will already beony 24.4 Gutenberg releases. So there are quite a few releases in there. 6 exactly. I will not catch up on those, but I will catch up on the 7.1— 7.2 again, 7.2 release, because it’s only about 10 days away when I get back. So that’s definitely the first episode that we are going to do in December. Yeah. Anything that you wanna talk about here that we haven’t covered yet?
Jessica Lyschik: No, I think, I think you made a very good thing. I didn’t know about editor paper cuts PR. Well, my homework is getting longer and longer for the weekend. Definitely.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Jessica Lyschik: I mean, it will be sad to not have a Gutenberg changelog for the next couple weeks, but I guess it’s well deserved that you go on a sabbatical.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, thank you.
Jessica Lyschik: And I feel very honored that I have been on the last show for now. And yeah, let’s see. If we can catch up.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Just to make sure it’s not a couple of weeks, it’s 12 weeks. So a long couple weeks, 6 couple of weeks. So, and yeah, I will share how you can reach Jessica on all the interwebs with the show notes so she doesn’t have to repeat it here. But I want to also point out she’s sometimes on the Greyd podcast with the Greyd conversations. And there are quite a few interesting episodes there. I’ll send, put also the link into the— is there one that you wanna point out about block editor or block themes or so that you had?
Jessica Lyschik: Oh, I have not been on the show in quite a while.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay.
Jessica Lyschik: I have been very busy in the background. So, but we do have very interesting shows. I think the latest ones were with Katie Keith and Matt Cromwell about products and, and stuff. I think there was one more person on there. I know this is horribly bad for me.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, no worries. No, I put you on the spot there, so don’t worry about it. But I mean, I can— I was trying to look it up. It’s about product companies and—
Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, it’s about a product business. And maybe just— I think we redo that and I would just like to correctly say it.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. It’s How Can Product Companies Grow in WordPress Space Right Now? And it was with Katie Keith, as you said, and Aurelio Volle. He’s the founder.
Jessica Lyschik: Oh, Aurelio. Yeah. WP Umbrella.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: WP Umbrella and Matt Crumbrall, founder of Roots and Fruits. Roots and Fruits.
Jessica Lyschik: Yes.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And they are, they’re talking about product companies and how they can be successful in the WordPress space, especially now. With or without AI and with the abundance of plugins now. So it’s gonna be interesting to see how you can build a business there. All right.
Jessica Lyschik: Yep.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: As always, the show notes will be published on gutenberg-times.com/podcast. This is episode 134. And if you have questions, suggestions that can wait until December, send me an email to changelog@gutenberg-times.com. That’s changelog@gutenberg-times.com. Caveat there, I’m not gonna pick up email during sabbatical on the Gutenbergtimes.com or on Automattic and very, very sporadically on my Gmail account. But yeah, send me things and you will see what happens.
Thanks, Jessica, for being with me on the show. Thank you all for listening. And this is goodbye.
It has been another evenful week for sure! WordCamp US came to an end and WordPress 7.1 was released.
Your WordPress profile now has a shortcut w.org/@[yourusername]. If you want to check out mine w.org/@bph (don’t forget the @ sign) . Mullenweg mentioned in his closing fire side chat that this could actually work without the redirect in the future. Now that would be cool, right?
Another cool and rather weird thing Mullenweg mentioned are Piplets. One self-contained PHP-file for your notes, no database, no hosting needed, for tinkerers who live in the Terminal window. If that’s you, grab the file from the GitHub repo and try it out. (64-bit PHP 8.1 or newer is required.) There will be . To be honest, it’s not my idea of simplicity, though. I am firm in the Obsidian camp.
Apropo WordCamp US: All Talks are already available in the Playlist on YouTube for your on-demand viewing pleasure. Or you organize a viewing party with your local WordPress Meetup. Just a thought.
Have a great weekend!
Yours, Birgit
Table of Contents
Nicholas Garofalo’s recap of WordCamp US 2026 in Phoenix covers four days, 1,100 attendees, 111°F, and a Contributor Day where 425 people formed 26 teams around goals they could finish by evening. You’ll get the Showcase Day migrations of The Ankler and Daily Kos, keynotes from Bo English-Wiczling and Loyal Pyczynski on judgment in the age of AI, and Matt Mullenweg’s closing pitch for simplicity, including Piplets, a single self-modifying PHP file with no database.
WordPress 7.1 is out!
WordPress 7.1 “Mary Lou”, names after Mary Lou Williams an American jazz pianist, arranger, and composer who recorded hundreds of records.
The WordPress 7.1 micro site with the featurettes, tiny videos highlighting the main features is definitely a beauty! What a pleasure to read and experience the most important updates!
Release lead Anne McCarthy kept a WordPress 7.1 release lead decision log, and it reads like the other half of the release notes. You’ll see why real-time collaboration, React 19, inherited-style display, and the Classic block removal were punted, why responsive styling got an opt-out rather than a pause, and how she decided to publish the announcement when auto-updates had already reached 300K sites while Matt Mullenweg was on the WordCamp US stage. Each entry links to the thread where the call was made.
On the WordPress Developer Blog, Justin Tadlock goes hands-on with the WordPress 7.1 Icon Registration API and builds a restaurant icon collection from scratch. You’ll register a collection with wp_register_icon_collection(), add 13 food icons via wp_register_icon(), and see why he prefers a string-backed PHP enum over arrays for naming them. He also lists what 7.1 still strips: only svg, path, and polygon elements survive, and stroke attributes are removed, so stick with fill-based icons for now.
If Justin Tadlock’s walkthrough is more than you need right now, Ryan Welcher covers the same API in five minutes in his video on custom icons in WordPress 7.1. He registers a collection and a single icon in PHP, loads a folder of SVGs from disk the way core does, and renders one in a template with wp_get_icon(). The gotchas matter most: the sanitizer strips fill="currentColor", and a function_exists() check keeps 7.0 sites from fatal-erroring.
The block editor’s single biggest frustration is finally addressed, Jackson argues in his tour of the new features in WordPress 7.1, and he means responsive block styles. Over twenty minutes you’ll see thirteen features in action: hover and active states for buttons and navigation, the Tabs block, the Icon block with Aki Hamano’s custom icon plugin, the Playlist block’s waveform, the in-browser media editor, and a Query Loop checkbox that stops your related posts from recommending the post you’re reading.
Gutenberg 23.8 released
Selecting all blocks in a 1,000-paragraph post used to take 16.8 seconds; in Gutenberg 23.8 it takes 0.4. Release lead Jon Surrell’s post on what’s new in Gutenberg 23.8covers that List View speed-up alongside the shareable revision URLs and in-editor code diff, and email notifications when someone @-mentions you in a note. You also get a real default block on the empty canvas, Audio-to-Playlist transforms, and, for developers, inner block templates declared in registerBlockType() and public Calendar components in @wordpress/ui.
For the Gutenberg Changelog 134 episode, Jessica Lyschik, senior developer at Greyd, joined me to discuss Gutenberg versions 23.7 and 23.8. We also chatted about WordPress 7.1 and what comes next for the December release of WordPress 7.2 As always the episode with its show notes will come to your favorite podcast app over the weekend.
Plugins and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
If you build with the Ollie block theme, Gina Lucia‘s WordPress 7.1 walkthrough shows where the new core features meet Ollie’s tools. Responsive styling now lives in core, so Ollie Pro’s Responsive Controls shift to handling column and grid stacking, while its Class Manager picks up where the new hover and focus states for Button and Navigation Link leave off. You’ll also see how the Tabs and Playlist blocks, gradient-over-image backgrounds, and the persistent admin bar fit your Ollie site.
Merging cells is still missing from the core Table block, and Aki Hamano‘s Flexible Table Block plugin fills that gap on 40,000+ sites. Version 3.9.0 adds WordPress 7.1 support and announces row and column selection to screen readers. You can merge and split cells, style the table, cells, and caption separately, and set your own breakpoint for horizontal scrolling or stacking cells on mobile. It also converts to and from the core Table block with rowspan and colspan intact. Aki Hamano is a major contributor to the Gutenberg project from Japan and co-tech lead for WordPress 7.1. There is a lot of crediblity attached to this plugin. And hat tip to Daniel Kossmann, editor of the Portuguese WordPress newsletter PainelWP 374.
The new Tabs block in WordPress 7.1 swaps panels abruptly, since the Interactivity API toggles the hidden attribute. Elliott Richmond‘s Tabs Animationplugin softens that with a fade or a slide from any of four directions, plus a duration up to 3000ms and five easing options under Settings → Tabs Animation. It’s one small inline stylesheet with no JavaScript and no theme changes, and it switches itself off for visitors who prefer reduced motion. One setting applies site-wide for now.
“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 his livestream, Ryan Welcher got back on his son’s hockey team site with WordPress Studio Code, this time handing over the single post template. The first pass got close, then navigation broke, the header came in too tall, and the content width wouldn’t match the homepage, so you’ll watch him go several rounds with Annotate, clicking and describing what’s wrong. Two hours used 2.5 percent of his monthly limit. He also covers the 7.1 iframe change and a twenty-minute custom fields tangent.
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 read any further, another security updates needs your attention: WordPress 7.0.4 is out. Update now!
You might have noticed, that the Gutenberg Times website has a new theme. It’s built on top of the Twenty Twenty-Five default theme. I started working on it last year, but was pulled away by other priorities. Then AI Enablement weeks arrived and I started to use all kinds of different AI tools for design and WordPress. None of them were really good at block themes at first. Then Telex got me close and I used it for my Block theme workshop. As the final stack I used WordPress Studio with the new AI Agent (Beta) and Claude. Both competently used theme.json and block markup for patterns, template and template parts.
The biggest hurdle, and that’s why it took multiple trials, was that the podcast data wasn’t block-theme ready so I had to build a plugin that handles all the block bindings and assembles them into templates. The plugin is in the WordPress repository (still beta), if you are interested. During the process I used Claude and WordPress Agent skills. Between November 2025 and August 2026 the quality of Claude’s work has improved considerably and it produced much more robust code. The deployment to GitHub and WordPress repository was a breeze. Take a look at the new podcast page. All feedback is welcome!
The WCUS program team announced great keynote speakers:: Bo English-Wiczling, PayPal, Loyal Pyczynski, Disney and Meta, Amanda Ventura, Waymo and the fireside chat w/ Matt Mullenweg round up a fantastic roster of speakers and topics. If you can make it get your ticket now. And I see you on the WCUS Livestream!
Have a great weekend!
Yours, Birgit
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
WordPress 7.0.4shipped as a security release fixing a single vulnerability: an authenticated remote code execution via malicious file upload, affecting sites running Imagick with Ghostscript, responsibly reported by the team at pwn.ai. Release lead John Blackbourn notes the fix is being backported all the way to the 4.7 branch and into the 7.1 release candidate. If your site doesn’t update automatically, head to Dashboard → Updates and click Update Now.
Release day falls on the last day of WordCamp US, and Justin Tadlock’s August roundup of what’s new for developers tells you what to test in the days that remain: responsive block styles with theme-configurable breakpoints, pseudo-states for Buttons and Navigation Links, the now-public SVG Icon API, and the always-iframed post editor. He also flags the change most likely to quietly break something — post list table row headers moved — and notes React 19 is punted again.
Joe Dolson tallies88 accessibility enhancements and bug fixes in WordPress 7.1, 45 in core, 43 in the editor. Highlights are the new accessible tooltips API, post list tables that identify rows by title instead of checkbox, a decorative toggle for the Image block, and stronger focus indicators throughout. He’s equally candid about the known regression: the Media Library’s infinite scroll is an inaccessible pattern, and the note walks you through three ways to turn it off.
Just in time for WCUS Contributor Day, JuanMa Garrido released v1.0 of the WordPress Contributor Toolkit. Your first Core contribution no longer starts with installing Git, Node.js, and Docker — this desktop app handles it all. After running the setup wizard, contributors can link a Trac ticket, apply and test existing patches on a running site, then open a pull request, attach a patch, or hand their work to a mentor. If you are heading to Phoenix and want to join the Core table, download it and create your first site before Sunday, so you can hit the ground running.
48 fixes for the small annoyances that add up: Ella van Durpe opened a round of Block Editor Paper Cuts for the WordPress 7.2 cycle. The list spans big tasks like rethinking appenders and inserters, writing-flow improvements, and long-standing bugs — pasting from Excel, Safari selection quirks, multi-block selection on iOS. Nine items are already done and several more have PRs in progress, so if one of these papercuts has been bugging you, now’s the time to test or comment.
Jeff Paul opend the call for volunteers for WordPress 7.2 release squad. The release is scheduled for December 9th, 2026. That’s of course, still preliminary.
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
Elliott Richmond pulled fourteen WordPress 7.1 features from the Source of Truthand tested every one hands-on against the release candidate for his latest video — no speculation, no reciting release notes. You’ll see responsive styling controls, custom breakpoints in theme.json, hover, focus and active states, the new Icon, Tabs and Playlist blocks, the media editor modal and the mark-as-decorative accessibility option. Thirteen earn a genuine thumbs up; the one mixed verdict only asks you to think backwards for a bit.
Image processing moves from your server to the browser in WordPress 7.1, and Carlo Daniele’s rundown of client-side media processing, design tools, and the Abilities API for Kinsta explains what that shift means: libvips compiled to WebAssembly produces images roughly 15% smaller while cutting server CPU and RAM. He also covers rich-text Notes with @mentions, the Playlist and Tabs blocks, four new Abilities API lifecycle filters, and the design tokens plugin developers can use to style admin screens.
Do custom field builders need to worry about WordPress 7.1? Lua Nguyen answers for the Meta Box community with a look at what’s new and how it affects Meta Box users. The always-iframed editor is the big one — Meta Box blocks already run on Block API v3 with modal-based editing, so you can upgrade without changes. Client-side media processing covers the Image fields automatically, and editable blocks inside Custom HTML give developers finer control over what clients may touch.
WooCommerce 11.0.1 arrived as a security and compatibility dot release, and Brian Coords lists what’s inside: a stronger, salted hashing scheme for guest session cookies, sanitized notices in Cart and Checkout blocks, capability checks on image matching, onboarding and Marketplace endpoints — plus faster logging that cuts checkout latency on stores with large log backlogs. It also readies the Orders list for WordPress 7.1’s changed list-table markup, so update your stores before August 19.
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
Your hero area looks gorgeous on desktop and clunky on a phone — a scenario Eric Karkovack solves in his walkthrough on how to hide WordPress blocks based on device. He builds two versions of the hero, then uses the Block Visibility controls from WordPress 7.0 to hide one on mobile and the other on desktop and tablet — no plugin, no custom CSS. A neat companion piece to the responsive block styles arriving in 7.1.
WordPress uses “patterns” for two related but different things, and Gina Lucia sorts them out in her guide to WordPress patterns vs reusable blocks— the latter renamed synced patterns back in WordPress 6.3. Regular patterns become independent copies once inserted; synced patterns stay connected, so one edit updates every instance, with partially synced overrides for things like team member cards. She also draws the line between patterns and templates and shows you how to save your own.
“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.
If your plugin styles the post list table or expects a non-iframed editor, WordPress 7.1 has surprises in store. Jonathan Bossenger spent a livestream testing the developer-focused changesfrom our Source of Truth ahead of release day: responsive per-viewport block styles, hover, focus and active states, the admin bar rendering as a block, the Playlist and Tabs blocks, and the reworked Notes with mentions. He flags a gradient-over-background-image bug live and shares migration notes for both breaking changes.
One npx command scaffolds the whole plugin — from there, Emre Ekener‘s six-step tutorial onbuilding your first custom Gutenberg block from scratch has you shipping an editable CTA block with heading, description, and button. Along the way you’ll learn what actually matters: attributes in block.json, the split between edit.js and save.js, RichText for inline editing, and InspectorControls for sidebar settings. As he puts it, the complexity scales, but the structure stays the same.
Ai and WordPress
You configure an AI provider once, and every plugin on the site can use it — no keys in plugin settings, no provider lock-in. Team WPShout’s developer guide to the AI connectors and wp_ai_client_prompt() covers where credentials live, why environment variables beat the database (keys there sit unencrypted), and builds a complete post-summarizing plugin whose actual AI work takes five lines. The gotchas section warns you: core ships no spend limit, so gate every feature behind the support checks.
Greg Ziółkowski‘s walkthrough of the Abilities API in WordPress 7.1 covers the three areas the release fills in: an execution lifecycle you can observe with actions and steer with filters, a shared preparation layer that turns canonical schemas into portable Draft 4 copies for REST and AI clients, and discovery filtering in wp_get_abilities() by category, namespace, and metadata. Each extension point comes with a working code example and the trade-offs he’d weigh before reaching for it.
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 any questions, leave a comment or email me at pauli@gutenbergtimes.com.
A huge “Thank you” to Anne McCarthy, Justin Tadlock, Isabel Brison, Adam Silverstein, Ramon Dodd, Andrew Serong, Hans-Gerd Gerhards, Marin Atanasov, Krupa Nanda, Aaron Robertshaw, Ben Dwyer, Brent MacKinnon, Ashar Fuadi, and a lot more. It still takes a village. Also huge respect to the whole release squad on getting WordPress 7.1 over the finish line.
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.
WordPress 7.1 rounds out the block editor’s styling controls and makes working with media noticeably smoother. Long-requested features let you style how blocks look across three screen sizes and in interactive states like hover and focus — all without writing custom CSS. The admin experience becomes more personal, too, following you with your own color scheme and toolbar across every screen.
Handling images gets a considerable upgrade, too. The new media editor modal brings free-form cropping, rotation, and metadata editing into one workflow, and client-side media processing makes uploads faster and more resilient, with broader format support and better-optimized files.
The new Playlist and Tabs blocks enrich the layout options available out of the box and make for more creative information presentation. In the same realm fall the expanded Icon API with custom icon collections, dynamic galleries, and background gradients for more blocks.
The unification of WP Admin and the block editors progresses as well: the editors now respect your admin color scheme, and the admin bar stays with you on every screen — including the editors and the front end.
While real-time collaboration has been punted to a future WordPress version, the asynchronous collaboration in Notes took real steps forward with inline notes on partial text selections, @mentions, rich text formatting, and multiple notes per block.
Beyond the headliners, core blocks receive many quality-of-life improvements and bug fixes to make editing content in WordPress streamlined, consistent, and fast — and developers get an expanding set of APIs to build on.
This release consists of features from the Gutenberg plugin version 22.7 – 23.6. Here are the release posts of those plugin releases: 22.7 | 22.8 | 22.9 | 23.0 | 23.1 | 23.2 | 23.3 | 23.4 | 23.5 | 23.6 Later Gutenberg releases contain bug fixes, backported to WordPress 7.1. 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 7.1
WordPress 7.1 introduces significant enhancements to block-based design and editing. These priority features focus on responsive controls, interactive states, media management, and modernized Admin bar navigation.
Responsive styles for blocks
[theme builders] [site admin][end user]
Probably the most requested improvement of the block editor: after years of pushing intrinsic design for fonts and spacing, WordPress 7.1 makes responsive design a built-in, first-class part of the editing experience. The feature builds on earlier steps in this direction — the ability to show or hide blocks by screen size and the Navigation block’s customizable mobile overlay — and extends the idea to styling itself.
The feature is available across all block editors for Posts, Pages, Templates, Patterns,template parts and Navigation. Responsive styling follows a desktop-first model, letting styles cascade to smaller screens until you customize them for specific devices.
Viewport-specific values are currently limited to block sidebar settings (like typography, spacing, and colors). The controls work in Global Styles (affecting all instances of a block) and on individual block instances, across all block editors — Posts, Pages, Templates, Patterns, template parts, and Navigation.
Any controls from the toolbar that can’t be set by viewport will be hidden when a viewport state is enabled. Among the most significant controls: viewport-level aspect ratio presets for Image, Featured Image, and Cover blocks, so each can be optimized per device (#78543). Alongside this work, the Layout controls moved from the Settings tab to the Styles tab, keeping all styling decisions together.
Community feedback from the Call for Testing made sure this feature ships with an off switch via a new responsiveEditingEnabled editor setting: turned off, both the Responsive styles option in the View menu and the viewport selector in Global Styles disappear. It gates the editing interface only. Responsive styles already saved keep rendering as before. (#80814). See code examples are in the responsive styles dev note.
Follow the Call for Testing: Responsive Styling to learn how to invoke the feature and what to look out for, and find the technical details in the Dev Note: Responsive block styles and configurable viewports in WordPress 7.1.
Themes can now define custom breakpoints in theme.json, so both responsive styling and per-viewport block visibility work from your design system’s breakpoints instead of WordPress’s defaults. For theme developers and designers, this provides fine-grained, device-agnostic control over responsive behavior. (79104).
This makes interactive design accessible to non-coders and theme builders. It eliminates the need to add custom CSS snippets for common interactions.
Interactive states styling (hover, focus)
You can now style interactive pseudo-states (:hover, :focus, or :active) without writing any CSS. For the Button block, this works both per-instance and site-wide in Global Styles. For navigation link blocks (Custom Link, Page Link), the state controls are available per-instance in the block inspector; in Global Styles, the state selector is enabled per block, with Button as the first, so styling navigation states site-wide currently goes through theme.json. An editor UI for the current-item state is also in development as part of the custom states iteration for 7.2.
The new media editor modal replaces the inline cropping tool, accessed via the familiar Crop button, and brings together free-form and aspect-ratio cropping, flip, fine-grained rotation with snap guides, and metadata editing in one unified workflow. (78653, 78935, 78792)
This considerably improves the editing experience in WordPress Block editor. The goal was to eliminate the need for external tools for basic image editing. You can now exercise faster, more precise control over your images—fine-tuning framing, fixing orientation, or mirroring an image to better fit your layout in just a few clicks, all without breaking your editing flow.
For the Cover Block, this new media editor modal is hooked up to the Crop background image button. The option appears whenever the Cover block uses an editable image, and the block automatically recalculates its overlay color and contrast after an edit, so text stays readable even if the crop removes the image’s brightest or darkest areas (79258 )
When you upload an image in the block editor, your browser — not your server — will now handle the creation of all sub-sized images using a WebAssembly (WASM) version of libvips (wasm-vips), a high-performance image processing library. The result stored on your server is improved over what server-side processing produced until today: smaller files generated directly on your device. Server-side image processing CPU usage could decline by more than 80% on capable devices (79188)
The update also comes with broader modern image format support that includes HEIC (the default format for iPhone photos), JPEGS with HDR gain maps (used by UltraHDR and Adaptive HDR), AVIF and WebP support built in. A great performance improvement is the GIF-to-video conversion feature for lighter, more efficient files that are faster to load on the front-end. This feature is opt-in right now. Uploads are also more resilient, with a progress indicator and automatic retries if your data connectivity drops off (76765, 79307).
For content creators uploading media, this update means better support for HDR images, faster, more reliable uploads, broader format support, and better-optimized files without manual intervention.
Plugin developers should note that some server-side hooks, including `wp_generate_attachment_metadata`, `image_resize_dimensions`, and `wp_handle_upload` may not fire as before. The team is working on documentation and mitigation strategies. (74333)
WordPress 7.0 shipped a built-in set of SVG icons for the block editor and the Icon block. With WordPress 7.1, this grows into a proper, public API: plugins and themes can register their own icons, group them into collections, render them on the server, and read them over the REST API.
For developers, the pieces come together on the PHP side: register a collection with wp_register_icon_collection(), add icons with wp_register_icon() — from an inline SVG string or an .svg file — and print any registered icon with wp_get_icon(), including size, CSS class, and an accessible label. Icon names get strict validation, the registry’s register method is now public, and REST API endpoints expose collections and icons to your own code. A dev note with full code examples is on its way to the Make Core blog.
One breaking change to flag: all 330 icons in @wordpress/icons v15 now declare fill="currentColor", so icons inherit the surrounding text color by default. If you’ve been tinting icons with the CSS fill property, switch to color — it’s more reliable, since an icon may use fill, stroke, or both internally. If you register your own icons, add fill=”currentColor” to their <svg> element to get the same behavior.
With WordPress 7.1, the WordPress admin bar which sits at the top of your site’s front end and other admin pages is now displayed when using block editor by default. It stays hidden when Fullscreen mode and Distraction-free mode are both turned on.
Until now, entering the editor in its default fullscreen mode meant the admin bar disappeared, cutting you off from the rest of wp-admin. Since the admin bar now provides site context, the update also replaces the top-left W/site icon in the site editor with an explicit back button, making the navigation control more obvious (79197).
With this update also comes a design refresh:
your site icon replaces the home icon,
the profile avatar becomes circular, and
the command palette keyboard shortcut moves into the Admin bar to remove visual clutter and resolve shortcut conflicts. (79060)
This keeps the familiar navigation with you on all screens again.
This release expands the block library with versatile new tools. These additions provide content creators with improved ways to display interactive media and organize information.
Playlist block
The new Playlist block lets you create audio playlists with waveform visualization, making it easy to showcase multiple tracks or podcast episodes in a single interactive player. Visitors can browse and play through your audio content without leaving the page. For content creators this provides a rich, modern listening experience built right into WordPress to highlight podcast episodes, track of music or talks.
Each track comes with its metadata: artwork, artist name, track number, and track length. The tracklist itself is configurable — you can set the play order and toggle artwork, artist names, track numbers, and track length individually to suit the design of your page.
This is the first version and contributors are working on improvements for the next WordPress version, too looking to add more waveform styles, shuffle and skip buttons, a hover overlay for more intuitive track scrubbing, as well as performance improvements.
The new Tabs block organizes content into separate tabbed panels that visitors click through to navigate. It’s a design pattern that presents information compactly without overwhelming readers with a wall of text. It’s a common layout for FAQs, product features, or any content where you want to show options side-by-side. For editors, it’s a familiar, flexible layout pattern now available natively in WordPress.
The block family consists of a Tab List for the navigation and Tab Panels for the content. Each panel accepts any blocks you like, and the tab buttons come with their own color, typography, border, and spacing controls, so the navigation can be styled to match your theme. Using the toolbar buttons you can reorder the tabs quickly.
Core blocks receive numerous quality-of-life improvements in 7.1. These updates refine existing editing workflows, simplify media handling, and provide deeper customization for layouts and design.
Block transforms: preview first, convert faster
[end user][site admin]
Switching a block’s look or type is now much easier to evaluate before you commit. When you open the block switcher in the toolbar, the style options a theme provides — say, a Button’s “Outline” style — show live previews on hover, so you see exactly how your block will look with the style applied. (75889) The same previews in the inspector’s Styles panel now match the toolbar presentation, so it no longer matters where you make the switch. (75989) A small polish fix also centers the Navigation block’s preview in its preview pane. (75741)
Transforms got more capable, too: a block can now transform directly into a variation of another block. Instead of converting to a Group and then picking Row afterwards, the transform menu offers Row or Stack as direct targets — one step instead of two. (78713)
The same “one step instead of two” thinking extends to legacy content. Pasting or converting an shortcode now creates a proper Embed block instead of leaving raw shortcode text behind, so embeds from YouTube and other services display correctly right away (77937)— and if you change your mind, undo restores a paragraph with the URL rather than deleting it. (77551).
The Shortcode block joins in as well: when its content matches a registered shortcode, it now offers block-specific transforms to convert it into the equivalent block. (77944)
For anyone maintaining a site with years of shortcode-based posts, that removes a tedious cleanup step on the way to block-based editing.
Combine gradient and image backgrounds
[end user][theme builder][site admin]
More blocks now support background gradients through the new background.gradient block support, which layers a gradient on top of a background image instead of one overwriting the other — a translucent color wash over a photo, for instance, without custom CSS.
Previously, gradients lived only in the Color panel, stored as a CSS background shorthand that clashed with any image on the block. The new support adds a Gradient control to the Background panel next to the existing Image control, and the style engine combines both into a single layered background-image value on individual blocks, in Global Styles, and via theme.json. A follow-up allows modern color functions in standalone gradients, and the text and background color controls moved to the Typography and Background panels to match.
To place the two color settings for background and gradients in the sidebar together, the controls needed to be split up from the text color. So now the color settings for text color and background colore are in two different panels.
WordPress 7.1 ships with six blocks supporting the new gradients: Group, Verse, Accordion, Pullquote, Post Content, and Quote. More will follow, with a long-term plan to migrate the older color.gradient to the new system across all blocks. There’s no built-in migration path in 7.1 yet.
For extenders, opting in follows the familiar block supports pattern. Custom blocks declare it in their block.json:
JSON
"supports": {"background": {"gradient": true }}
Themes control the setting via theme.json under settings.background.gradient (it’s also included in appearanceTools), and can define gradient values in styles — at the root, per block, or in style variations:
Besides gaining the new media editor modal for background images, the Cover block addresses a request from community feedback. When the block’s “Embed video from URL” feature shipped in WordPress 7.0, site builders asked for a way to curate or disable it. WordPress 7.1 adds a new allowedVideoProviders attribute to restrict which video providers are offered, or to remove the URL-embed option entirely by allowing none (#80092). Existing embeds keep working; only new URL input in the editor is restricted.
Gallery and the attached images workflow in the Media Library
[end user][site admin]
Images you upload while writing a post have always been “attached” to that post. This specifically true for older sites, pre-Block editor. Attached images where no accessible as an cluster and need to be added the block editor canvas one at a time. WordPress 7.1 finally puts that relationship to work in the editor, via an additional filter drop-down item Uploaded to this post in the Media Library Inserter modal. Photos and other media you’ve uploaded stay within reach for reuse instead of disappearing into the media library.
The Gallery block is the showcase: instead of hand-picking every image, a single Use attached images button populates a dynamic gallery from all media attached to the current post (#78796). For content creators, this makes assembling image galleries faster and more flexible. It also helps reorganize image on older posts. The Source panel provides options for sorting the images. This brings the block editor handling of Galleries up to par with some features of the [ gallery ] shortcode.
To have entire freedom to control the Gallery block, the Detach feature comes in handy. A Detach button in the toolbar and in the sidebar’s Source panel, makes out a stand-alone Gallery without the dynamic connetion to the post’s image. Using it help user to edit/upate the gallery block.
Below video visualizes the connection between a list of image attached to a post from the Media Library and the gallery block with the new feature.
It’s a step back toward the simplicity of dropping photos into a post and having WordPress do the arranging. It’s the first visible piece of a larger effort around dynamic galleries and post-attached media, with dynamic queries by date and eventually categories or tags ahead.
Image Block: Mark as decorative toggle
[end user][site admin]
Screen readers announce every image to their users — but some images, like dividers and design flourishes, carry no information worth announcing. The Image block’s new “Mark as decorative” checkbox tells assistive technologies to skip such an image entirely on the front end, by rendering it with role=”none” in the published post. It now eliminates the question, did we forget an alt=text or was it a deliberate decision to leave the alt-text empty?
There is further processing to come with the checked box. Marking an image decorative clears its alt text and disables captions and links, since an image that links somewhere or explains something isn’t decorative by definition. Until now, the accessible route was knowing the empty-alt-text convention; the checkbox makes the intent explicit, machine-readable, and available to every content creator. (78064)
Login/out Block Improvements
[theme builder][site admin][developer]
The Login/Logout block has an option to display a full login form instead of a simple link — but until now, that form’s submit button ignored your theme entirely, rendering with plain browser-default styles that stuck out next to every other button on the site. With a block theme active, the submit button now carries the standard button classes (wp-block-button__link and wp-element-button), so it automatically picks up the button styling your theme defines in theme.json — colors, border radius, and all — with no custom CSS required. The block follows the same approach the Comments form already uses, resolving a mismatch first reported back in 2023. (76746)
Navigation Block and Link Creation
[theme builder][site admin][end user]
The Navigation block picks up several improvements that give site builders more freedom in what a menu can contain and where it can be edited. The Login/Logout block can now be nested inside submenus (#75497), handy for tucking account actions into a “My Account” dropdown instead of spending a top-level slot on them. New links can be created directly from the sidebar List View in the Site Editor (#75918), so building out a menu no longer requires clicking into each item on the canvas. And the Home Link block gains previously missing controls (#76672), bringing it up to par with its navigation siblings.
One behavior change to note for theme builders: the Navigation block no longer force-propagates its font size down to individual menu items (#77419). Until now, every navigation link, submenu, and page list item received the parent’s font-size markup — and because relative units multiply, nested dropdowns compounded dramatically (1.5em became 2.25em, then 3.375em).
The block now relies on standard CSS inheritance instead, which also fixes mismatched typography between the editor canvas and the front end. Most themes need no changes, but themes that target has-{slug}-font-size classes directly on nav items should check their menus — the Miscellaneous Editor Changes dev note includes a filter to restore the old markup if needed.
Search block Styling
[theme builder][site admin][end user]
A styling gap is closed in the release for the Search block: color settings now apply to the search input field even when the search button is disabled (77219), so your search boxes match your design system regardless of which display options you choose.
The block also embraces modern HTML: it can now render inside the native <search> landmark element, which carries search semantics for browsers and assistive technologies without the manual role=”search” attribute. Because dropping that attribute could break existing theme CSS, the feature is opt-in — per block via a new HTML element selector in the Advanced panel, or site-wide with add_theme_support( ‘search-element’ ) (#78485). Default output is unchanged, with a path to making the modern markup the default in a future release.(78485)
Query block
[theme builder][site admin][end user]
The Query block received an additional filter to control the list of blocks: You can now exclude the current post from a list of posts. This is useful when you want to add a list of posts with related posts. (64916).
General quality of life improvements.
Pattern editing experience improvements
[theme builder][site admin][developer]
WordPress 7.0 shifted pattern editing to focus on content changes rather than exposing every tool, treating patterns more like single blocks. In 7.1, work focuses on UX refinements based on feedback, bug fixes, and general maintenance. For users inserting and customizing patterns, this means a more polished, predictable experience with fewer rough edges.
Pattern Editing and Block Fields: Highlight selected block (74841)
Pattern editing: show root block identity when editing pattern sections #79417
Block Width and Layout Controls
[theme builder][site admin][developer]
Refines spacing and layout tools to be more intuitive. The Columns block no longer shows a confusing ‘Skip’ option in its layout picker, the Button block now uses the standard width control system, and spacing controls display in a more logical order when unlinked. These changes remove friction points that tripped up editors when building complex layouts.
Columns: Remove redundant Skip option from layout picker #78405
Re-order spacing side controls when unlinked #66317
Link Control and Preview Enhancements
[theme builder][site admin][developer]
When linking to pages or posts, the link picker now shows ‘Homepage’ instead of just ‘Page’ for your site’s front page, and uses the actual entity link title for previews. These small improvements make link creation feel smarter and help editors understand exactly what they’re linking to before publishing.
Use entity link title for link control preview #77155
Link Picker: Use Homepage badge instead of Page if Homepage #75929
Additional CSS Validation
[theme builder][site admin][developer][end user]
Additional CSS is now validated both on mount and via a new dimension validation endpoint for sideloaded styles. These checks prevent malformed or insecure CSS from breaking your site’s appearance or introducing security risks, giving you more confidence when adding custom styles.
Add dimension validation to sideload endpoint #74903
Block Editor Attribute Handling
[theme builder][developer]
The block editor now correctly targets the right block when copying direct insert block attributes, fixing edge cases where attributes would apply to the wrong block. This fix ensures that copy-paste and duplication workflows behave as expected.
Block Editor: Fix target block for copying direct insert block attributes #77877
A set of small fixes makes working with images more predictable. If an image points to a media library item that has since been deleted, the editor no longer treats it as a local attachment, preventing confusing errors. The crop button only appears when cropping is actually available for your user role and image type, so you’re never offered a tool that can’t work.
And the featured image field now shows placeholder text making clear at a glance what goes there.
Image block: Validate attachment ID exists before treating image as local #77178
Image/Site Logo: hide crop toolbar when editMediaEntity is unavailable #76626
Ensures the Post Template block’s fallback styles only apply when appropriate, preventing layout conflicts when custom minimum column widths are defined. This fix gives editors more predictable control over query loop layouts without unexpected style overrides.
Ensure Post Template fallback styles don’t apply when minimumColumnWidth is defined #77411
Post Title Block Enhancements
[site admin][end user]
The Title block gains a placeholder attribute, letting you show helpful text when no title has been entered yet. This small addition improves the editing experience for custom post types and guides content creators to fill in required fields.
Post Title: Add placeholder attribute #7601v22.7.0
Block Inserter Enhancements
[site admin][end user]
Makes discovering and adding blocks easier with visual polish to the inserter interface. The search input now stays visible while scrolling through block options, and the inserter button animates to clearly signal when the panel is open. These small touches reduce friction when building pages and help editors stay oriented while exploring block options.
Block Inserter: Animate inserter button icon to signal open state. #78306
Make Block Inserter search input sticky while scrolling #77698
Editor enhancements
Beyond the block improvements, the editing experience itself picks up refinements across the board. Notes mature into a fuller commenting workflow. Visual revisions gain a more detailed timeline. And your site’s brand identity gets a dedicated home in the Site Editor.
Notes, the inline editorial comments right in the editor, continue to mature, with several additions in this release that make asynchronous collaboration richer and easier to act on without leaving WordPress.
The headline feature: inline notes. You can now attach a note to a specific text selection rather than to a whole block. Select part of a paragraph, add a note, and the highlight stays anchored to that text as you keep editing around it. A single block can carry multiple inline notes, sorted by the order they appear, and none of the highlighting shows up in the published post. Also, blocks are no longer limited to a single conversation, either — you can start multiple note threads on the same block.
The conversations themselves got more expressive, too. Notes now support rich text formatting — bold, italic, links, and code. @mention autocomplete makes it quick to pull a colleague into a thread. Longer notes collapse behind a “Show more” toggle, and a “Resolved” divider in the sidebar separates finished discussions from open ones, so it’s easy to see what still needs attention.
A new Appearance > Editor > Identity screen consolidates your site’s logo, favicon, title, and tagline into one easy-to-find location, with inline editing so you can crop and adjust images right there. This eliminates hunting through Settings or digging into templates just to update foundational branding. For new site builders especially, it makes setting up your site’s identity quick and straightforward. Existing site owners have an intuitive place to update the data. (76264, 76116)
Visual revisions improvements
[site admin][end user][theme builder]
Building on the visual revisions introduced in 7.0, the revisions screen gains a paginated timeline in the inspector with more detailed information about each revision, making it easier to understand what changed as you scrub through versions. (77333)
Changes made via autosave are now labeled in the revisions timeline and make the autosave notice work with the visual revisions UI.(79950, 79947)
Apply Globally now with review panel
The block inspector’s Apply globally action which has been a one button push of the block’s local style changes to Global Styles, has received an upgrade in WordPress 7.1 so designer can have a more granular control, on which part of the styles will make it into the global styles.
The button now opens a review modal instead, listing each modified style with its current and new value. All changes come pre-selected; deselect any you want to keep as local overrides, and only the checked styles are applied. Undo still restores the previous state in one step. What was a somewhat risky action is now a deliberate choice. You see exactly what will change across your site before committing. (#79839)
Admin / Workflow updates
Updates to admin and workflow tools in 7.1 improve navigation, content management, and site administration. These changes are designed to reduce friction and help you work more efficiently within the WordPress dashboard.
Organized command palette
[all]
The command palette, the quick-access menu you open with keyboard shortcuts, now groups results into recent, suggested, and matching sections, and remembers your recently-used commands across sessions. The visual design has also been refreshed to make scanning results easier. This helps you navigate WordPress faster by surfacing the tools you use most often right at the top. (75691)
Change a comment’s parent from the Edit Comment screen
[end user][site admin][enterprise]
Ever needed to fix a comment that landed in the wrong thread? The Edit Comment screen now has an “In reply to” control in the Save box — hit Edit and you get a dropdown of the post’s other comments, listed by the author with a short excerpt. Top-level comments just show “None.”
You can’t create broken threads with it: the dropdown hides the comment itself and anything nested under it, and the server double-checks on save — the new parent has to be on the same post and can’t be the comment or one of its own replies (anything invalid gets bounced with a WP_Error). If the current parent wouldn’t normally show up in the list (a pingback, say), it’s kept in there as the selected option, so saving without touching the field changes nothing. Works without JavaScript too, and there are tests covering the validation. (65570)
See an excerpt of posts without titles
[end user][site admin]
If you publish posts without titles for instance for quick status-style updates, the Posts list has been pretty useless for telling them apart: just a column of identical “(no title)” links.
Now, in Compact view, untitled posts show the first 15 words of the excerpt right after “(no title)”, so you can actually see what each post is at a glance.
The checkbox’s screen-reader label gets the same text, password-protected posts keep their content hidden, and the Extended view is unchanged since it already shows excerpts.(65022).
Media Library: infinite scrolling is back on by default, with a per-user opt-out
[end user][site admin]
The Media Library grid now uses infinite scrolling by default, so attachments load continuously as you scroll instead of behind a “Load more” button. For anyone who prefers the previous behavior, there’s a new personal option: a “Disable infinite scrolling in the Media Library grid view” checkbox on the profile screen. The setting only appears for users who can actually upload files, since others never see the attachment grid.
For developers, the existing media_library_infinite_scrolling filter still works and now takes top precedence: a hooked filter always wins, followed by the user’s profile preference, with infinite scrolling enabled when neither is set. Note the filter’s default value has flipped from false to true as of 7.1.0, so any code relying on the old default should be reviewed. The change ships with unit tests covering the new user option and the full precedence chain (65564).
Since WordPress 6.8, speculative loading lets browsers prefetch or prerender pages a visitor is likely to open next, making navigation feel near-instant. WordPress ships with deliberately cautious defaults — and until now, changing them required an mu-plugin. With WordPress 7.1, hosting providers and site owners can adjust the default mode and eagerness through environment variables or wp-config.php constants. A well-configured host with page and object caching in place can opt its sites into more aggressive speculation and pass the speed gains on to visitors. The real-world data hosts gather this way will also help inform whether core changes the defaults for everyone in a future release. The technical details are available in the core ticket (#65624).
WordPress 7.1 provides developers with expanded APIs, theme.json capabilities, and system improvements. These tools offer greater control over site design, block behavior, and system integrations.
Post editor iframe now always on
Other editors in WordPress—the site editor, the template editor, and block, template, and device previews—have been unconditionally iframed for a long time, going back to the template editor’s introduction in 5.8. The post editor was the holdout: starting in 7.0, whether it ran isolated depended on the blocks actually present in a given post, so a post using only Block API v3+ blocks got the isolated canvas, while a post containing even one older block (API v1 or v2) dropped out of it entirely. That meant the same site, even the same author, could see the editor behave differently from post to post. In 7.1, that condition is removed: every post editor is always iframed, regardless of theme type or block API version.
For most people writing and editing content, this is good news—no more switching behavior depending on which blocks happen to be inserted. Block developers have a bit of homework, though: the iframe has its own document and window, separate from the admin page where editor scripts run, so any code that reaches for the global document or window to touch the canvas will now be looking at the wrong place. The usual fix is to get the canvas’s document from an element inside it (via ownerDocument and its defaultView) rather than the global object, and to use useRefEffect for attaching and cleaning up canvas event listeners.
The Abilities API arrived in WordPress 6.9, and 7.1 gives extenders real control over it. Four new lifecycle filters let plugins step into ability execution — short-circuit it entirely (think caching, rate limiting, or maintenance mode), transform input, layer on extra authorization rules, or reshape and even recover results. Two more filters add custom input and output validation on top of JSON Schema, and a new wp_ability_invoked action fires on every invocation — even failed ones — handy for logging and auditing. The core info abilities return more user details, input over the REST API now arrives properly typed, and wp_prepare_json_schema_for_client() strips PHP callbacks and WordPress-only conventions before a schema goes out to REST clients, MCP integrations, or AI tools.
A new public metadata flag rounds it out: declare once that an ability is meant for external clients, and REST, MCP adapters, and future integrations use it as their default — with channel-specific flags still able to override, and permission callbacks still guarding actual execution.
Finding the right abilities gets easier too: wp_get_abilities() now accepts arguments to filter registered abilities by category, namespace, or meta — with the same filtering available on the REST endpoint.
Theme authors can now define text shadows directly in theme.json via a new textShadow property under styles.typography. It works everywhere you’d expect: at the root level, per-block (say, a shadow on paragraphs only), via style variations, and on elements — including pseudo-selectors like a link’s :hover state. Any valid CSS text-shadow value is accepted, including stacked multi-shadow definitions. Block placeholder text in the editor resets the shadow so it stays readable regardless of what the theme sets.
Nine more core blocks (Post Date, Post Excerpt, Post Navigation Link, Post Title, Query Title, Site Tagline, Site Title, Pullquote and Term Name) now use WordPress’s standardized text-align system. As part of a larger migration effort this update ensures consistent alignment controls across the editor and makes these blocks behave predictably alongside newer blocks.
WordPress EndUser are not supposed to see any changes and existing blocks continue to work. Theme designers are now able to style any of these blocks text align via theme.json property. The code example shows how to set the center as the site-wide TextAlign default. And `”textAlign”: false` disables the feature for this block
When set to false, the toolbar button and block options menu item are hidden. In this regard, it makes this block support consistent with color, typography etc.
blockVisibility.allowEditing follows the layout flag. The reason is the two-fold nature of blockVisibility at the block supports level: a bool means don’t render the block at all, but viewport settings allow users to control visibility per viewport.
The object shape also leaves the door open to extending block visibility to triggers, not only blockVisibility.viewports but others like post type or whatever. (76559).
Block Supports: CSS variables by feature selector
Block Supports now generates CSS custom properties based on a block’s feature-specific selectors, not just its root selector. Some blocks—the Button block is the example given—define their outer wrapper and an inner styling target as different elements, and previously there was no way to output a preset variable (like a dimension size) onto that inner element specifically. Theme and plugin authors building design systems now have a way to target the right element per feature, without needing custom CSS to work around the mismatch.
A minimum-width option for block dimensions
Blocks already supported height, minHeight, and width. What was missing was a way to stop something from shrinking too far—so a layout element wouldn’t collapse into an unusable sliver on a narrow screen. Minimum-width closes that gap, mirroring how minimum-height already works.
It’s opt-in at the block level: the control stays hidden in the inspector until a block explicitly enables it, though it shows by default in the global styles panel. Theme-defined dimension presets carry over automatically, so existing spacing scales just work. The Group block is the first to adopt it.
The first version of the design system’s theme component arrives in WordPress 7.1. It consists of standardized CSS custom properties that follow the W3C Design Tokens specification. You probably won’t spot the difference right away — the default theme was deliberately built to match existing styles — but this is the machinery that will power the admin color scheme in the Site Editor. You can read more details on the future direction in the Merge Proposal: Design System Theming
The Site Editor’s sidebar and interface now respect your chosen WordPress admin color scheme instead of always showing a dark background. This brings visual consistency across the post editor, Site Editor, and admin dashboard. If you’ve personalized WordPress with a color scheme you prefer, that choice now carries through everywhere you work. 78397
Mix static HTML with editable blocks
A new innerContent block support lets a block keep static HTML fragments interleaved with editable inner blocks as the canonical source of its own markup. In practice, this means a hand-written HTML structure can have just a piece of it—a paragraph, an image—editable in place, while the rest stays fixed and can’t be moved, removed, or rearranged.
The Custom HTML block is the first adopter: pasting HTML with a block comment delimiter embedded in it (for example, a <!– wp:paragraph –> block inside a larger static <div>) makes that inner piece editable directly in the canvas, while the surrounding markup remains locked in place. It’s a narrow, developer-facing capability for now—the HTML block is the only place it’s wired up—but it opens the door for custom blocks to offer the same kind of “mostly static, partly editable” experience going forward. (79115)
The List Item block has gained Block Bindings support. A List Item’s content can now be connected to a data source—a custom field, a pattern override, or another registered source—so individual entries in a list can be populated dynamically rather than typed in by hand. The change registers content as a bindable attribute for core/list-item.
A related fix rounds out the feature: previously, if a bound List Item also contained a nested sub-list, that nested list was dropped when the binding was rendered. Now a List Item can carry a bound value and a nested list beneath it at the same time. In practice, this means multi-level lists—say, a team member’s name pulled from a custom field, with a nested list of their current projects underneath—can now be fully dynamic without losing structure.
The Connectors framework, which manages WordPress’s connections to external services like AI providers, now supports username and application password authentication as an alternative to API keys. A merged pull request adds a default connector form for this method, along with the underlying authentication type, mirroring the equivalent API already available in WordPress Core.
The change also handles the practical details: saved passwords are masked in the UI and over REST, credentials can be set via constants or environment variables instead of the database, and a companion Core patch keeps the two in sync. For connectors that require an account login rather than a bare API key, this removes the need for a custom settings screen.
This lands alongside a broader open proposal for a PHP-side field registry that would let connector authors declare arbitrary settings—model choice, temperature, custom URLs, and more—the way register_setting() works elsewhere in WordPress. That registry isn’t built yet; the application password work is a first, concrete step (new auth method, not new field types), addressing one of the two gaps the proposal identified rather than the full vision.
Blocks package stabilizes two experimental functions
The Blocks package stabilizes cloneSanitizedBlock and sanitizeBlockAttributes, dropping their __experimental prefixes now that the functions have been stable in practice for some time. The old __experimental-prefixed names still work but will log a deprecation notice, so plugins or themes importing them directly should switch to the new names.
Post author notifications: the filter decides
The notify_post_author filter now has the final say: approval status is checked before the filter runs, so it receives an accurate default and returning true reliably sends a notification — even for unapproved comments. Sites forcing notifications with __return_true should switch to a callback that checks approval, or they’ll start receiving emails for spam and moderated comments. (#64217). More Details can be found in the Dev note The notify_post_author filter now has the final say on post author notifications
Accessible tooltips and toggle tips API
WordPress adds a core mechanism for accessible tooltips (51006), offering an alternative to the title attribute, which is not available to keyboard and touch users. Two new functions cover different use cases: wp_get_tooltip() exposes an accessible name when a control has focus or hover, such as for icon-only buttons, and wp_get_toggletip() implements a popover disclosure with extended help information that stays open until dismissed. Both generate accessible markup that avoids excess verbosity for screen readers and follows best practices for voice command users.
The first toggle tip in core explains the “Remember Me” option on the login screen (55343). Plugin developers can use the functions for their own settings screens and metaboxes. (62741).
Plugin developers can now configure the Site Editor’s Pages, Templates, Template Parts, and Patterns screens through four new PHP filters — one per screen. Each filter adjusts the DataViews and DataForm components powering these screens: the default view (layout, sort order, visible fields), the layouts available to users, the preconfigured views in the sidebar such as “All” or “Drafts,” and the fields shown in the Quick Edit form.
This creates a single place of configuration per entity, with more screens — including the editor inspector — planned to draw from the same source in future releases (#76544). Code examples are in the Dev Note: Filtering Site Editor Screens in WordPress 7.1.
Post list table markup changed for accessibility
An eleven-year-old accessibility ticket is resolved: in post list tables, the row header (th scope="row") moves from the checkbox column to the title column, so screen readers identify each row by the post’s name rather than by a checkbox that may not even be present. (#32892).
Extenders should check their CSS and JavaScript: selectors like th.check-column or ones expecting the title and row actions inside a td need updating. The dev note Post list tables row headers changed lists the affected patterns, and keeping both td and th selectors preserves compatibility with older WordPress versions.
It was another busy release week: the WordPress 7.0.3 security update, WordPress 7.1 RC 1, and Gutenberg 23.7 all landed. More on each below — but before you keep reading, update all your sites to 7.0.3 now. This newsletter can wait…
If you are traveling to Phoenix: safe travels, and pack a sweater — the AC will be cranked up high in every building! This year, I will see you on the WCUS Livestream.
Have a great weekend!
Yours, Birgit
Table of Contents
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
WordPress 7.0.3shipped as a security release fixing twelve vulnerabilities, so update your sites right away if automatic background updates aren’t already handling it for you. Release lead John Blackbourn lists the fixes, including a pre-auth XSS on the login screen that could lead to PHP code execution, several contributor-level stored XSS issues, and a multisite privilege escalation. Backports reach all supported branches down to 4.7, and 7.1 RC2 carries the fixes too.
To appreciate the huge effort by the security team to get this release out, consider the numbers: until earlier this year, there were 20 to 30 reports per month; now that number has jumped to 450 per month. Both security updates, 7.0.2 and 7.0.3, were backported not only to the two officially supported versions, 6.9 and 7.0, but all the way back to version 4.7. That’s two dozen major versions that needed updating. See also Rae Morey’s story in The Repository: WordPress 7.0.3 Patches 12 Vulnerabilities as Bug Bounty Reports Climb to 450 a Month.
August 19 is the scheduled final release date, and Benjamin Zekavica announces WordPress 7.1 Release Candidate 1 ready for your test sites. Since Beta 4, more than 145 updates landed — 57 in the Editor, 88 in Core — plus new features like the Icons API, shareable revision links, and email notifications for @mentions in Notes. Plugin and theme authors: wrap up testing and bump your “Tested up to” to 7.1. WordPress Playground lets you try it straight in the browser.
Milana Cap counts more than 310 Core Trac tickets, twenty new hooks, and roughly 600 Gutenberg enhancements in the WordPress 7.1 Field Guide, your linked index of every dev note for the August 19 release. Highlights range from client-side media processing and the always-iframed post editor to the SVG Icon API, responsive block styles, and the persistent admin bar. A candid closing section covers what didn’t make it, from the Classic block’s reprieve to real-time collaboration and React 19.
The post editor is always iframed in WordPress 7.1, and the escape hatch that let one apiVersion 2 block pull a whole post out of the iframe disappears. That’s the compatibility risk topping the developer’s audit list for WordPress 7.1by release coordinator Benjamin Zekavica. He sorts each section by risk level, walks through the SVG Icon API’s strict sanitizer, responsive block styles, and the new DataViews filters, and closes with a checklist for your August 19 release.
The Gallery block’s ambiguous “Convert to images” button becomes “Detach,” complete with a modal explaining what happens — one of many refinements Jonathan Bossenger walks through in what’s new in Gutenberg 23.7. You’ll also find the Global Styles inheritance UI now opt-in via the Experiments page, LaTeX errors in the Math block waiting until you leave the field, and fixes for floated blocks overlapping sticky ones and Pullquote line heights in the editor.
Plugins and Tools for #nocode site builders
Variable product pages load roughly 9 to 12 percent faster and large stores get snappier Order screens, Brent MacKinnon reports in what’s new in WooCommerce 11.0. Analytics also grows more trustworthy: refunds now count in the period they happened, session counts exclude bots, and you can rerun incomplete historical imports. Guest customers can claim past orders when they create an account, and a Checkout Recovery beta lets you test messaging before a full rollout.
Getting Site Editor changes out of the database and into version control has frustrated agency developers for years, and Brian Coords argues agents make it urgent again. His experimental agent-first approach to Create Block Theme, wp-theme-control, wraps the upcoming WP-CLI 3.0 wp block commands in bash scripts and an agent skill: a plan command lists database changes, then you dry-run, export them into your theme, and optionally clear the database copies. He’s collecting feedback ahead of his WordCamp US talk.
Clients pinning comments straight onto your live pages — no logins, no email chains, no PDF round-trips — is the pitch of Ben Elwood‘s Reviso client feedback and approvals plugin. Among other page builders it’s native to the block editor, with threaded replies, status tracking, and review links that work even in maintenance mode. Version 1.5.2 switches on Suggest mode by default, so reviewers propose wording changes like tracked changes and your team applies them with one click.
Bas Buis released Dynamic OSM Maps, a pluginthat adds interactive maps without Google API keys or recurring fees. The lightweight block runs on OpenStreetMap and Leaflet: in the free version you enter addresses manually, while Pro connects your custom fields — coordinates, addresses, or repeaters — for unlimited markers and popups. That opens the door for directory and listing sites to render stored location data straight onto the map.
Emily Rapport opens with Dutch tulip mania to frame the rush of llms.txt files and AI-visibility subscriptions, then does something rarer: shares a year of her own content work with real Search Console data. Her rewritten maintenance page climbed from position 50 to 13 and collected exactly five clicks — yet three inquiries arrived saying “I asked ChatGPT.” Her takeaway: publishing consistently across real topics beats chasing one niche, and you still can’t reliably trace an AI recommendation to a page.
“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.
The WooCommerce Developer Blog follows up its All Products proof of concept with the why behind it. Veronica Fasulo and co-authors lay out the value of DataViews and who it’s for: you describe a field once and it powers the list column, Quick Edit, bulk edit, and forms, instead of four hand-wired implementations. Merchants get switchable views without page reloads, extension developers get registration instead of DOM patching — and the team openly asks whether DataViews is even the right foundation.
What’s new in Playground?
A customizable Dock, auto-save, and live visual previews of your saved instances headline the new WordPress Playground UI, which Fellyph Cintra demos on WordPress.tv. The video walks through importing projects from GitHub or Zip files, previewing Core and Gutenberg pull requests, and the built-in file editor, database manager, and error logs — plus switching WordPress versions all the way back to 0.7. Feedback goes to the Make Playground blog or the #playground Slack channel.
AI in WordPress
Vercel, a major platform shipped the Vercel AI Gateway Provider plugin, by former Core AI team rep Felix Arntz. One API key unlocks hundreds of models from over 40 providers. Any AI Client plugin on your site can route text, image, and video generation through the Gateway — including the Photo to Post demo from Jonathan Bossenger’s tutorial. Automatic fallbacks kick in during provider outages, and you pay provider rates without platform fees.
Your AI agent designs a beautiful page, and Gutenberg freezes it into one uneditable Custom HTML blob. Human Made’s answer is Block Runner, now open-sourced on GitHub: a deterministic Node CLI that converts generated HTML into properly nested native blocks — wp:cover, wp:columns, wp:buttons — with real attachment IDs, and validates every result against headless Gutenberg. In the team’s benchmark, raw models writing block markup score 35 to 73; paired with Block Runner, the same models hit 93 to 99.
Readers may remember Chris Huber’s Block Format Bridgefrom a few months back — it tackles the same gap from inside WordPress, converting Markdown and HTML server-side at insert time, while Block Runner works the pipeline side with its validation gate and CI hooks. Two open-source answers to the same question is a good sign the agentic content problem is getting real attention.
A third piece of the puzzle: the official WordPress agent-skills repository takes the prevention route, teaching AI coding assistants to write valid block markup in the first place. For a lighter-weight approach, you can also point your AI agent straight at the updated Core Blocks Reference, where each block’s page now documents its markup, attributes, supports, and allowed nesting.
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.
In episode 133 of the Gutenberg Changelog Podcast, Birgit Pauli-Haack hosts Faith Ruth Imokol, a Ugandan web developer and longtime Gutenberg advocate, to discuss the Gutenberg 23.6 release and the upcoming WordPress 7.1 update. The episode opens with insights into the WordPress community in Uganda, highlighting their active WordCamp scene and educational initiatives such as the Campus Connect program, which introduces WordPress to students across the country.
Faith Imokol shares her experience on a recent WordCamp Kampala panel about AI in web development, noting divided perspectives: while some Ugandans are excited about AI’s possibilities, others are concerned about job security and adaptation. She describes her personal transition into using AI as a collaborative development tool, driven by the need for faster production due to heightened competition.
Discussion moves to WordPress 7.1, covering new features such as customizable viewports via theme.json, expanded notes and commenting capabilities, enhanced SVG icon registration, and improvements to blocks like playlists and tabs. Both speakers are enthusiastic about the collaborative features and the evolving editorial workflow, particularly the granular notes system for streamlined feedback.
The episode emphasizes community feedback’s role in shaping new releases and encourages listeners to help test upcoming WordPress versions to ensure quality and translatability. The episode closes with practical tips and excitement for ongoing educational outreach and future Gutenberg advancements.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Welcome to our 133rd episode of the Gutenberg Changelog Podcast. In today’s episode, we will talk about Gutenberg 23.6 release and some WordPress 7.1. And that should be enough for today. I’m your host, Birgit Pauli Haag, curator at the Gutenberg Times and full-time core contributor to the WordPress Open Source Project sponsored by Automattic. And today I’m very excited that Faith Ruth Imokol joins me. She’s a web developer from Uganda, WordCamp organizer there and speaker, and a Gutenberg advocate since 2018, as long as the Gutenberg Times. And I’m glad she agreed to come on the show and talk through with this release and tell us more about the WordPress community in Uganda. Welcome to the show, Faith. How are you today?
Faith Imokol: Thank you very much, Birgit, for having me. I am okay. I’m very fine. Thank you, listeners, for having me as well. I’m excited.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Me too. Me too. It’s such wonderful to have you on the show. So, WordCamp community in Uganda is really busy this year, and it probably was last year as well because there’s a lot of experience there in doing WordCamps. So you, you were in WordCamp Kampala this year.
Faith Imokol: Yes.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And you were on a panel session titled AI and the Future of Web Development: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. So what were your takeaways? How are the people in Uganda kind of looking at AI and the future of the web?
Faith Imokol: Oh, well, the opinions on the future of AI in Uganda and how people view it are quite divided. Many are very hopeful, but some are also a little worried about what is going to become of them, especially when it comes to their jobs with AI. There’s a lot of talk on AI taking over. There’s a lot of talk on, okay, what do we need to do? Do we still need to continue with the way that we’ve been working or should we transition into full AI mode working with AIs? So there’s a lot of speculation around AI. And during the panel session, very many people had very many questions around that. They wanted reassurances on, especially when it comes to their jobs. Do we still have our jobs as developers? Can we still maintain the work that we are doing right now? Can we still continue using the tools that we are working with right now, or should we leave them and just take on AI and start working with AI. So it was a panel that was there to encourage people, to also highlight and offer corrections on some of the misinformation that was going, that has been spreading and going around in the community, especially in the WordPress community. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So how, you don’t have to go into details, but how are you approaching AI for your work?
Faith Imokol: Personally, I could say that I’ve been forced in some way to use AI ’cause I’m using it more as a pair working along with it in my development. And I’ve been forced to use it. Initially, I was a little hesitant. I like to do my own discoveries. I like to go through my own work and do my own troubleshooting. But with the AI coming in, it forced some of the teams that I was working in to have to increase the rate at which they produce and release applications. Why? Because the competition has now stiffened. If you’re not using AI to work faster, someone else is going to produce what you’re doing and they’re going to release it, and then you’re going to be left behind. So I kind of, at some extent, have had to take a back seat on doing my own personal investigations and leaving those to my own personal time. But when it comes to work, it’s something that I’ve fully incorporated into my day-to-day working. Yeah, still, I still apply my own knowledge as well. I don’t leave everything to AI to do it.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s certainly quite prudent, yeah, to see how AI can really go wrong and you don’t know which tangent they go on. Yeah. And I have found, well, I’m using AI maybe a year now for a lot of different things and I have found that there’s no taste. Yeah. It has no feelings, of course. Yeah. And it has no empathy for anything. Yeah. So, human judgment is even more needed for anything that is released that was done by AI. And I think it becomes more and more clear the longer we practice with it. First, it’s a fantastic tool. Yeah, it kind of gets you to certain things faster, but it also is very verbose in code, in reviews, in analysis, and you really need to kind of slow it down and figure out what’s really important. And that it can’t do. It doesn’t know what’s important, what’s not important. Everything is the same.
Faith Imokol: I kind of think it’s like a very smart child who thinks they know everything, but they’ve not lived through the experience of what an adult knows.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So they still need guidance. That’s a good analogy. Yeah. It’s like a young person who just graduated high school and knows everything.
Faith Imokol: Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I was that when I graduated from high school. I knew everything. But back to the Uganda community, the next WordCamp is in Jinja. Is that how you pronounce it? From the 19th to the 20th of September. It’s in the Civil Service College in Jinja. Just, just in case you dear listeners are in the region and you wanna go to a WordCamp in Uganda. But there’s also running from now to December several WordPress Campus Connect events with 25 schools, each one with at least 100 participants, 25 schools, colleges, or universities. And the program will bring practical, as it aims to, practical WordPress learning sessions to selected schools across Central and Eastern Uganda. And students will be introduced to the basics of WordPress, how websites are built, how to create and publish content and how they can use WordPress for school projects, personal portfolios, blogs, business ideas, and future technology careers. So these are the Campus Connect from the WordPress Education Program that started, I think, in the end of ’24 and has now run through ’25 and half of ’26. So, and Uganda is really taking to it and getting a lot of students involved with WordPress.
Faith Imokol: Yeah, we’re working hard to see that the future, the next generation that comes into the workforce is not too ill-equipped like the way we were. So these programs that we’re starting as the WordPress community are out to help the next, the coming, the young generations that are coming in, for them to know, to know the different skills that they can take on and to know that there are different tools that they can also learn that can help them. So it’s really a very amazing initiative that was started by Mr. Dumba and Moses.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. And they are still completely involved and totally immersed in that field. Yeah. Stephen Dumba also organized a website project competition for elementary schools, high schools, and colleges. And they had, I think, 20 teams in total there. And then each team had to create a website for a community project that is local and was very important to the community and how to communicate those problems and solutions. And that was also in June. Then there was WordCamp Osaka, Campus Connect in Osaka, and then Campus Connect in Kakumiro, if I pronounce all that right.
Faith Imokol: Yes. Yeah, you’re trying.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: I’m trying. Yeah, I’m not succeeding. Okay.
Faith Imokol: Your pronunciations are very good.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So I’m really excited about what’s happening on the African continent in the various communities. Uganda is one. I think another very active one is Kenya. And there was one in Rwanda. I don’t know how active they are now. But yeah, I’m really excited about that.
Announcements
So we have a few announcements. 7.1 is coming Today is July 30th. So in about 3 weeks, we will have a final release of 7.1. August 19th is the release date. And it will be released on the last day of WordCamp US. The Source of Truth, that’s the book about things, yeah, that is published on the Gutenberg Times. This time it’s about 39 minutes to read and 7,000 words. It’s really an ebook or something like that. The table of contents, it’s very detailed. So you can jump into the sections that you want. Okay. That you need. And the developer notes are coming out for those who need more technical details. And there was one from the client-side media processing, the text shadow support for global styles.
The media library infinite scroll is coming back and is enabled by default, but there is a filter to disable it for those who need it disabled. And then there are now editable blocks inside custom HTML blocks. That’s a very interesting construction. So if you’re interested in that, we share, of course, the developer links in the show notes. There are some editor component updates that are interesting for those who are using those for development in admin as well as in block editor. And then a lot of people have been waiting for that part, registering and rendering SVG icons and icon collections. The developer note is out and it will come to 7.1. And then there’s also a mid-width block support and background gradient block support. So there are some things for the global styles that are only available through the theme.json. There is no UI yet for it because it just needs to simmer a bit and kind of brew a bit before developers are thinking about the UI. Is there anything that excites you from 7.1 from, from these developer notes yet?
Faith Imokol: Yeah, well, I really, really, really enjoy the new features that are coming in, especially the one thing that I’ve really been excited about is the collaboration tools. So I’m really looking forward to working more with those and seeing how they will help people collaborate on different WordPress projects.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, the real-time collaboration has been punted again. Or it was clear that it would not come to 7.1 because it has these underlying server technical approaches that depending on where the site is hosted, it needs to have a different approach. Or in enterprise, yeah, it’s a different approach and all that. And they haven’t narrowed down what the default value could be. But what I really like are the e-syncer. So it’s very rare that I’m sitting there and somebody else is sitting on their computer and we’re on the post or on the site at the same time. Mostly it’s because, yeah, I work remotely in Europe time zone with a lot of people in the United States that’s 6 hours behind. It’s more asynchronous. And I think the notes section is really getting some great love there that came in 6.9 and 7.0 and now has additional features. Yeah, I really like that.
Faith Imokol: Yeah. I see it growing. I see it growing into something much bigger. So I’m looking forward to whatever is coming ahead.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, I could actually see that. But the current publishing flow at the official developer blog is that the writers do a draft in Google Docs, and then 2 reviewers come in and help edit that or streamline it or shorten it or whatever, comment on it. And then the writer has to make all the changes after those feedbacks and then take the whole Google Doc and put it into a blog. So with the notes feature, we can cut out the Google section part because we can now comment on the, on writing on the blocks. Yeah, we can mention people and we can resolve issues from the notes. So it’s coming really close to streamlining that, our process. All right.
What’s Released -WordPress 7.1
What’s released? WordPress 7.1 Beta 4 came out. That’s the last release before the release candidate next week on August 5th. August 5th is also the deadline for the rest of the dev notes, the developer notes for that, and the Field Guide will come around that as well. And that’s also the time where string freeze happens. Release candidate is still 14 days away. The translators need to get into it. So string freeze means there are no new strings that come in that need to be translated. Because the WordPress ecosystem has a huge army of translators. And by the time the release comes out, it will be translated into about 70 languages, almost 100% from the new release. And that’s huge. But we need to give those translators a time on the polyglots teams to actually get it all in. And this is not a small release, although it wasn’t a long pipeline there. Yeah.
And if you want to test it, this is now the time to go to the Make/Test team and follow the Help Test WordPress 7.1. It’s also linked from the release post from the news section because it gives you an opportunity to not only dive into the new features, but it also gives you instructions and a video and you learn quite a bit about it. And if you find things that are not right, you surface that. And that is not only surfaced for yourself, but it’s also surfaced for millions of other people who are going to get this new version. And if you are fast enough and the problems are small enough, they might get the fixes in before the final release. So if you wanna help and contribute quite impactful, help test WordPress 7.1. It’s my call for action for this show. Did you get a chance to dive into some of the features yet?
Faith Imokol: Yes, I did. I did try testing them as well locally. And yeah, it’s really impressive. The work that is being put into this is very, very impressive.
Gutenberg 23.6
Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right. So this brings us to the Gutenberg plugin release 23.6. And 23.6 is also the last feature release for 7.1. So everything that made it into the 23.6, almost all of it will come to 7.1. Everything that’s enhancements in the next release will not make it because we are past the beta site. But all the bug fixes that you find in your testing and you report them as issues or on the support forums have a chance to get in. Yeah. So let’s start with that.
Features
The first item that I want to point out is that you can now set the viewport for tablet and mobile values in theme.json. What does that mean? So the Gutenberg plugin editor had hardcoded viewports for what’s considered desktop, what’s considered tablet, and what’s considered mobile. And everybody had to work around those if you had a different idea about those viewports.
Faith Imokol: Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: But now you can just set the setting in your theme.json for your theme and then everything will fall into place.
Faith Imokol: I think this gives us much more flexibility because initially with the default viewpoints that are set by WordPress, all sites end up having the same, could I say breakpoints?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Faith Imokol: I think personally I prefer to, I refer to them as breakpoints. for different screens that is in mobile responsiveness. And this is going to allow us to be able to customize this to our own liking so that our themes can be uniform with, uh, can have settings that have been preset by us than having the default ones that WordPress has added. And I think as I was going through the changelog, I came through the discussion because the viewports allow you to set the tablet and the mobile view. And there was a discussion of what could happen if someone set the tab view to have a smaller, should I say, breakpoint than the mobile screen. What could happen by that? And it was quite interesting that at that point we reverted back to the defaults.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Faith Imokol: Yeah. So it’s a good thing to have in the background, as I don’t think everyone will abide by the rules, but As you’re working with this and anyone who gets to work with this, I think you have to keep that in mind that you, you’re setting different breakpoints for different devices and tablets are larger than mobile devices.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. That’s the assumption that tablets are larger than mobile devices. So if someone puts a mobile breakpoint in that’s bigger than the tablet, that can probably just be a mistake or something like that. Yeah. So having a fallback to not ruin the whole site just because of a wrong value in the theme.json is probably a good measure, yes.
Faith Imokol: I’m thinking we now have these new Samsung phones that have come out, the flip phones. Does it become a tablet? I’m still trying to understand.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s a good question. So I saw a discussion, an issue that you can— that on Gutenberg to think through the consequences if you have more than 3 breakpoints. Yeah. Can we have multiple sizes? I mean, at one point it really becomes a usability issue. How would an editor or a user, keep in mind that, yes, I saw plugins that have 6 breakpoints and it’s really hard to control those because you never know where you have all the changes made. Yeah, and come back to it when you, when you start out, it’s probably easier to kind of think through it. But once you have a site and you need to make some changes, it’s very hard to figure out where all those changes have to be made. So it doesn’t become better with more breakpoints. I think that was a point why the Gutenberg developers started out with really honing in on the intrinsic designs, that there’s actually a seamless adaption to the screen sizes. And that’s where the Samsung folding phone probably will come in.
Faith Imokol: Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: That you’re not fixed on a breakpoint to just say, okay, yeah, it takes the space it has. Yeah. And rather do content queries rather than media queries. Yeah.
Faith Imokol: I hope we see how, what else will be added to this, cuz I think more is going to come up and shall have more settings being added to this.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: For sure. Yeah.
Faith Imokol: So, uh, notes, this is, features that I’m really excited about. It shows you how powerful Gutenberg has gotten. Being able to add notes. So the upcoming features, one of the features that we have will be auto-completing mentions. This is you’ll be able to tag an individual, a user, onto the post, and when you tag them, the prompt will be able to— will allow you to select from— it will pop up a list of the available users and you’ll be able to select the ones that you want to tag. And when they are tagged on the front end, you’ll be able to see that they are highlighted, that the tag name is— their display name is highlighted. So this is a feature that I’m really, really impressed by and hope to see how far it grows more because I’m seeing all the different possibilities that it can be used in, things like notifications. And I think this is one of the features that is being incorporated for the collaboration right. Later, even as we’re collaborating, because you can tag someone within the notes, but now you’re also doing inline, you know, you’re able to tag people within, within the context of the content that you’re creating. Yeah. So this is something that I’m really impressed by and looking forward to see how far that can be taken.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And now what a lot of people were waiting for, that you can actually highlight partial text and have those notes in the sidebar about a certain portion of a text and not just a whole paragraph block. And now you can also have multiple notes per block as well. So if you have here, the paragraph is, I don’t know, 10 lines long and you have something you want to note about the first line or the first 6 words or so, and then in the middle is something, and you could have notes for each one of them that then show up in the section. So it makes it much easier to streamline the conversation and to be really granular in what the notes are about or the comments are about. Yeah. And it now has a resolved divider. And so when you check a note that is resolved, it pushes it further down and has a little divider in the sidebar. So yeah, it really comes well together, this note section. Yeah. It really starts growing up.
Faith Imokol: Yeah, I’m seeing lots and lots of ways that this is going to, because I’m thinking with the resolver, adding the resolved divider, I’m seeing this going into something like project management and we’re able to add even more other statuses possibly besides just the resolved divider. Very impressive.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: I can see some plugin opportunities there to kind of collect all those and have a separate kind of setup for a whole editorial workflow where the main editor just kind of looks through what are the posts and what are the comments. And you can see, okay, or you come in as an editor and see, oh, I need to go through all the comments where I’m tagged. Yeah. So these kinds of things, I think that would be an interesting feature set to add to it. Not sure that core is actually gonna aim for it. So that might be plugin territory because, territory, because it’s a very finite use case for that.
Faith Imokol: Yes.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: The next item is by default, the admin bar is now shown for post and site editor as well. Once you’re logged in, you see a black bar on your website on top of it with some links where you can jump in different places, and that is coming to 7.1 as well. And now that admin bar has been streamlined and kind of combines the site editor navigation as well with the admin bar. And it’s really, it’s a nice feeling. It kind of feels now a little bit more consistent, and you can access the things that you could access before. Yeah, you have your site icon. You also have the big W, and that was in there before, but the header of the site editor is now smaller or the block editor. And it’s all coming together quite nicely.
Faith Imokol: Yes. Coming in version 7.1, we are having, I could say there’s a kind of more a mix of both dynamic and static content blocks, block content, where we are going to be able to have what WordPress offers. I don’t know if this is the right way to present this, but currently WordPress offers you a way of providing or creating content that is you’re either working with blocks or you’re working with your default static HTML. And this new feature of adding inner content is going to allow us to be able to add dynamic content within static content. So you’ll be able to work with your HTML and still add editable content within your static content. that is your normal HTML, but within it you have an editable, let me say, paragraph block within there. So the other content remains static, but within it you have your inner content. And we’ve been provided a new feature called inner content that we can use to set this up.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Mm-hmm.
Faith Imokol: That is, if you’re working with if you’re creating your own code, you’ll be able to add this inner content feature and we’ll be able to allow you to create static content that has HTML blocks within it.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. No, very well described. Yeah, I can see how that is really helpful, especially for patterns that you have editable sections and you say static, I say hardcoded. Yeah, don’t touch things as an editor. You’re right. This comes to 7.1 as well. And there are developer notes out. So it will be in the show notes so you can see the technical implementations for that in 7.1.
Faith Imokol: Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s quite a powerful tool, I think, because it’s— I see it becoming also— it’s some— one of those features that I feel can be added onto in different ways because you’re now not just building something that is strict, but you can modify it to appeal to different scenarios and different use cases. As current cases, either you have one block that is doing one particular thing, but now here you’re able to work with blocks and also normal HTML. So it gives, as a developer, I feel it gives me some power. I’m not just leaving everything to the blocks to be doing everything, but it gives me some power to be able to add different content styles. Yes.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Nice.
Faith Imokol: Yeah. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: The next one is part of the Icons API. Now 23.6 Gutenberg plugin now has PHP methods To render inline SVG icons from the registry. So that can also be used in PHP-only blocks or in other templates and all that. So that also comes in 7.1, is a new API for registering icons in WordPress, SVG icons and icons collections that came in with 23.6.
Faith Imokol: I can take the next one.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Mm-hmm.
Enhancements
Faith Imokol: Coming in 7.1. So we had some issues with the backgrounds in some of the blocks, that is the accordion, the post content block, the quotes block, the verse block. And in this, there were issues with the way the images were being handled, that is in the CSS, in the blocks, in the block CSS, which ended up blocking the gradient. It ended up breaking the gradient. So kind of could say that there was a conflict. In how the background images and the gradients were being handled. So it was causing a bug with our gradients. So this has been fixed in how the background images and the gradients are handled. And so you’ll not be able to see conflicts when you apply a gradient onto any of your blocks, especially the blocks that we have stated, that is the block quotes accordion, the pull quotes, the verses and post content blocks.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And actually, this fix also gives you a totally new feature. Now you can overlay the gradient onto the background image, and that gives a whole new way of designing things. And if you look at some of the PRs that are coming through and with a screen share there, it’s actually quite nice that the image kind of feels a little bit more lively when there’s a gradient on top of them. So it’s really good.
Yeah, the latest post block received layout and block spacing support. The latest post block was historically just a re-rendering as a block from the widget section of WordPress prior to that, and hasn’t gotten a whole lot of love after that because the query block is kind of also a latest block kind of thing. But it now has layout and block spacing support so you can fit it in other places quite nicely. Speaking of the query block, it now has an option to exclude the current post from the query block, from the list of blocks, so to speak. So this gives a better feel for your single post template where you can say, okay, so this is the post with the post content, but then underneath you can add a list of blocks from either the same category or for the same taxonomy and exclude the current block. Up until now, it would always also render the current block if it had the same taxonomy. So I think that’s a feature that a lot of people actually were waiting for. It sounds so minuscule. Yeah, but it’s actually pretty powerful.
Faith Imokol: So we have a new feature that has been added to the cover block. And this will allow users to restrict the kind of videos that they want to be added to their cover blocks. Initially, currently what we have is that WordPress has a variety of different video providers that you can embed into your cover block, but this will allow you to restrict. So if you only want to display only YouTube videos, you can add a restriction that we only need YouTube videos being uploaded in our cover block. While you can switch this up to any that you want, as opposed to just allowing it to have any video embedded provider adding the videos. So this is one of those features. I think it gives us more control over what you want. Could I say, when it comes to different service providers, they provide a whole different interface and layout for how their videos play out, and this will allow something like uniformity.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Faith Imokol: Because I think it can be a little strange when you have your website on— some videos are playing like YouTube content and then it switches into another format and it’s maybe Vimeo and it all looks so different. I see this creating a better display, a better feel, but it also gives you more control on what kind of content is acceptable.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Absolutely. So from the history, this comes after 7.0 allowed to actually use a video URL as a background for a cover. And after that was installed, there was quite some feedback from the community, especially the agency community and the enterprise level where they say, okay, I don’t want people just have video embeds from outside of, especially those that are in restricted industries, they’re regulated industries, they cannot just have willy-nilly URLs playing on their website. So they needed a way to restrict the video providers or even restrict that feature altogether. So this is a reaction of all the community feedback that came in to provide that.
Faith Imokol: Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Speaking of video, the new client-side processing now also has a way to convert the GIF, an uploaded animated GIF. We know them from the ’90s, right? But some of the Screen recording features also do animated GIFs. And when they have one problem. It’s nice for smaller things, yeah, for 1 second or something like that. But if you have a longer GIF, you cannot control it. You cannot stop it. You cannot do anything. So some people want to convert that to a video. And now that feature is coming to 7.1, but it’s also made opt-in. So people have to say, okay, I wanna do this. And then it shows up in the block transform dropdown from a block toolbar. And then you can automatically have the GIFs converted to a video. It really depends on the video and the frame size and a lot of other things to get this right. But it’s a really nice feature.
Faith Imokol: Yeah, it’s a very nice feature in that I think now we have still, one has the ability to choose what they want, if they want to maintain the image GIF or to have it as a video. Whereby if it was a video, it could be lightweight and loads much faster than when it’s a normal GIF. GIFs tend to be quite heavy.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes.
Faith Imokol: On websites. Yeah. Just a funny scenario. I went on a website that had— was literally littered with GIFs everywhere. And I’m just imagining having to work with that.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Faith Imokol: How resource intensive that can be and how the performance of the website. So I think this resolves a problem that was there previously that they had tried to resolve previously. That is by allowing the conversion of the GIF into a video. So now one can choose, they can either maintain using the GIF or they can choose to go with the video.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Faith Imokol: We had 2 blocks that were initially still, should I say, in production. That is the playlist block and the tab block. And these are coming out in version 7.1. The playlist block will allow you to add a playlist. If you’ve worked with any podcasting and different— if you’re doing any music playlists on your website, this block will allow you to be able to add a list of music that you want and you’re able to play it as well in one after the other. So it’s a very powerful block coming out in version 7.1. And I’m also talking about the tab— the tabs block. This will allow you to be able to organize content into tabs on your website. So it will allow you to group, literally to group different content onto your website. It’s also a very, very powerful block that I think will make a whole sense on how different content can be added onto our site. So maybe you can add on to that.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, there were right from the beginning when Gutenberg came out, there were quite a few block collections that had tabs blocks in there. So finally it comes into core. I have a question for a developer. I don’t know how you feel about that, but doesn’t it seem that the details block, the accordion block, and the tabs block, they all kind of have the same metaphor kind of thing? Yeah, kind of. Yeah, you check something and something opens, and then you have a collection of check something and the tabs are there, or accordions kind of I mean, they behave a little bit differently, but aren’t they just a variation of the same idea?
Faith Imokol: I think it’s kind of a similar idea, especially when you see how accordions work. But they— I think it comes down to what kind of display is someone looking forward to. They may all be doing the same kind of similar thing, but someone wants their content to work differently. The tabs block, I think, gives us kind of more— I find it to be superior, should I say superior, to the accordion block in the sense that it allows you to actually group content that you’re displaying.
So an accordion can be used for things— I could say the most common example that I’ve seen where they’re mostly applied is something like FAQs, right, where you group questions and answers. But now looking at a tab, imagine you have something like a WooCommerce site and you have all this different content that is in line with that product. You have the details, then you have the, uh, should I say specifications, then you have the pricing. So all these things can be grouped into different tabs and it can allow someone to navigate through them while providing more concrete details within them. You can do the same with accordions. But I find that this provides a better way of navigating, you know, of navigating through content. Accordions, if the content is quite a lot, they may become, I think, kind of very bulky and they create a lot. You have a lot within one thing while tabs allow you to break down that thing. And I think also, I don’t know right now, I don’t know how far this this feature is, but I think tabs can also allow you to also add different other blocks, should allow you to add different blocks within it. So you can do a lot more within, within it.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So, and I feel it’s a little bit of a— the metaphor that tabs do is kind of more like in an office setting where you have files, folders, and then files in them that are kind of— you pull them out of the register and then you have the writers on top that are your tabs and then you can— that metaphor is kind of in a website now. And I think people can navigate that better than figuring out how an accordion works.
Faith Imokol: Yes.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I think you’re right there. Yeah. Well, that was actually kind of a tricky question because that question should go to the WC3 body that does the standards for HTML because that’s what these 3 blocks do, details, accordion, and tabs. They put the HTML that’s available into a block setting and then offer that as a tool to design pages and lay out the pages. So the question is actually for the WC3 standards body. Why did you come up with these different standards there and HTML tags for that?
So I think, yeah, we have a few, 2 more updates on the visual revisions page. There is now a label for autosaves. Because the revisions historically only saved what you did, what was there when you hit the save button. And now it also adds the autosaves as separate line items to the revisions timeline. It might get a little crowded now, but you can collapse them quite a bit. And so when you leave a post that was autosaved and then come back to it again, you get a notification on top of the screen that says there is a newer version in autosave. And when you clicked on the link there, you were going back to the old revisions screen, and that has been solved too. So now this screen also goes to the new block-based visual revision screen.
Faith Imokol: I think this is one of the things— revisions is one of the things that I’m actually impressed by and excited about. I don’t know how many times I just could come back to my site trying to look through my content and going through the revisions, I’ll just give up and be like, you know, no need to go back. But I think this helps us to be able to track and actually know where in time we ended, what changed, and also being able to go through what the different revisions are.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Faith Imokol: And it’s quite also funny that the person who reported this was a first-time contributor.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Faith Imokol: The person who caught this. Yes.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Faith Imokol: So with the new settings that we have for the viewpoints, this is a buildup on what we had, we had talked about previously. That is being able to remember what we have, we now have a new feature that allows us to add our own custom viewpoints. in our theme that is in the theme.json.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: With the new states being for either the viewport states or the pseudo states, which is kind of hover and action on that and active, what didn’t work was that when you changed the color, you didn’t get a notification that your color choices didn’t adhere to the contrast for accessible websites. So, and normally when you change the color for the background and for the text, you get a little warning that this is not contrast-rich. You better check your color settings. This feature wasn’t working for the viewports for the mobile or tablet or for the pseudo-states. So when you change the styling for those states, you didn’t get the warning. So, and that has been rectified with 23.6 Gutenberg. And it is actually a nice, I would say bug fix, but it’s an enhancement because it was something that wasn’t there before. And I think the next one, we already talked about the inner blocks and the custom HTML block. I think we’re gonna skip through that.
Faith Imokol:
This is just, I think, adding up to what we had previously.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right.
Faith Imokol: Because now you can add this as when you’re developing, writing your own blocks, you can add the inner blocks feature in your blocks as well.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. And feedback was for the block visibility. Now you actually have a setting in the theme.json to opt out so your editors wouldn’t be able to change the block visibility on any of your blocks. There’s a new theme.json property there. I think some people wanted to kind of look at that and have that available.
Faith Imokol: The next issue we have, enabling text alignment to be set by viewpoint state. So this will allow you in your, when you’re setting up your text and you’re aligning it, you can have different alignments based on different viewpoints. You can choose to, let me say, left align on the desktop and then right align on your mobile or on your tablet. So this new feature will allow you to be able to set up different alignments for different viewpoints.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes, I really like that because sometimes you have a text that’s in— oh, I’m— that might be nice centered on a mobile, but it’s on this, on the big screen, you just can’t read it. Yeah. So you want it left aligned or something like that. The next one is an enhancement to the grid block. Sometimes we use the same terminology for different things. I just need to make sure that I’m looking at the same thing here, that it’s actually— it’s about the grid block. So there’s now an option to stretch the columns with an autofit for better layout flexibility. So it’s adapting to the screen.
If you wanted to, or you can say I have a fixed column width or fixed relationship to the other columns, but now there’s also that option to stretch the column with autofit.
Faith Imokol: So with the new icons feature, we now can group, should I say, we can group the different icons into different collections. WordPress is offering us a way of doing this and they’ve given us new tools, developers especially, to be able to create different groups for icons. So you can group your icons, maybe these are WordPress icons, these are Font Awesome icons, these are whatsoever different, uh, places where you’re picking your icons from. So you can group your icons. This is a very nice feature, I think, to be able to allow you to streamline so you can pick from one collection over the other. But this is one of the features that is coming in together with the updates that are being done to the icons.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Exactly. Yeah. In the same vein now, developers are really happy about that, that they can now use digits and underscores in icon slugs. That was part of— it’s part of the registry API. And in 23.6, those things were added to the API for coming into 7.1.
Faith Imokol: Yes.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So I think when I go through the rest of the changelog, I think we are through with that, what we talked about. But 23.6 again had about 400 PRs in there. And I’m really happy that the show is not more than an hour or so because we could kind of go on and on about a lot of things in there.
For listeners, when we do the rundown, it has 38 pages and we’re kind of skipping over over 30 of those. So there’s a lot of work getting into WordPress 7.1, especially because the 3.6 release of Gutenberg was the last one. So everybody wanted to kind of get stuff in. That’s why it’s so exploded. But it’s mostly bug fixes from things that were in before. So we are not talking about those here. But make sure that you read the release notes that are on the Make blog and then, yeah, there’s a lot of information coming at you for 7.1. So carve out the time to study some of those that are really important for you.
Tools
One of them I wanted to highlight is on the Gutenberg Times. There is a blog post about how to approach the iframe editor for the post editor. So the iframe that every block editor is now going to be loaded in an iframe. That has the advantages that other designs and artifacts from the admin page do not creep into the editor. And that has been done in the site editor, template editor, and the pattern editor since 2021. Only the post editor, who was— that was the first one that was a block editor, was still loaded in an admin page. And now with 7.1, the post editor will also go into an iframe. But with the history of older blocks and older block collections, there might be some quirks there.
The rule of thumb is if you load your block in the site editor in a template or something like that and it works, then it will also work in the post editor with no problem with the post editor iframe. If you see quirks, you probably— and the article is for developers and it goes through, okay, what were other people doing with the post editor that might not work with the iframe. And it goes through all the different scenarios and how to fix them or how to alleviate them. But there’s a lot of anxiety, but I have yet to see blocks that break in the iframe. But I only have a certain viewpoint there. I only use certain things. I’m gonna put the livestream YouTube video as well as the link to the article on the Gutenberg Times into the show notes so you can all follow up on it.
All right, so you made it, Faith! Yay, congratulations!
Faith Imokol: Thank you.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right, dear listeners, as always, the show notes will be published on gutenbergtimes.com/podcast. This is the 133rd episode; 133 is the episode number. And if you have questions, suggestions, or news, just send them to us in the changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. That’s changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. And thank you, Faith, for joining me for the first time. You did an awesome job. Thank you so much. And I hope you come back. I didn’t scare you away.
Faith Imokol: Thank you too. Thank you too. Thank you for having me.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, absolutely.
Faith Imokol: Absolutely.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: We have fun. Yeah. Thank you for listening, dear listeners, and goodbye and to the next time. Bye-bye.
This week I realized, I have been building websites for 30 years. from Notepad and hand-coded HTML to HomeSiteX over Coldfusion to WordPress, Nodejs and ReactJS to Python and Claude. It’s been a fantastic journey. It never gets old. I still learn new things every single day. I cherish most the friends I made along the way. I also found my notes about the WordCamps I attended, spoke at and organized. The first one was WordCamp Tampa in 2014. In 2026, I will probably attended my 30th WordCamp as well, Athens in December 2026. It’s a bit out, so let’s see if it works out.
Back to the here and now: It’s finally here the WordPress 7.1 Source of Truth with all the big and small changes coming to a WordPress instance near you. It’s again more like a book. Digest in small dosis.
On the WPBuilds podcast series At the Core, Anne McCarthy and I talked with Nathan Wrigley about WordPress 7.1. We cover responsive styling, the persistent admin bar, and richer inline notes, plus why the new image crop modal and customisable viewports change your day-to-day editing. You’ll also hear how community feedback saved the Classic Block, where the collaborative editing outreach stands, and which developer changes to test now.
Responsive styling finally lands in the block editor, and The WP Minute+ podcast has release lead Anne McCarthy demoing it with Eric Karkovack. You’ll also get the reasoning behind what didn’t make 7.1, including collaborative editing, plus how Classic Block deprecation is being paced. Anne talks about her first turn as release lead and points out hidden gems like the ‘On This Day’ widget and custom icon registration for the Icon block. The episodeWhy WordPress 7.1 Will Improve Your Workflow is also available as video.
Anne McCarthy gives a candid account of the punted inherited styles indicator and its design dead ends. If you’ve ever watched someone style a template expecting it to apply site-wide, that’s the problem she’s chased since the FSE Outreach Program. Blue dots, diamonds, tooltips versus infotips, two competing reset paths — none settled, and summer holidays thinned the reviewer pool. She’s aiming at 7.2.
This week on the Gutenberg Changelog podcast, my guest was Faith Imokol from Uganda. We began with the wonderful work of the WordPress community there, who have put together a series of events — WordCamps, Campus Connect, and a website competition — bringing WordPress to schools, colleges, and universities, and to thousands of students and users. Then we turned to the latest release and had a great time going through the details. As always, the episode drops in your favorite podcast app over the weekend.
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
No PHP template, no shortcode, no custom block — Meta Box fields can now feed core blocks directly through block bindings for custom fields. Lua Nguyen shows the setup: select a Paragraph, Heading, Image, or Button, open Attributes in the sidebar, pick a Meta Box source, choose your field. Sources cover post, term, author, and settings-page fields, and an image field binds URL, alt, title, and caption separately. WordPress 6.5+, though the Attributes panel needs 6.9.
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
Coming to the Site Editor from Elementor or Divi means learning new vocabulary, and Ollie’s ground-up guide to the WordPress Site Editor by Gina Lucia covers it: templates, template parts, patterns, global styles, navigation, the Font Library, and each toolbar button, starting at Appearance → Editor. A comparison table weighs both approaches on performance, flexibility, and portability. Ollie-specific tips sit alongside the core explanations, so you can read past them if you use another theme.
A typical Elementor page ships 200–400 KB of extra frontend assets, three to five times a native block build — the number behind Bikash Pun Magar‘s case for custom Gutenberg blocks over page builders on client sites. You get conditional per-block asset loading, HTML you control line by line, and content stored in native block grammar rather than a proprietary format. He’s fair about where Elementor still fits: prototypes and solo builders wanting pixel control without code.
The theme.json schema resolves to more than 40MB across hundreds of nested properties, which is why Sérgio Santos built a form-driven visual editor for theme.json as a VS Code extension. Fields come from the official schema rather than hand-written forms, and a weekly scan of core and Gutenberg adds experimental properties with honest badges. The feature Santos says changed his workflow: every preset shows the CSS variable name it will generate as you type the slug.
There’s also a companion WordPress plugin that mounts the same editor under Appearance. There will be dragons though: Santos flags it as an experiment as it overwrites theme.json in place with no revisions or backups.
“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.
If your custom blocks touch the global window or document, WordPress 7.1 will break them. Ryan Welcher walks through theforced iframed post editor canvas, landing August 19th with no flag to check and no opt-out. Five demos cover viewport detection, click-outside handlers, editor styles, admin body-class CSS, and unmaintained third-party libraries, with fixes using ownerDocument, defaultView, useRefEffect, editorStyle in block.json, and patch-package. His demo plugin ships broken and fixed versions of each.
Some people still assumed every Playground was temporary. Persistence, multiple sites, Blueprints, file editing — all already there, just easy to miss, which is what the new WordPress Playground interface sets out to fix. A customizable Dock gathers those tools into one bottom toolbar: New, Playgrounds, Blueprint, Site Settings, Database, Files, Logs, Export. It’s navigation, not new capability. The design came out of the Playground table at WordCamp Europe Contributor Day, after Adam Zieliński used AI to explore 400+ variations.
Point a coding agent at WordPress Playground and it reads an instruction file first. The wp-playground agent skill now splits that file into a 52-line router plus focused references, so your agent loads the CLI details only for a local run and the sharing rules only for a share link — encoding, CORS, public hosting. Fellyph Cintra‘s four-scenario benchmark scored 24/24 against 22/24 for the old version, one run per prompt. All this is explain in more details in the post One Playground, three workflows: Consistent agent guidance across surfaces in the team’s Make Blog.
In a third post, Fellyph Cintra walks you through programmatic site management in WordPress Playground: from DevTools you can list, create, save, rename, and switch sites, change PHP or networking, and run PHP inside a site to check active plugins. Order matters — temporary sites must be saved before you can rename or reconfigure them.
One caveat worth knowing if it runs alongside the other Playground item: this API belongs to playground.wordpress.net only. It isn’t in the @wp-playground/client package, the CLI, or embedded Playgrounds via /remote.html — those need the JavaScript API instead.
AI and WordPress
Carlo Daniele‘s guide to the Abilities API for plugin developers stays on fundamentals: the input schema, output schema, callback, and permission check that together form an ability’s contract, and the WP-CLI commands that let you inspect one. A fresh install ships three — site info, user info, environment info. His example registers an audio-to-blocks process from an existing plugin and triggers it over the wp-abilities/v1 REST route.
Where Carlo Daniele registers a single ability, Jonathan Bossenger composes three into your first AI-powered WordPress plugin. Two call the AI Client, a third orchestrates them via wp_get_ability() and execute(), turning an image URL into a draft post. The same ability then answers over curl, from a React settings page, and from Claude Desktop through the MCP Adapter. Gotchas included: base64 data URIs for vision providers, stray markdown fences, and request timeouts.
One rule for this stream: no hand-written code. Ryan Welcher takes a full WordPress site build with Studio Code end to end for his son’s hockey team, and you watch a custom post type, a teams taxonomy, an Advanced Query Loop roster, and junior/intermediate/senior tabs come together by direction alone. The highlight is the agent reaching for block bindings unprompted. The lowlight: rogue PHP metaboxes, and a PHP-first answer where he wanted a SlotFill.
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.
After a few month dealing with a bad knee and a bad back, I enjoy moving again. As long as the weather is nice, I will be biking, swimming and walking the city with all the tourists that populate downtown Munich.
From an SEO veteran’s surprisingly upbeat take on WordPress market share to a one-file answer to “what makes a block theme,” this week’s finds dig a little deeper than the usual headlines. There’s also plenty of hands-on material, whether you want to test 7.1 Beta 3, try the new Playground UI, or get your store ready for agentic commerce.
Enjoy your weekend!
Yours, Birgit
WCUS 2026 has a dedicated AI track
The AI in Action sessions are built around the questions site builders are actually sitting with right now. How do you set guardrails for AI-assisted development without losing client trust? How do you build sites that serve AI agents as visitors, not just humans? What are the legal and ethical boundaries when you put AI tools in front of clients?
They’re practical sessions for developers navigating a workspace that changed faster than anyone planned for. The full schedule is live. If you’re figuring out how AI changes your pricing, your workflow, or your service model, this is a rare room to be in.
August 16–19, Phoenix Convention Center. $100 includes four days, all sessions, lunch, and the community social. us.wordcamp.org/2026/tickets
Contribute by Help Test WordPress 7.1 and learn deeply how the new features and blocks work. It’s a very impactful way to contribute to the open-source project that powers hundreds of millions of websites.
Quite a few Dev notes made it out of the publishing queue this week:
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
On the WordPress.com blog, Joe Fylan explains what agentic commerce means for your store. AI assistants that discover, compare, and buy products on a shopper’s behalf. You’ll get an overview of where the big AI tools stand on in-chat checkout, plus reassurance that small stores can win with verifiable facts. Fylan’s checklist for getting ready: clear product descriptions, structured data, and making sure your robots.txt isn’t blocking the agents you want.
Dave Smith, core committer and Gutenberg contributor, thinks WordPress has a homepage problem — and he built a better version to prove it. In his video, he walks you through why setting a static homepage trips up so many beginners, then demos a prototype exploring a simpler, clearer approach. You can try the live demo yourself in the browser. Smith wants to know if the direction resonates, so drop your homepage struggles in the video’s comments.
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
In episode 226 of the WP Tavern Jukebox podcast, Nathan Wrigley talks with Jessica Lyschik about why accessibility in WordPress themes is easier than you think. Fresh from her WordCamp Europe 2026 talk, Lyschik walks you through the recently updated accessibility-ready requirements, quick wins like correct HTML tags, alt text, and skip links, and why block themes make much of this effortless because Core handles it. The insight: AI agents navigate your site like screen readers do.
Ryan Welcher digs into how WordPress decides a theme is a “block theme” — and the answer might surprise you. It all comes down to one file: templates/index.html exists, or it doesn’t. Neither theme.json nor patterns flip the switch, which is why Astra, Kadence, and Blocksy all still test classic.
“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.
In episode 477 of the WP Builds podcast, Nathan Wrigley talks with Olly Campion and Tommy Rockett about lessons from their WordPress plugin business and their block-based plugin Slidey Panel, which slides customizable side panels into any site. You’ll hear how years of client work revealed a gap in both classic themes and the block editor, the philosophy behind their “page as panel” approach, and their candid take on AI, market share shifts, and the future of bespoke agency work.
Ryan Welcher walks you through What’s New for WordPress Developers for July 2026 in his monthly video roundup. You’ll learn why WordPress 7.0.2 is a must-install security release, how to test React 19 via a runtime flag in Gutenberg 23.4, and what the now-enforced iframed editor means for your themes. He also covers responsive styling, Block Bindings for list items, and MCP support in Playground. Prefer reading? There’s a companion post on the Developer Blog.
What’s new with Playground
The Playground team wants your help testing the new WordPress Playground UI before it officially launches. Fellyph Cintra shares four testing modules you can pick from: creating and managing Playgrounds, the Blueprint experience, developer tools like Files and Logs, and import/export workflows. Five minutes on desktop or mobile is enough, and the post walks you through each step. Feedback on text clarity, mechanics, and design goes into the GitHub issue #4092.
Elliott Richmond shares how he uses WordPress Playground and Blueprints to train clients on block themes, inspired by WordCamp Europe. For a client migrating from a classic theme, he trimmed a gigabyte-plus database to a 50MB export, then built a Blueprint that loads their actual theme, plugin, and content into a disposable in-browser site. You send one link, the client can safely break things, and a refresh resets everything — no hosting or credentials needed.
WordPress and AI
On the Kinsta blog, Carlo Daniele takes a deep dive into the WordPress AI integration architecture that arrived with WordPress 7.0. You’ll learn how the three layers — Connectors, AI Client, and Providers — replace bundled SDKs and provider-specific code with the unified wp_ai_client_prompt() function. Daniele then walks you through building a real plugin, available on GitHub, that transcribes an audio note and converts it into structured Gutenberg blocks via two AI passes.
An interesting take: On the MemberPress blog, SEO veteran Curt Noble argues that WordPress lost market share and got stronger. Drawing on twenty years in SEO, including his own private blog network (PBN) days, Noble contends the dip mostly reflects Google demolishing the spam economy that ran on WordPress. Meanwhile, search interest hit a five-year high, WordPress dominates the top 10,000 sites, and the vibe-coding security hangover is sending founders back to proven platforms. Noble’s bigger point: with the AI Client, Abilities API, and MCP Adapter, WordPress became the platform AI agents can natively and safely operate.
Jeff Paul announced what’s new in AI 1.2.0, the latest release of the canonical AI plugin. You’ll find a new Suggest Reply experiment that drafts contextual comment responses for moderators to review, bulk Content Summary generation for existing content libraries, and two read-only Abilities: core/read-content and core/read-users. The settings screen got simpler, too, with advanced controls now tucked behind an opt-in Developer Tools option. Content Translations and C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) tracking are on the 1.3.0 roadmap.
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.
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
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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.
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The latest episode is 
. To be honest, it’s not my idea of simplicity, though. I am firm in the Obsidian camp. 
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.
