General

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s New?

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

/edit {tell the LLM how you want this post adjusted}Automatically make simple (or even not so simple!) edits on your post, giving your writing a little extra polish.

/proofreadFind and automatically fix simple spelling, grammatical, and punctuation issues.

/reviewRead the post, and leave notes (using Gutenberg’s Notes feature!) about suggested improvements to your post. This doesn’t touch your post content, leaving you to make use of the suggestions as you see fit.

/respond-to-notesIf you’re happy with the notes left in the review, you can also have it automatically apply them, too!

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

Behind The Scenes

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

Getting It Running

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

Connect

Authorise

Install

What’s Next?

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

Hi,

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

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

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

Yours, Birgit

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

WordPress 7.0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gutenberg 22.8

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

Real-time Collaboration improvements

Button pseudo-state styling in Global Styles

Site Logo & Icon in the Design panel

Connectors extensibility

Other Notable Highlights

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

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

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

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

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

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

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

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

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

“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 previous years are also available: 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.

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

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

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

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

Playground News

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

AI in WordPress

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your AI agent can now create, edit, and manage content on WordPress.com by Jonathan Bossenger

It’s Official: You Can Now Use Claude with WordPress! also with Jamie Marsland

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

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

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

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

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I’m in New Orleans for the first time in 7 years for a beautiful wedding. My Mom’s side of the family emigrated here in the 1860s, and there’s a deep comfort in the art, traditions, and weirdness of Creole culture. Good music and food are ubiquitous.

I met up with WordPresser Blake Bertuccelli-Booth to catch a set by Jason Marsalis at Snug Harbor, featuring some great originals and surprising arrangements of Maroon 5’s “This Love” and the music from the Bejeweled Butterflies game. Great artists find inspiration everywhere.

Afterward, we went to see my friend Troy, aka Trombone Shorty, at his studio. (Troy and I met when we both received the Heinz Award in 2016.) He was with Silkk the Shocker and Reggie Nicholas Jr., working on beats and songs. Though I was there for just a short while, it was inspiring to see the act of musical creation.

A few days ago, Ed Sheeran went on the new Benny Blanco / Lil Dicky / Kristin Podcast Friends Keep Secrets. I haven’t watched the entire episode, but the twenty minutes from about 1:09 to the end where Ed and Benny come up with a new song I’ve seen 4 times now, it’s magical. Check it out, it’s one of the coolest things you’ll see this week.

I’ve seen Ed Sheeran loop his songs live, but this act of creation is very special, and I love the dynamic between him and Benny. It reminds me of that magical moment in Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary where you see Paul McCartney and the band come up with the idea for the classic song Get Back.

Hi,

This week, we saw many updates in WordPress Core with two Betas and three security releases. Your auto-update email folder got plenty of traffic if you are managing more than one website The next step for the security team is to backport the 6.9.4 fixes to older version for WordPress, all the way back to WordPress 4.7.. It’s a huge job and it needs to be diligently executed.

Be well and hope you can enjoy Spring or Fall colors.

Yours, Birgit

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

WordPress 6.9.2, led by John Blackbourn, is a security-only release you’ll want to apply immediately. It patches ten vulnerabilities: a blind SSRF, a PoP-chain weakness in the HTML API and Block Registry, regex DoS in numeric character references, stored XSS in nav menus and via the data-wp-bind directive, an AJAX authorization bypass, a PclZip path traversal, and an XXE in the bundled getID3 library—now also patched upstream by James Heinrich.

WordPress 7.0 Beta 5 is available for testing, packing over 101 fixes since Beta 3. The headline new feature is a Command Palette shortcut in the Omnibar — logged-in editors will spot a ⌘K / Ctrl+K symbol in the admin bar, giving you instant access to navigation and customization tools from anywhere on the site. The final release remains scheduled for April 9, 2026.

Ben Dwyer recaps what’s new in Gutenberg 22.7, a feature-packed release. You’ll find a new experimental Connectors screen under Settings, letting you manage AI providers like OpenAI with extension hooks for plugins. Real-time collaboration is now enabled by default, style variation transforms show live previews, the Grid block visualizer is more responsive, and the Playlist block gains a WaveForm Player.

Maggie Cabrera and I sat down to discuss the latest Gutenberg release and the Dev notes for WordPress 7.0. It’s been a while since we chatted and it was a great conversation. As always, the episode will drop into your favorite podcast app over the weekend. Stay tuned.

Anne McCarthy has issued a call for volunteers to build the Twenty Twenty-Seven default theme, with Henrique Iamarino confirmed as lead designer. Targeting the WordPress 7.2 release in early December, the team is getting started early to allow room for iteration. If you want to contribute to development or testing, leave a comment on the post by Friday, March 27th — the community response has already been enthusiastic.

This month’s What’s New for Developers (March 2026) is your essential pre-launch briefing as WordPress 7.0 approaches RC1 on March 19. The big headline is Real-Time Collaboration, now built on HTTP polling with Yjs and CRDT data stored in post_meta. You’ll also find AI provider packages for OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic landing in the Plugin Directory, plus visual in-editor revision tracking, a new Icon block, Content-Only pattern editing by default, and phpMyAdmin support in wp-env’s Playground runtime.

Maggie Cabrera outlines what’s new with pseudo-element support for blocks and their variations in theme.json in WordPress 7.0. You can now define :hover, :focus, :focus-visible, and :active states directly on blocks and their style variations — no custom CSS needed. An “Outline” button variation, for instance, can have its own distinct hover behavior. No Global Styles UI yet; that work continues separately.

Gopal Krishnan outlines what plugin and theme developers need to know about real-time collaboration in the block editor in WordPress 7.0, powered by Yjs. Collaboration is disabled when classic meta boxes are present, so you’ll want to migrate those to registered post meta with show_in_rest. The new sync.providers filter lets you swap the default HTTP polling transport for WebSockets or WebRTC. Avoid local React state for shared data — always derive values from the WordPress data store.

The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #127 – WordPress 7.0 Beta and Gutenberg 22.6 with special guest Jessica Lyschik, senior developer at Greyd

Anne McCarthy shared a candid look at three Notes features for WordPress that didn’t quite make the 7.0 cut — show/hide notes on the canvas, filter options in the Notes panel, and compact notes. All built with Claude Code as part of her “Learn AI deeply” effort. She’s openly working through open questions, including whether “Open” or “Unresolved” is the clearer label, and whether a resizable sidebar should replace the compact toggle entirely. Chime in if you are interested and have an opinion.

My WordPress

Brandon Payton announced my.WordPress.net, a browser-based WordPress that requires no sign-up, no hosting, and no domain — just open it and start creating. Built on WordPress Playground, your site lives privately in your browser, persists across visits, and stays entirely yours. An App Catalog offers one-click installs for a personal CRM, RSS reader via the Friends plugin, and an AI workspace that can modify plugins on your behalf. As Alex Kirk puts it, this is WordPress democratizing digital sovereignty.

Where the official announcement focused on the product itself, Matt Mullenweg‘s WordPress Everywhere is the strategic vision behind it. He zooms out to explain what’s coming next — peer-to-peer sync, version control integration, and cloud publishing — and frames Playground containers as composable, atomic units you can roll back entirely. Mullenweg believes this shifts WordPress from millions of installs to billions, with AI making open source more powerful, not less relevant.

Sarah Perez covers WordPress’s new browser-based workspace, my.WordPress.net, for TechCrunch.

Emma Roth reported about it for The Verge: WordPress launches an in-browser website creator.

Ben Werdmuller marvels at your browser becoming your WordPress — a genuine innovation announced by Brandon Payton. Built on WordPress Playground and powered by WASM, my.WordPress.net installs a full WordPress instance directly in your browser: no sign-up, no hosting, nothing between you and a running site. Werdmuller wonders about cross-device syncing and sees broader implications — to-do lists, CRMs, source management — as a glimpse of what private, browser-based personal apps could become.

If you get a chance to try my.WordPress.net in its current early state, go in with the right expectations: this is a proof of concept, a rough but genuinely exciting experiment. The App Catalog reframes plugin discovery in a way that just feels right, and the idea of a private personal space — where outside research meets things you want to keep to yourself — is compelling. Give it a few months, more apps, and a designer’s touch.

Just before the official announcement of My WordPress, Ray Morey interviewed Adam Zieliński’ on his vision for Playground in 2026 and also recounts the history of WordPress Playground starting in 2022.

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

On the WooCommerce Developer Blog, Brian Coords invites you to Building Ecommerce Community: Meetups, Networks, and Real-World WooCommerce, a free 60-minute panel on March 31, 2026 (17:00–18:00 UTC). Coords brings together Amber Hinds (Equalize Digital), Mary Hubbard (WordPress Executive Director), and Raquel Manriquez (PressConf) for an honest conversation about building community, finding collaborators, and getting real value from events — whether you’re an agency, freelancer, or developer who’s never quite felt at home in a crowd.

Mike McAlister has expanded Ollie into WooCommerce territory, adding dedicated shop templates, product grid patterns, custom WooCommerce blocks, and a guided setup wizard — all built natively for full site editing. You can design and customize your store, product pages, cart, and checkout entirely inside the WordPress site editor. One user reported a 170% year-over-year sales increase after rebuilding their client’s store with Ollie.

Rae Morey, The Repository also reported on it in Ollie Moves Into Ecommerce With Full WooCommerce Support

Derek Hanson, Technical Account Manager at Automattic, shares 10 field-tested tips for building custom WordPress blocks with Telex AI, drawn from real agency work on his team. You’ll learn practical techniques like drafting prompts in Claude before opening Telex, using post-it sketches as visual references, remixing projects as version control checkpoints, and knowing when a block has outgrown the tool and needs a developer to finish it properly.

In his latest video, Wes Theron shows you how to speed up your designs with WordPress patterns. You will learn how to quickly build and customize professional WordPress layouts using block patterns. Theron shows you how to insert, modify, and create patterns to design pages effortlessly.

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

The Create Block Theme plugin v2.9.0 brings a handful of focused improvements to your theme-building workflow.

fixed localization for Cover block background images and the Read More block’s content attribute.

added basic end-to-end tests and an AGENTS.md file,

polished the sidebar with a Card component,

consolidated redundant APIs,

migrated to husky v9, and bumped the minimum WordPress requirement to 6.8.

“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. 

The previous years are also available: 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.

In this week’s livestream, Ryan Welcher and Troy Chaplin teamed up on this episode of Talk Devy To Me to walk you through “Veils of Fate,” a fully functional Choose Your Own Adventure game Chaplin built entirely with the WordPress Interactivity API. You’ll see how he delivers instant feedback and seamless state changes across game choices — no page reloads, no JavaScript framework. A creative, boundary-pushing demonstration of what the Interactivity API can do beyond typical block development use cases.

Wojtek Naruniec writes about two new debugging tools now available in WordPress Studio: Xdebug support and a debug log toggle. Xdebug lets you set breakpoints and step through code line-by-line from your editor on port 9003, no system-level installation is needed. The debug log toggle sets WP_DEBUG and WP_DEBUG_LOG automatically and adds a direct “Open log file” link in Settings. A bonus tip: point your AI agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex) at wp-content/debug.log to interpret errors hands-free.

AI and WordPress

Jeffrey Paul recaps what’s new in AI Experiments 0.4.0 for the WordPress AI Team. This release, shaped by 14 contributors, introduces prompt-based image generation in the editor and Media Library, along with a Generate Review Notes experiment for accessibility, readability, grammar, and SEO suggestions.

In another post, Paul outlines what’s new in AI Experiments 0.5.0, a focused release aligning with WordPress 7.0. It removes AI client dependencies, using the WP AI Client in core instead, while previous credentials migrate to a new Connectors screen. The plugin is available in the repository.

Ray Morey reported on both releases for The Repository: AI Experiments Plugin Gets Two Updates in a Week, With WordPress 7.0 Now the Focus

Elliott Richmond put wordpress-agent-skills repo and Automattic’s Claude Cowork plugin through its paces and came away impressed. Describe your site, pick from three AI-generated design directions, and a complete block theme — theme.json, templates, patterns, the lot — deploys straight to WordPress Studio in minutes. The generated code follows solid conventions and is yours to iterate on. Setup requires MCP configuration and Studio CLI, so developers will find it straightforward; everyone else faces a steeper climb. Token usage on Opus is substantial.

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

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

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

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

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Hiding your best WooCommerce reviews on product pages is like keeping your top salespeople in the back room. When reviews are scattered or hidden, most visitors never see them. And that means missed chances to earn trust and make sales. By showing your reviews on… Read More »
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