WordPress Planet

Open Channels FM: Signal – AI Insights, Open Source Guidance and Commentaries.

Bob Dunn — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 09:39:01 +0000

A focus on guiding new contributors in open source, discussing AI's impact, and adding insightful commentary.

Matt: Homework from WordCamp

Matt — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 23:39:17 +0000

A few times during the WordCamp US keynote, I asked for a show of hands and got mostly blank stares back, especially on the AI questions. That’s not a criticism — it’s a reading list. If the future is going to be built on this stuff, the WordPress community should be fluent in it. Here’s the homework.

How models are actually trained

When I asked who knew about the reinforcement learning models go through, Robert looked out and said “I see no yeses.” Base models are trained to predict the next word across huge amounts of text; the friendly, helpful behavior comes after, in post-training, where human/AI feedback reinforces some responses over others. If you use these tools every day, understanding that pipeline changes how you prompt them and what you expect from them.

Start with Hugging Face’s Illustrating RLHF, a visual explainer. Chip Huyen’s RLHF deep dive is the best longer read, and Anthropic’s Constitutional AI paper shows where post-training went next. If you only have time for one thing, watch Andrej Karpathy’s Deep Dive into LLMs — pretraining, fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and why models behave the way they do, all in one sitting.

Uncensored models

Almost nobody had tried an OBLITERATED model. Since refusal behavior is added in post-training, researchers found it can also be removed — it turns out to be, roughly, a single direction inside the model that you can subtract out. Maxime Labonne’s Uncensor any LLM with abliteration explains the technique, and the paper behind it, Refusal in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single Direction, is short and genuinely fascinating. Whatever you think of the applications, it’s worth understanding that open weights mean the community can modify these models, the same way the GPL means you can modify WordPress.

The open-weight wave

Only a few hands went up for Qwen 3.8. The open-weight models coming out of Chinese labs — Qwen, DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM — are at or near the frontier at a fraction of the cost, and the smaller ones run on a laptop. I demoed one from this MacBook on stage. Token costs have dropped about 20x, and that curve isn’t slowing down.

The easiest way to feel this for yourself is to run one locally tonight: install Ollama or LM Studio, pull a small Qwen model, and talk to an intelligence that lives entirely on your own machine, no cloud required. For a community built on the four freedoms, that should feel familiar — and exciting.

Read one, watch one, run one. Then bring what you learned to your next meetup.

It is really important to me that WordPress community members ride this AI wave.

Errata: I said Automattic has 32 or 33 data centers; the actual number is 29, all co-located.

Open Channels FM: AI for the Rest of Us

Bob Dunn — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 10:54:28 +0000

An update on Open Channels News, new fall series (including "AI for the Rest of Us"), and a preview of the Open Channels FM 5.0 release coming in September.

WordPress.org blog: AI Creates Opportunity While Artists Ship at WordCamp US 2026

Nicholas Garofalo — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 05:51:52 +0000

WordCamp US (WCUS) 2026 just wrapped up after 4 days at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona. Over 1,100 people from around the world registered to attend, and thousands more watched online through livestreams. Contributor Day and Showcase Day opened the week before two main conference days, featuring over 50 speaker-led sessions across 4 tracks, including multiple workshops.

The temperature reached 111°F (44°C), but golf carts ferried travelers between the Sheraton Phoenix Downtown and the convention center. Inside, attendees moved between session rooms, the Sponsor Hall, and the Happiness Bar.

It’s hot, but it’s not Florida hot.

– Loyal Pyczynski

Sessions covered artificial intelligence (AI), accessibility, publishing, business, site ownership, and the open web. Speakers in different rooms often found common ground, noting the importance of good judgment and trust-building in the age of AI.

Real Artists Ship

Contributor Day followed the motto “Real artists ship,” and a new format to match. The 425 participants, including 29 first-time contributors, formed 26 teams around goals they could complete that day. Experienced contributors moved between groups and helped newer participants shape goals. Then, goal owners gave 30-second pitches, and contributors could move between teams when that work caught their interest.

By day’s end, contributors had closed tickets, opened and shipped pull requests, and reviewed themes for accessibility. One team created description-list blocks for glossaries and product details, and another added email settings, a test tool, and checks for account, password-reset, and recovery messages.

Other teams built a Photo Directory importer and updated Notes in the WordPress dashboard and Multisite documentation. More work covered PHP, PHPUnit testing, and guidelines for AI work within the project. New contribution pathways became a course on Learn WordPress, open to people who could not be in Phoenix.

Every team ended the day with a 30-second presentation of what it had made, tested, fixed, or moved closer to release.

Showcase Day Put Real Sites First

If Contributor Day was about shipping in a day, Monday’s Showcase Day was about what happens after the shipping. Sites have to keep working smoothly for the people who publish, maintain, and depend on them. The case studies came from public services, independent publishers, community platforms, training systems, and large content operations.

Manny Costa covered the first of those: civic websites where residents find services, apply for programs, read emergency information, and report problems. In that work, accessibility, governance, and editor workflows are part of the service rather than a final check box.

Two of the case studies were about publishers taking back ownership of their content. Both sites now appear in the WordPress Showcase.

See The Ankler in the WordPress Showcase

Nicola Catton’s session described how The Ankler moved 15 newsletters to WordPress and took direct control of its content, subscriber data, revenue rules, and reader experience. Nicola detailed the massive migration, the thousands of rebuilt paywall boundaries, and the site’s brand-new block theme.

See Daily Kos in the WordPress Showcase

The Daily Kos migration was a similarly large-scale move. Ben Greeley and Allison McHenry centered their session on a community that writes as well as reads: 1.5 million posts, 88 million comments, and 2.7 million users, with a public beta that involved more than 500 community members.

Other sessions dealt with the people who do the publishing once a site is live. In Aviral Mittal’s session, an AI agent built a page from a Google Doc using patterns the team had already defined. Andrew Adam described a library of about 100 written and video guides, with accessibility guidance included. Shared foundations covered repeat questions, while project-specific help and tips inside the editor handled the rest.

Human Judgment in the Loop

Early on, Bo English-Wiczling had opened Showcase Day by addressing the gap between rapid AI adoption and trust. Her keynote covered the move in developer work toward setting intent and supplying context.

AI doesn’t remove your work. It moves it.

– Bo English-Wiczling

A first draft can now arrive in seconds, but an almost-right block of code may still miss keyboard navigation, use the wrong theme styles, or bring an unsafe dependency into a project.

The importance of good judgment is familiar to the WordPress community. Bo tied it to habits WordPress contributors already have: reading other people’s code, submitting small changes, reviewing pull requests, and accepting critique in the open.

The next morning, Loyal Pyczynski drew on his work at Disney and Meta for a keynote about tests, time, and creative confidence. His talk returned to a phrase from an Imagineering colleague.

We need to make sure that we make better mistakes tomorrow. Success is an iterative endeavor, and time is our most precious resource.

– Loyal Pyczynski

Loyal described Disney teams that paired creative and technical leads early, then brought in experts for work another team could do better or faster. The goal was not to know everything but to know what the team should own.

Design and publishing sessions drew similar conclusions as the keynotes. Michelle Hunt framed design systems as living feedback systems that need to preserve intent as production gets faster.

K Adam White’s session centered on moving large stores of content into block patterns, with editors staying involved where automatic conversion still needed judgment. Nik McLaughlin’s Abilities API session looked beyond AI integrations to the broader structure the API gives WordPress developers. Brian Coords made a related case through block themes: approved patterns, templates, and real content offer a starting point, and design tokens add guidance that a blank-page prompt cannot provide.

Machine translation got the same treatment. In a multilingual WordPress multisite case study of AI translation for technical content, native-speaking colleagues found output that was correct word by word and could still miss the intended meaning. Human review covered the gap between translating language and translating intent.

The judgment question even reached hiring. The Making of a WordPress Certification introduced a standards-based certification and covered how the credential was created, checked, governed, and delivered.

Trust Becomes a Product Practice

Wednesday morning took the trust question outside the WordPress world. The day opened with a fireside chat between Amanda Ventura of Waymo and David Levine on what it takes for people to trust technology that moves through their streets.

Ventura described trust as repeated work. Teams can publish safety data and listen before arriving in a new city, and they need a path for product teams to act on feedback. Her example came from accessibility testing. Screen-reader support helped blind and low-vision riders use the Waymo app, but it did not solve the physical problem of finding the right car. Feedback led to step-by-step directions and a horn control with a distinct musical tone that was easier to identify on busy city streets.

Other sessions applied that standard to WordPress sites. WordPress Core committer Jonathan Desrosiers focused on supply-chain safety while Robert Abela’s session explored login security. AI tools can find security flaws faster than ever. That speed raises the need for careful checks.

The rest of Wednesday’s schedule included sessions on security, accessibility, design, AI tools, and work for site owners.

Kathy Zant’s session proposed an audit for AI use, covering plugins, themes, content pipelines, and client sites, and it named consent, data location, disclosure, and legal review as questions teams should settle before launch.
Another case-based session compared two responses to navigation problems: one client received an AI search tool, and another received a predictable interface that editors could control. The planned lesson was simple. AI can be the right choice without being the automatic choice.
Joseph LoPreste’s session explored accessibility work no single plugin can complete: navigation, forms, headings, images, content, and interactive elements.

Learning With Your Laptop Open

WordPress beginner workshops ran throughout the event for first-time builders, with no hosting account or prior WordPress experience required. Participants made pages, posts, logos, and menus, and each person left with a WordPress site, a year of hosting, and a domain. These sessions laid groundwork to work with plugins, styles, and additional features. The beginner program, office hours, and Happiness Bar gave people several places to ask questions and get hands-on experience.

More advanced technical workshops offered even experts the chance to hone their skills.

Łukasz Wilczak focused on reusable WP-CLI commands. They handled bulk content changes, block and shortcode migrations, link cleanup, and safe batch processing.
Vedanshu Jain designed a workshop around roles and review paths for AI-only teams. The planned outputs included a plugin stub, publishable content, or another real result.
Rob Ruiz built his workshop around WP Rig and automatic checks for preparing block-ready themes for the Theme Directory.

Like all WordCamps, these sessions gave attendees skills and tools to bring home to their own projects.

Simplicity Gets the Last Word

The closing session started with city business. Michael Hammett, Phoenix’s first Chief Innovation Officer, read a proclamation from Mayor Kate Gallego declaring August 19 Phoenix WordPress Day, and then presented the signed document to WordPress Cofounder, Matt Mullenweg. The proclamation credited WordPress with supporting the small businesses, developers, designers, educators, and creators in the city’s growing digital and creative economy.

What followed was a dynamic presentation and conversation between Mullenweg and Robert Jacobi, ending with a traditional Q&A. Matt’s thesis was simple: Tech needs to be simpler.

I want WordPress to be known for simplicity, not just complexity.

– Matt Mullenweg

After a detour through why AI models now prefer simple, self-contained HTML files, the argument became tangible with WordPress Piplets, a 2007 idea built around a single self-modifying PHP file that stores its own data, with no database and no third-party packages. One file can hold up to 25 megabytes, about four million words, and load in about 50 milliseconds. For Mullenweg, it extends the experiments that took WordPress from MySQL to SQLite to Playground, and he floated the idea of a WordPress.org directory where people could publish, fork, and remix.

Speaking of WordPress.org, it was announced that profile links are getting shorter, with w.org/username redirects like w.org/@matt already live, with full support just a few days away.

Midway through, release leads were called up to press the button on the WordPress 7.1 release, and were awarded with applause as “Mary Lou” received hundreds of thousands of downloads.

On contribution, Mullenweg expressed his desire to reward impact instead of pledges. The Five for the Future directory shows two million self-sponsored hours pledged each week from 150,000 contributors, and he questioned whether that reflects reality. The project already records what actually happened (commits, posts, tickets closed, WordCamps organized), and he wants recognition built on that record. He asked the same of the plugin directory, suggesting a focus on fewer better-working things.

Audience questions covered AI licensing, data centers, and why open source communities compete more than they collaborate. On that last one, Mullenweg invited other open source leaders to speak at WordCamp, and encouraged working together. Copying good code between projects, he said, is the entire point of open source.

Jacobi closed by asking who was at their first WordCamp; he had met more first-timers here, he said, than in the past ten years. One of them found the event by asking an AI chatbot for the coolest thing happening in Phoenix, came to Contributor Day, and left with one of its awards.

Beyond the Session Rooms

So much happens outside the session rooms. At the WCUS Happiness Bar, volunteers sat with attendees and worked through plugin questions, CSS problems, ecommerce setup, and new-site questions. An AFK (Away From Keyboard) room offered a quiet place away from the crowds. In the Sponsor Hall, people painted Wapuus with a local Phoenix artist, watched screen-printing, and talked between product demonstrations.

The Connect art installation used photographs from the WordPress Photo Directory. Forty postcards paired images by contributors who may never have met. Color, composition, or subject linked each pair. Attendees could take several cards and a blank one, then add a connection of their own.

Lunch did something simpler. People changed tables, picked up open seats, and started conversations with one question: “What do you do with WordPress?”

Organizers and volunteers kept four days of rooms, shuttles, meals, and livestreams moving. Thank you to them, and to the speakers, sponsors, contributors, attendees in Phoenix, and everyone watching online.

What Comes Next

If you missed this year’s WordCamp US, you can find recordings of sessions on us.WordCamp.org/2026/. Be sure to sign up for email notifications, so you don’t miss out next year. Next stop, State of the Word, followed by WordCamp Asia 2027 in Penang, Malaysia, and WordCamp Europe 2027 in Málaga, Spain.

Photo credits: Jaron Quach, Emily Chan, Wini Lao, Kendra Stowe, and
Jennifer Swisher

WordPress.org blog: WordPress 7.1 “Mary Lou”

annezazu — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 23:33:49 +0000

Each WordPress release celebrates an artist who has made an indelible mark on the world of music. WordPress 7.1, code-named “Mary Lou,” honors pioneering jazz pianist, arranger, and composer Mary Lou Williams.

A child prodigy who began playing publicly at six, her influence and work cut across nearly every major era of jazz, moving through swing, bebop, and sacred jazz. Through all of it, she kept reinventing her own sound. In the 1940s, she turned her Harlem apartment into a nightly workshop where Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, and Bud Powell came to trade ideas and shape bebop itself. That combination of reinvention and collaboration inspired WordPress 7.1.

Let the range of Mary Lou’s music carry you through everything 7.1 offers.

Welcome to WordPress 7.1!

WordPress 7.1 is built around how you work: navigating the admin, controlling your designs, collaborating with others, and building what you want. The admin bar now follows you across the entire admin experience, putting the tools you need within reach, whether you’re writing a post or editing your site’s design. Built-in responsive styling, added to the current show/hide options for blocks, means you can ensure your site looks exactly how you want across screen sizes, without custom CSS. A new media editor keeps the familiar Crop button entry point, and brings freeform and aspect-ratio cropping, horizontal and vertical flipping, fine-grained and snap rotation, and metadata editing into one dedicated workflow. Leave Notes anywhere in your content—no longer limited to the block level. Rich text support and @mentions make it easier to collaborate with others as you write. Two new blocks, Playlist and Tabs, as well as a new API to register your own set of icons for the Icon block, give you even more flexibility to build what you want without additional plugins. These are just the highlights! Read on to see everything WordPress 7.1 has to offer.

Download WordPress 7.1

What’s inside

There’s a lot packed into WordPress 7.1 across new styling tools, updated media flows, added Notes functionality, and more. Some changes add new capabilities, while others refine existing tools and workflows.

Here’s a closer look at what’s new in this release, starting with the release video:

Apply responsive styles

Style your content your way, on every screen.

WordPress 7.1 brings more responsive controls directly into the Site Editor. Style how a block looks at different screen sizes from Global Styles or in individual block settings, without custom CSS. You can also preview your changes at different viewport sizes as you work, making it straightforward to build layouts that adapt to the way people browse the web.

Admin bar, now in every editor

Consistent navigation, from dashboard to editor.

The WordPress admin bar now stays with you as you move across all editors, so you always know where you are and have easy access to familiar tools. The admin bar also features some small visual updates to more fully polish the experience.

A new way to crop

One dedicated workflow for editing your images.

A new media editor modal replaces the previous inline cropping tool, bringing together freeform and aspect-ratio cropping, horizontal and vertical flipping, precise rotation control, and metadata editing together in one place. The familiar Crop button still gets you there.

Inline notes with mentions and rich text

More ways to leave feedback.

Notes now support rich text and mentions, making it easier to leave clear feedback and loop in the right people. Format your Notes with bold, italic, and code, add links, or type @ to mention a collaborator and notify them.

You can also leave a note on a specific piece of text instead of just an entire block, keep multiple conversations going on the same block, and collapse longer notes to keep the margin tidy. It’s built for the back-and-forth that happens when people review content together.

Improved media handling

Faster, more flexible image processing.

Image compression, resizing, and thumbnail generation now happen in the browser, reducing server load and producing smaller files — without hitting PHP memory limits or upload timeouts.

Media handling in 7.1 also includes native support for AVIF, HEIC, and HDR gain maps, adding native support for the image formats modern cameras and phones already produce.

Enhanced details and new blocks

WordPress 7.1 also adds two new blocks, along with more ways to customize how content looks and behaves.

Create playlists

Bring multiple audio tracks together in one playlist, with an optional waveform that gives listeners a visual sense of each track as it plays.

Customize responsive breakpoints

Block themes can now define their own mobile and tablet breakpoints in theme.json, overriding the defaults for responsive styles and block visibility.

Organize with tabs

Organize content into tabbed panels instead of showing everything at once—a cleaner way to present related information without crowding your content.

Add custom icons

Developers can extend WordPress’s icon library with their own collections, making custom icons available throughout the editor alongside the built-in library.

Set interactive styles

Give Button blocks distinct styles for hover, focus, and active states directly in the editor’s style controls. Set the styles for just one button or all buttons.

A more consistent editing experience

The post editor is now fully iframed for all themes, matching the Site Editor.

The editing canvas runs separately from the WordPress admin interface, so admin styles don’t interfere with your content. Viewport-relative units and media queries now target the editing canvas directly, so responsive layouts behave more predictably as you build. The change is mostly invisible, but the result is a more reliable and consistent editor.

Developer’s toolbox

Advanced tools for building your way.

WordPress 7.1 expands several of the APIs and tools developers use to build on WordPress, with new options for icons, automation, admin interfaces, and responsive styling.

The SVG Icon API is now a public API, allowing developers to register their own icon collections and icons and use them throughout the editor with functions such as wp_register_icon_collection(), wp_register_icon(), and wp_get_icon().

The Abilities API builds on the infrastructure introduced in WordPress 6.9 with a filterable execution lifecycle, custom validation, and shared discovery. These additions make it easier to build integrations and automation on top of WordPress, including AI-powered tooling.

A new Design System provides foundational support for theming WordPress admin interfaces, including color, roundness, and cursor styles. Developers can use semantic design tokens and the ThemeProvider React component to bring more consistency to custom admin interfaces while still feeling at home in WordPress.

Theme authors also get responsive styling and pseudo-state styling for hover, focus, focus-visible, and active states through theme.json, along with new filters for configuring the DataViews and DataForm screens that power Pages, Templates, Parts, and Patterns in the Site Editor.

Accessibility

WordPress 7.1 continues to improve accessibility across WordPress Core and the editor. New wp_get_tooltip() and wp_get_toggletip() functions bring accessible tooltips to more areas of the WordPress admin, including post meta boxes and the login screen.

Screen reader support also improves across admin interfaces, with clearer labeling and more predictable navigation in post list tables. The new Tab and Playlist blocks, along with improvements to editor navigation and interaction, add to the broader accessibility work included in this release.

Together, these changes continue to make WordPress easier to navigate and use for more people.

Performance improvements

Image compression, resizing, and thumbnail generation now run in the browser (via a WebAssembly build of libvips), reducing the processing load on your server and helping avoid memory limits and timeouts with larger uploads.

Opt-in GIF-to-video conversion produces typically smaller files, while upload progress indicators and automatic retries make uploads more resilient when connections drop.

The Media Library now uses infinite scrolling by default, with a per-user option to return to pagination. Speculative loading defaults can now be set through environment variables or constants, so hosts and site owners can configure how WordPress prefetches pages without writing a plugin.

And much more!

For a comprehensive overview of everything new and improved in WordPress 7.1, visit the feature showcase website.

Check out what’s new in 7.1

Learn more about WordPress 7.1

Learn WordPress is a free resource for new and experienced WordPress users. Learn is stocked with how-to videos on using various features in WordPress, interactive workshops for exploring topics in-depth, and lesson plans for diving deep into specific areas of WordPress.

Read the WordPress 7.1 Release Notes for information on installation, enhancements, fixed issues, release contributors, learning resources, and the list of file changes.

Explore the WordPress 7.1 Field Guide. Learn about the changes in this release with detailed developer notes to help you build with WordPress.

The 7.1 release squad

Every release comes to you from a dedicated team of enthusiastic contributors who help keep things on track and moving smoothly. The team that has led 7.1 is a cross-functional group of contributors who are always ready to champion ideas, remove blockers, and resolve issues.

Release Lead: Anne McCarthy
Release Coordination: Benjamin Zekavica, Krupa Nanda
Tech Leads: Aki Hamano, Joe Dolson
Triage Leads: Adrian Duffell, Sajjad Hossain Sagor, Sergey Biryukov
Test Leads: Huzaifa Al Mesbah, Nikunj Hatkar

Thank you, contributors

The mission of WordPress is to democratize publishing and embody the freedoms that come with open source. A global and diverse community of people collaborating to strengthen the software supports this effort.

WordPress 7.1 reflects the tireless efforts and passion of more than 800 contributors from all over the world. This release also welcomed over 170 first-time contributors!

Together, their work delivered more than 1500 enhancements and fixes, helping make WordPress 7.1 a stable and polished release for everyone. It’s another great example of what the WordPress open source community can accomplish when people come together to build, test, and improve the software

1shiharaT · Aagam Shah · Aakash Verma · Aaron D. 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WPTavern: #230 – Adrian Sticea on Navigating the Decline of WordPress Work on Upwork and the Rise of New Opportunities

Nathan Wrigley — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 13:00:00 +0000

Transcript

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, the decline of WordPress work on Upwork, and the rise of new opportunities.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox and use the form there.

So on the podcast today, we have Adrian Sticea. Adrian has been working in the WordPress space since 2013, starting out as a developer for small companies. Then moving into freelancing, agency roles in the US, major projects at IBM, a, stint at StellarWP, and extensive work with enterprise level clients.

Most recently, Adrian’s post on LinkedIn about the dramatic drop off in WordPress work through the Upwork platform, went viral, sparking many conversations and comments.

I suspect that many WordPress professionals listening have seen shifts in their freelance workloads, and maybe wondering what’s behind these changes. And Adrian is here to share his own data-driven account.

He talks about his experience using Upwork as a primary source of project leads. How for years it was a reliable fountain of work, but recently the flow has all but dried up.

We dive into the possible causes, the impact of AI making developers more efficient, and thus reducing hiring demand, changes in the broader economy, increasing competition from rival platforms, and how the nature of WordPress work itself is changing.

Adrian mentions the difference between simple website builds, which are still in demand on Upwork, and complex plugin or enterprise projects, which he thinks might have migrated elsewhere.

We also talk about diversification, whether it’s a mistake to rely on just one marketplace for freelance work, and the importance of building real relationships, collecting testimonials, and seeking recommendations. Adrian shares how he’s pivoted, leveraging LinkedIn for networking, connecting directly with agencies, and building partnerships with recruiters and temp agencies.

If you’ve ever felt your freelance pipeline shrink, are curious where the most interesting WordPress work has gone, or want to hear how other professionals are adapting to marketplace shifts, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Adrian Sticea.

I am joined on the podcast by Adrian Sticea. Hello, Adrian.

[00:03:34] Adrian Sticea: Hey.

[00:03:34] Nathan Wrigley: Very nice to have you with us. Adrian is joining us today because of something that he posted on LinkedIn, which captured my attention.

I’m not a frequent lurker on LinkedIn, and so I don’t really know how the algorithm works. But Adrian and I have, as far as I know, not been in communication with each other before. But, Adrian’s post went really viral, I think it’s fair to say, and it certainly caught my attention and got into my feed.

And it’s all about the state of work in the WordPress space at the moment, particularly through a particular platform. And we’ll get into that in a minute, though. Adrian, if it’s okay with you, do you want to just tell us a little bit about your backstory? What it is that you’ve been doing these many years and so on?

[00:04:15] Adrian Sticea: Sure. I started working as a WordPress developer in 2013. I worked for a couple of small companies, local companies that needed kind of customer support, and also web development. And after that I started doing freelancing for about two years. I moved to the US in 2016, that’s when I started to look around for better paid jobs.. And I started working as a WordPress developer for a digital marketing agency, and I did that for, about a year and something.

In 2018, I joined IBM to work on one of their WordPress projects. I think it was the largest WordPress one that they had at the moment. Basically it was a learning platform, and the courses were about technology, programming and other stuff. I left IBM at end of 2020 because of multiple factors, and I started doing freelancing.

I freelanced for about three years and after that I joined StellarWP, where I worked in the marketing department as one of their web engineers. And I worked there for about a year and a half. And at start of 2025 I started doing freelancing again. And since 2018, I mostly worked with enterprise-level companies and more complex work than just building websites.

That’s the stuff that I’ve been doing for the past.

[00:05:40] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you for that, and all of that really plays into what we’re going to talk about because, what I’ll do is I’ll link to the post that Adrian wrote, which kind of went viral on LinkedIn. And the first thing you’re probably going to capture is there’s a graph at the bottom, and it’s a line graph, and it’s not pleasant to look at this line graph. Because it starts off and there’s this blue line and it’s fairly high up on the on the axis and it moves across horizontally. And it just goes along and along and then it just starts to tail downwards until finally, it hits the axis and it basically zeros out.

And so I caught sight of that and I thought, “okay, that’s interesting.” And then caught sight of the word WordPress, you know, and you being a WordPress developer, and then noticed that this was the volume of work that you had been receiving. And we’re talking about volume of work coming through a particular platform. The platform is called Upwork.

Now, I confess I don’t know a lot about Upwork, so we can get into that in a moment. But essentially, it looks like from the year 2015 through 2020, more or less everything that you did, bar a couple of percent, maybe 5% in some years and what have you, was through the Upwork platform. And then by the year 2022, 20% of that had been shaved off, so down to 80%. A year later, 2023, 60% and then 40%. And then in this year, 2026, 0%. And I caught sight of that and I thought, “okay, we’ve got to talk about this,” because there’s a lot of interest in the WordPress space at the moment.

So do you just want to just run us through your journey with the kind of work that you’ve been doing through Upwork and, you know how it’s tailed off? And then maybe we can get into the discussion about perhaps why this is happening.

[00:07:32] Adrian Sticea: Sure. Just to preface, I had periods of time where I worked on Upwork just part-time, not as a full-time freelancer because I had jobs here and there.

[00:07:43] Nathan Wrigley: Ok, yeah yeah.

[00:07:44] Adrian Sticea: And I was actually calculating this morning how much time I was full-time freelancing and full-time on a job, and it was kind of split in half. So basically, half of my professional career was spent as a freelancer, and the other half was doing part-time. So if I had a job, I will search for other avenues to get a bit more revenue in. And also I didn’t like the idea of just relying on one source of income.

So I always had running in the background, the project, a couple of hours here and there or, a week or a project a month that doing. And that graph represents the number of basically of leads and projects that I got from Upwork over the years.

[00:08:28] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:08:28] Adrian Sticea: Even if it’s full-time or part-time, basically that was kind of the lead source that I primarily used.

[00:08:34] Nathan Wrigley: And so what we’re seeing, I guess is you, like many people in the WordPress industry, you’ve taken the approach that, subscribe to a bunch of these, I’m going to call it a marketplace, you know.

[00:08:47] Adrian Sticea: Yes.

[00:08:48] Nathan Wrigley: Something like that, where you subscribe to this marketplace and it can bolster what it is that you do already. So maybe you’ve got a 50% gig somewhere where you’re part-time and you need something to top that up. Or it may be that, come to rely on it, and it genuinely has been 100% of the income that you’ve accrued in particular years.

But how do you explain though, the fact that it has kind of just gone down? Because to me the obvious explanation, and it’s a fairly, you know, this is the kind of explanation which is being rolled out everywhere at the moment, is AI. Simply because it seems to coincide so perfectly with the advent of AI.

Now, I don’t know if you’ve got any thoughts beyond that, you know really the graph takes a massive turn in the year 2023, 2024, sometime there. And that seemed to be the moment at which, the kind of work that many of us have done in the past perhaps was getting done by AI. And if not getting done by AI, people at least had intuitions that there would be a future in which that work could be done by AI.

So that’s my first pass at this. Do you think there’s anything in that whole AI debate, whether or not it’s captured the kind of work that you may have got from Upwork?

[00:10:06] Adrian Sticea: I think the answer is more complex than just blaming AI for everything that is happening in the marketplace right now. Definitely AI plays a role because it made developers more efficient in shipping code, shipping features and stuff that clients need.

But I don’t think it’s only reason because if you work with clients and stuff like that, you’ll know a client will pay you to do a work. They will not go themself, even if it’s with AI, do the work. So because of it, because AI it’s making developers build faster, the need for developers decreased. That’s one of the reasons behind it. If you want to blame AI for anything, it’s that it made developers faster.

[00:10:55] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s an interesting one. So the work in your experience anyway, the work is still there, it’s just the expectations of the clients maybe have gone up. So instead of wanting X amount of work, they may want 1.5X or 2X or whatever it is, or perhaps have it delivered in less time or something like that.

[00:11:12] Adrian Sticea: I think it’s a fair assumption. But also probably market, the way that the economy is right now, I don’t think it’s in a good shape. And also one of the factors. Like, if you look at the number of layoffs, a lot of companies in the tech sector, ’cause I think this was more affected than others, happened in the past three years.

[00:11:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah that’s true. Yeah.

[00:11:36] Adrian Sticea: But AI most likely was an accelerator of that just because. And before 2022, a lot of companies needed engineers to support the demand for people staying at home. And after they didn’t need that demand, a lot of layoffs happened and AI came along. And just it was basically a perfect storm for massive layoffs ’cause you had engineers that can deliver more work, and you didn’t need that many engineers because the demand was not there anymore.

[00:12:09] Nathan Wrigley: I suppose the other thing we should bring into question is the popularity of WordPress as an avenue to gain work. So for example, I don’t know, probably 2018 feels like a good place to point the needle. 2018, WordPress couldn’t be more popular.

[00:12:30] Adrian Sticea: Yeah.

[00:12:30] Nathan Wrigley: It was just really really super popular, everybody was talking about it. It was an exciting place to be. Lots and lots of work. Lots of companies getting in and investing in all sorts of bits of WordPress.

[00:12:41] Adrian Sticea: Mm-hmm.

[00:12:42] Nathan Wrigley: Whether that was the community or getting plugins built, and shipping them and all of that kind of stuff.

[00:12:46] Adrian Sticea: Yes.

[00:12:47] Nathan Wrigley: And so I wonder if maybe that plays into it. You know these companies, who require websites to be built, or projects to be built. I wonder if they’ve cast their gaze elsewhere, and so that reservoir of work in the WordPress space on the Upwork side has dried up a little bit.

[00:13:03] Adrian Sticea: Yep definitely today there are more options than there were in 2018, like with the rise of Wix, Squarespace, other page builders. Definitely, made people that just wanted websites built, like presentation websites, simple stuff, not rely on WordPress. Because to be honest, WordPress out of the box is not that user-friendly for building a website as the other competitors are. Because you still, or at least before the full site editing was introduced. But even then, it’s a steeper learning curve than other page builders in a sense.

But where I see the deep is actually in newer projects rather than legacy ones, where companies that used WordPress to build their infrastructure, at least web infrastructure on. Because newer builds probably rely more on AI than on WordPress, and that’s kind of basically the, where the market shifted.

But again, like if companies used to build, because I see this in the clients that I serve. Not one of them that I worked with probably the past two to five years said like “Let’s remove WordPress from our web assets and just build it with AI,” because they understand the value of it, and also like technical debt and what actually maintaining software means so.

[00:14:23] Nathan Wrigley: Do you think then there might be a realignment? Let’s say you’re a fairly large company and you’ve got WordPress website as you just described, you’re willing to let go of that. You’ve got so much stuff in there and legacy, and all of your staff know how to use it and what have you.

Do you think though, perhaps we’re in an era though where the experience that somebody with 20 years building on top of WordPress could bring, would make them an absolutely invaluable asset? You know, you’ve got John Smith over there, he’s done 20 years of really hardcore WordPress development, and therefore he’s the person that we’re going to reach out to, or at least, if he comes through a platform like Upwork, that’s really credible.

I wonder if we’ve entered an era where, and I’m going to use the word vibe coding, we all know that’s fraught, and not really the right term to use, but I hope you get what I mean. I wonder if it’s now that people are questioning that, and thinking more like, do we really need John Smith with his 20 years of experience at $250 an hour? Or could we hire somebody with half the experience, a quarter of the experience, who charges a quarter of the rates? And if we factor in that it might take a little bit longer, but they’re going to use AI along the way. Do you know what I mean?

[00:15:39] Adrian Sticea: Yes.

[00:15:40] Nathan Wrigley: I’m just sort if that that kudos that your experience used to bring you. I wonder if that’s being brought a bit lower in people’s estimation of importance when they’re hiring.

[00:15:50] Adrian Sticea: I think it might. But again like I think the answer is more complex than yes or no. And I think it all depends on what part, or role, the website or web assets that were built on WordPress is valued by the company.

So if it’s really important thing, probably they will not think about redoing it using AI. If it’s not that important, because I saw this, if it’s not that important it’s just probably a brochure website. It doesn’t do a lot. It doesn’t bring in. It’s just for visibility. Some of them they move to, again, like probably Framer or they just vibe code it.

[00:16:29] Nathan Wrigley: So given all of that, and we’re pontificating and guessing why.

[00:16:33] Adrian Sticea: Yeah.

[00:16:34] Nathan Wrigley: And the truth is we don’t really know.

[00:16:36] Adrian Sticea: Exactly, yeah.

[00:16:37] Nathan Wrigley: We’re putting our finger air and kind of trying to figure it out. However, given that we don’t know, what we do know is that this line chart that we can see, of yours has gone really in a very different direction. Flat lining for years, lots and lots of work available, and now kind of like nosedive, and then more recently fell off a cliff. And so does that mean that you are struggling to find work? Or does it just mean that you’ve pivoted and that work in a different way?

Does it mean that the Upwork platform, I don’t know, is no longer aligned to WordPress, or just doesn’t have WordPress as a priority? How can you explain it, and we’re talking about Upwork in particular.

[00:17:20] Adrian Sticea: Yes.

[00:17:21] Nathan Wrigley: How can you explain it happening in that way over on that platform specifically?

[00:17:26] Adrian Sticea: One of the things that happened, it was probably saturation of a marketplace. That’s one.

And the other thing is that different competitors are on the market right now, outsource companies and more like, just to put it in perspective, most of my clients, probably 95%, are US-based clients, are not somewhere in UK or somewhere in Eastern Europe, or somewhere in other places that are still needing WordPress work done. And the type of projects that I’m looking for are not websites, basically. They are complex builds, plugin builds and kind of regular maintenance that people need. If they have legacy code base that they need maintenance, or adjusting rule or a code rebuild and stuff like that.

So those kinds of projects are not there anymore. You can still find work in building websites on WordPress, or having small gigs. But the type of project that I used to get on Upwork, like I said, like pretty complex builds are not there anymore. And my read it’s like I said, it’s more complex. Probably it’s a market.

[00:18:40] Nathan Wrigley: So, there’s a particular kind of work that you used to get in Upwork which has dried up? And the, let me just understand that correctly. So just the website building side of it, did you say that was still okay? know if you’re just trying to hawk your service as a website builder, that’s fine. But the kind of “I need a plugin,” or, “I’d like a plugin adapted,” or what have you, that kid of stuff has gone away?

[00:19:06] Adrian Sticea: So most stuff that are more developer focused are kind of dried up. At least in the US, because I’m not looking outside of US. So the US market shifted away basically from Upwork towards probably different competitors of them. Or using like temp agencies, or recruiters that pre-vet their developers before they are presented with a candidate they can have a discussion with.

[00:19:33] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So I’m thinking immediately of things like Codeable and things like that, where they’ve just got a slightly, maybe they’ve got a slightly different approach, I don’t know?

[00:19:40] Adrian Sticea: Yes, Toptal I think also they pre-vet their developers. And also like I said, temp agencies like Robert Half or, I don’t know, whatever tech systems that are here in the US. Basically you have a discussion with the recruiter before being presented to a potential project. It’s a different workflow basically. Because of it, it presents a better candidate than Upwork can present to a client.

[00:20:04] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so that’s interesting. So we’re apportioning some of the responsibility for this on the platform and the way the platform works and what have you?

[00:20:14] Adrian Sticea: Yes.

[00:20:15] Nathan Wrigley: And so, you know one of the things that we constantly talk about in the WordPress space is owning your own stuff. So for example, rather than posting stuff onto Facebook, write it on the WordPress blog, and then if Facebook goes out of business, or somehow decides that your account needs to be closed, you’ve still got access to it.

[00:20:31] Adrian Sticea: Mm-hmm.

[00:20:31] Nathan Wrigley: And so I’m going to flip that into this conversation and say that sort of seems like potentially what’s happened here to you with Upwork. Presumably over the years, you’ve fostered a relationship with Upwork, and built up your kudos over there, and at some point presumably Upwork recognized that, “Oh, this Adrian guy, he’s really good. Look, he’s getting loads of work. Let’s push Adrian,” and so on and so forth.

Do you have any regrets about putting the eggs into that one basket? Now that you’ve got to the point where the line has hit zero and there’s no work coming through? Do you wish that you’d have been on a variety of, maybe you have been, but do you wish that you’d been on a variety of different marketplaces? Or is it just, “Okay, this has happened. I didn’t think it was going to happen. Time to move on and try the different marketplaces”?

[00:21:19] Adrian Sticea: I think not only me, but people usually are nearsighted, so they don’t think long-term. So whenever I started on Upwork, it was pretty easy to get clients because you don’t have to pay a fee, or you don’t have to go to events, or meet people in person, which for developers is pretty hard, at least for me. I’m a pretty introvert person. Going, mingling around with other people, it’s not something that I look forward to do.

[00:21:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I get it.

[00:21:46] Adrian Sticea: Or it’s something that it’s in my skill set. Over the years, I got better and better because I’ve worked with clients and became more confident in my skills and stuff like that. But Upwork presented a easier way to get clients, and that’s kind of the appeal of those kind of marketplaces, because you don’t have to go outside of your comfort zone. You just have a keyboard, apply for a different bunch of gigs, and you can get accepted or not.

Just to put it in perspective, probably half of the work that I’ve done was only through messaging back and forth, not even interacting with a real person, which for a developer is really appealing.

[00:22:28] Nathan Wrigley: No kidding, yeah.

[00:22:29] Adrian Sticea: It’s easier in a sense because, again, like it’s easier. But to be honest, the larger projects that I took on Upwork, or outside of Upwork needed that human touch. Like meeting with the client, talking about your skills, how you will approach the project and all of that. So they can gain confidence that you are competent enough to take their work.

So that’s kind of the reason why I got into it. If I have any regrets of it, of course, because if you leave that, you are basically handcuffed to that platform if you want to get more work. Because you don’t have any contacts outside, and also, it doesn’t produce any referrals.

So if a client is satisfied, the maximum that they can do with it, is just leave you a good review because they are so scattered around, they don’t have any other contacts that you can get recommendations from. So basically, for all the clients that I had, I didn’t get recommendations altogether. Probably just one in the past 10, 11 years.

[00:23:32] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:23:33] Adrian Sticea: That’s not good for long term, because you rely on constant getting new and new work from different clients. It’s not sustainable in a sense, because you have to focus yourself on delivering the work, but also getting the work, instead of building a network of clients that can supply that work for you, and recommend you to their friends and other of their peers.

[00:23:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I suppose a lesson to be learned, with the benefit of hindsight, is to spread yourself around, but also go looking for those kind of recommendations, and ensure that people endorse you and maybe even write you an email or something that you can put away somewhere and kind of have a bank of credible testimonials and so on and so forth.

Now, the piece itself on LinkedIn got quite a lot of commentary. I have to confess, I didn’t go reading all of the different comments that people had put in. But did you get a sense that the people that were commenting had had a similar experience from you? Or do you feel that you’re in some kind of unlucky, unhappy valley that nobody else over on Upwork is experiencing?

[00:24:37] Adrian Sticea: No, I think I talked with agency owner, that most of their work comes off of Upwork, and they said they didn’t get any. Actually, this was the post that inspired me to write this. They didn’t get any work this month or in July from Upwork, even though they constantly applied. And one of the things that he said, it stood up was that, if they increase a bit their prices, they will not get any responses.

So basically, probably the market became more sensitive on spending. And because of the rise of AI, you can say that AI commoditize more development than it used to be. So it’s not just a me thing. I think it’s a general.

[00:25:24] Nathan Wrigley: So it is more broadly across the platform there. So fees you brought up, that’s interesting. I wonder if people are playing a bit of a wait and see game, and just keeping that money in their own bank account just to see how the landscape changes. Maybe this heralds a change in the industry which is going to stick for a while where the fees that people such as yourself can charge are going to be driven down, because less work seems to be available, so people are going to be more sensitive to the cost of it, and the competition will be greater and what have you.

[00:25:53] Adrian Sticea: Yeah.

[00:25:54] Nathan Wrigley: I guess only time will really tell. Yeah.

[00:25:57] Adrian Sticea: And also most likely is, the fact that AI commoditize programming in a sense. They are not the same number of WordPress projects that are started now. And they use, I don’t know, whatever AI is better on building with, which is like JavaScript-based stacks. And that’s probably the new directions where the new projects are going to rather than WordPress.

[00:26:25] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so just before we wrap it up then, let’s move to this point, which is that, no matter how much you inspect all of this, and out what’s going on, and the reasons behind it. I guess the bottom line is you’ve got to do something.

Maybe you’re perfectly all right, and you can take this hit from the Upwork platform and that’s absolutely fine. You’ve got other irons in the fire. But I’m guessing the next question’s pretty obvious, which is what are you doing to shore up this considerable loss of income? What’s the plan that you’ve got going forward? You may not have a fully hatched plan, in which case your best guess is fine. But I’m curious to know what your idea is to keep your irons in the fire and to keep the through put of your business up.

[00:27:07] Adrian Sticea: Just to put in perspective, my income didn’t decrease because of Upwork. So I’m pretty good, I’m in a pretty good shape. The thing is that I shifted away from relying on it, and trying to get, work through other avenues. And one of the other avenues that I am expanding on right now is basically LinkedIn, and it’s not.

[00:27:27] Nathan Wrigley: You’re suceeding.

[00:27:29] Adrian Sticea: I’ve succeeded on getting viral, yeah.

[00:27:33] Nathan Wrigley: That’s the first step, isn’t it, in a way?

[00:27:35] Adrian Sticea: Yeah, exactly, yeah. So I took three different approaches on LinkedIn. One was to post content, to see if I get any interaction with potential clients. I did get a couple of leads from that, and I get some gigs from it.

The other one is actually talking directly with agency owners that build websites, but from time to time they have a need for either adjusting a legacy code base, or building something more complex that they don’t have in-house tools for. So I started building those relationship, and I do work with couple of different agencies that I they provide work for me from time to time.

And the third one is talking with recruiters from temp agencies. So I build couple of relationship with some of the big temp agencies, and whenever they have a project that it’s my lane, they contact me first basically, and I get to talk directly with the client, and they decide if they want to work with me or not.

[00:28:34] Nathan Wrigley: So in a sense, although there’s this cautionary tale of, gosh, this whole thing dried up, the bigger picture is that actually the whole thing didn’t dry up. There are different ways of getting the same work. In your case, you just had to be a bit creative for a few months, and start to talk in different ways to different people.

[00:28:51] Adrian Sticea: Yeah, and also another thing is that I needed to start thinking a bit more long term rather than one-off projects, not one-off projects, but just thinking that one source of leads will basically provide whatever I need every month budget-wise.

Also this is how business used to work. Like you went, you interacted with a person, and they give you a business or not. Not chatting with a person on the other end of the world, and they give you work.

So basically, fostering those relationships are more beneficial, and to be honest, they pay better than clients on Upwork. And you get into the cycle of recommendation, and you don’t, it’s less work for you to get clients than it is on Upwork, but it takes longer to build those relationships.

[00:29:46] Nathan Wrigley: Right. And that’s a really interesting observation, isn’t it? Because essentially the advice that you’re giving there is as old as the hills really, isn’t it? You could have had that same marketing advice in like 1930s.

[00:29:56] Adrian Sticea: Exactly.

[00:29:57] Nathan Wrigley: Which is, go out, find people who you can work with, build up a longstanding credible relationship with them, and then the next time they need a bit of work, which hopefully they will, you’re going to be the first person who they’re going to call.

But it’s curious how we’ve all fallen into, and I’m just doing air quotes, “the trap” of having these platforms around you know, like Upwork. It just allows you to very easily get work here, there, and everywhere. And it’s only at the point when that starts to dry up for all the reasons that we discussed that you realise, okay, gotta pivot a little bit. But it’s great to hear that in effect, it’s had no impact on your bottom line. It’s just meant that you’ve had to pivot, do things slightly differently, go outside, get out of the office and go and interact with people in the real world.

[00:30:46] Adrian Sticea: And again, like the projects that I was able to get outside of Upwork are for better clients that I did on Upwork. It’s not that I didn’t work on interesting projects on Upwork. It’s that the opportunities that can lead after the work is completed for those clients are bigger than the opportunities that you get from working on, for clients on Upwork.

[00:31:08] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I see. Okay, so the long tail of work, you know, let’s say that you land a client and they build website in the year 2026, maybe they’ll need an upgrade in 2028, and they’ll need some modification in 2027 that you’re the person to do it.

Yeah, whereas Upwork is more here today, gone tomorrow. Disposable thing, you finish it, move on, another thing, another thing. And that’s worked for years, but maybe that system, certainly for you at least anyway, is drying up and you’re trying out other things, which I hope you are successful with. I guess that’s the perfect place to, to call it a day.

[00:31:40] Adrian Sticea: Mm-hmm.

[00:31:41] Nathan Wrigley: Honestly Adrian, all the best of luck. I know that when you put that post out, it must have been, it’s hard to write that kind of stuff, isn’t it? Because it demonstrates that in some way you’ve had to modify things and that things have been a struggle. But it’s nice to hear that you seem to have got a handle on it.

[00:31:58] Adrian Sticea: Yes.

[00:31:58] Nathan Wrigley: And I would wish you the best for the future.

[00:32:00] Adrian Sticea: Thank you.

[00:32:00] Nathan Wrigley: If anybody wanted to reach out to you, because we have a fairly large audience, and I wouldn’t be surprised if one or two people out there were going through something very similar, where’s the best place to reach out to you? I can obviously link to your post on LinkedIn.

[00:32:14] Adrian Sticea: Yes.

[00:32:14] Nathan Wrigley: And people can click on the link and contact you via that. But is there any place you hang out online?

[00:32:18] Adrian Sticea: Yeah, mostly LinkedIn. And if you want to check my website out, it’s CustomWP.io. That’s kind of my avenues of contacting me and that’s about it.

[00:32:28] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. I will put that into the show notes. So if, dear listener, you’re listening to this, head to the episode with Adrian in it. Probably by the time you listen to this it’ll be one of the first two bits and pieces on the WPTavern.com website. Go and click into the show notes and all of the links will be buried somewhere in there.

So, Adrian Sticea, thank you so much for chatting to me today. Good luck with the future.

[00:32:50] Adrian Sticea: Thank you.

On the podcast today we have Adrian Sticea.

Adrian has been working in the WordPress space since 2013, starting out as a developer for small companies, then moving into freelancing, agency roles in the US, major projects at IBM, a stint at StellarWP, and extensive work with enterprise-level clients. Most recently, Adrian’s post on LinkedIn about the dramatic drop-off in WordPress work through the Upwork platform went viral, sparking many conversations and comments.

I suspect that many WordPress professionals listening have seen shifts in their freelance workloads and may be wondering what’s behind these changes, and Adrian is here to share his own data-driven account. He talks about his experience using Upwork as a primary source of project leads, how, for years, it was a reliable fountain of work, but recently, the flow has all but dried up.

We dive into the possible causes. The impact of AI making developers more efficient (and thus reducing hiring demand), changes in the broader economy, increasing competition from rival platforms, and how the nature of WordPress work itself is changing. Adrian mentions the difference between simple website builds, which are still in demand on Upwork, and complex plugin or enterprise projects, which he thinks might have migrated elsewhere.

If you’ve felt your freelance pipeline shrink, are curious where the most interesting WordPress work has gone, or want to hear how other professionals are adapting to marketplace shifts, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Adrian’s post on LinkedIn

Matt: Surprise DM

Matt — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 06:44:50 +0000

When I saw the Slack notification preview, “Matt, I’m literally crying right now,” I must admit my first reaction was “Oh no, what happened…”

Matt, I’m literally crying right now. I just read the Baby & Caregiver Attendance policy that Automattic will fly your baby and whoever is caring for them to be with you at a meetup while you’re breastfeeding.

Everyone talks about closing the gap for women in the workforce after kids. This is the first time I’ve seen a company actually pay for the answer.

I don’t think you hear this enough, so I want to say it plainly: thank you, THANK YOU. Forever grateful.

Stephanie Ospina also posted about it on LinkedIn. This benefit isn’t even on our public benefits page! From our Field Guide post revisions I found it was added in 2018 by Ingrid Miller of our Human Wrangling team, and it’s a great example of the care and effort they put into shaping what we call the Automattic Operating System.

Matt: Student Plan

Matt — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 14:13:21 +0000

Sarah Perez at TechCrunch writes: WordPress.com targets the next generation of web creators with a free student plan. $24/yr, starting with “6 GB of storage, backups, staging sites, and other tools, as well as support for plug-ins, SFTP/SSH, phpMyAdmin, and Studio Sync“

Open Channels FM: How AI is Transforming Open Source Communities and Digital Innovation

Bob Dunn — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 11:10:00 +0000

In this episode of Open Web Conversations, Adam Weeks chats with Nate Stewart on AI's transformative impact on open source. They explore challenges, opportunities, and the evolving role of agencies as digital experiences shift in the AI era.

Open Channels FM: Are We Forgetting Our Human Skills Thanks to AI?

Bob Dunn — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 12:16:55 +0000

AI tools are amazing for getting stuff done, but could be losing basic human skills like handwriting and critical thinking. Let’s not forget to practice these essential abilities as we embrace the digital age.

Gutenberg Times: WordPress 7.1 arrives at WordCamp US, Abilities API for developers, and a new theme for Gutenberg Times and more — Weekend Edition #373

Birgit Pauli-Haack — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 04:10:00 +0000

Hi there,

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 7.0.4 shipped 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 tallies 88 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.

The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #133 – Gutenberg 23.6 Release and WordPress 7.1 with special guest Faith Imokol, webdeveloper from Uganda.

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 Truth and 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.

The previous years are also available:
2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor

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 changes from 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 on building 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.

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

Open Channels FM: Is Digital Fame Really the Same as Traditional Celebrity?

Bob Dunn — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 09:38:00 +0000

Fame has evolved from traditional celebrity status to digital prominence, where online figures may lack universal recognition. Digital fame offers influence but is often more situational and fleeting.

Open Channels FM: Mozilla, Alibaba, and WordPress Headlines Reflect Changing Definitions in AI and Open Source

Bob Dunn — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 09:33:31 +0000

Open Channels News discusses Alibaba's Qwen AI model's commercial restrictions, Mozilla's view of AI as community-driven infrastructure, a critical WordPress update, and highlights from the upcoming WordCamp US.

Matt: Me.sh on Android

Matt — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 19:12:25 +0000

TechCrunch on how Me.sh (née Clay) is now available on Android. Also, kudos to those other Clay folks for winning the Clay memetic namespace dominance.

WordPress.org blog: Introducing the WordPress Browser Extension

Jake Goldman — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:29:42 +0000

The official WordPress Browser Extension is now available for Google Chrome and Chromium-based browsers in the Chrome Web Store and for Safari on macOS in the Mac App Store. This new open source extension lets logged-in site users easily hide the admin bar while keeping its most helpful shortcuts in the browser toolbar, provides quick access to all of your WordPress sites, and adds helpful tools for developers and content creators.

By default, the admin bar sits at the top of every page you view while signed in to WordPress, keeping the dashboard, the editor, and your profile within reach. That convenience carries a cost: the bar occupies the viewport, so the page on screen is never quite the page a visitor sees. On sites doing more interesting things with the viewport, such as sticky headers or scroll-driven effects, it can introduce artifacts that send you hunting for a bug that is not there. Further, the admin bar can sometimes grow unwieldy as plugins add their own features and shortcuts to it. Switching it off in your profile settings trades one problem for another, because the shortcuts leave with it.

That problem was the spark for the creation of the WordPress Browser Extension. The extension hides the admin bar on the sites you choose, or everywhere by default, and keeps the most commonly used shortcuts one click away. Bringing the full bar back takes two clicks and no trip to the dashboard. What began as a fix for that one tradeoff grew into something broader: a way to recognize WordPress wherever you find it on the web, to jump into your own sites from anywhere, and to carry a small set of tools for testing and review.

As you browse, the toolbar icon shows whether the current site runs WordPress and whether you are signed in, without being obtrusive. On a site you manage, opening the extension reveals shortcuts to the dashboard or to the editor for the exact post, page, taxonomy, or template in view, including template-backed pages that open in the Site Editor on block themes. A locally stored launcher remembers the sites you sign in to, so they stay available even when you are somewhere else entirely.

A few tools also turn out to be a better fit for the browser than for a WordPress plugin. The extension can draw block boundaries over the rendered page, open a phone-sized preview window, reload with cache busting, or clear cookies and local storage for the site you are on. Some of that is hard to do from inside a site, and none of it requires a plugin or any other software installation, so the same tools are available on every WordPress site you visit.

All of this happens on your device. The extension reads the page in front of it to work out what it is looking at, and when it needs more than the page can tell it, it asks the site. Your preferences, and the list of sites you sign in to, stay in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere else, and there is no tracking or analytics of any kind.

The extension began as an independent project and became an official project with active support from Matt Mullenweg. Notable contributors include Fabian Kägy, a core contributor and colleague at Fueled (formerly 10up), who helped shape much of its early design and architecture, and Khokan Sardar who contributed multiple patches. Several other Fueled colleagues provided comprehensive testing and influenced its final shape.

You can follow along with its development on its GitHub repository, where bug reports and pull requests are welcome.

Open Channels FM: OpenWALDO’s AI Transparency and AT&T’s Cost-Saving Smart Router in Focus

Bob Dunn — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 11:17:04 +0000

Open Channels News discusses OpenWALDO's launch, promoting true AI openness through transparent data sourcing, and AT&T's shift to open models for cost savings and AI sovereignty.

WordPress.org blog: WordPress 7.0.4 Release

John Blackbourn — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 14:45:53 +0000

WordPress 7.0.4 is now available

WordPress 7.0.4 is now available which features a security fix. Because this is a security release, it is recommended that you update your sites immediately.

You can update to WordPress 7.0.4 by downloading it from WordPress.org, or visiting your site’s Dashboard → Updates and clicking Update Now. Sites that support automatic background updates will begin updating shortly.

For more information, please visit the WordPress 7.0.4 HelpHub site.

Security update included in this release

The security team would like to thank the team at pwn.ai for responsibly reporting the following vulnerability and allowing it to be fixed in this release:

Authenticated Author+ remote code execution via malicious file upload on sites that use Imagick and Ghostscript.

Backports

As a courtesy, these fixes are being backported through to the 4.7 branch and the 7.1 RC3 release that’s due later today. As a reminder, only the most recent version of WordPress is actively supported. The backports are in progress and will ship as they become ready.

CVE and GHSA references

Further details can be found in the advisory: CVE-2026-65640 / GHSA-8vr3-7mxf-gx8w.

Thank you to these WordPress contributors

This release was led by John Blackbourn, with significant input from Dennis Snell and Jeremy Felt. In addition, WordPress 7.0.4 and its backports would not have been possible without the valuable contributions of the following people:

Aaron D. Campbell, Aaron Jorbin, Adam Silverstein, Aki Hamano, Alex Concha, Barry, Dennis Snell, Ehtisham Siddiqui, Jeremy Felt, John Blackbourn, Jon Surrell, Jonathan Desrosiers, Lance Willett, Marin Atanasov, Mohammad Jangda, Sergey Biryukov, vortfu, Weston Ruter, and representatives from WP Engine.

Open Channels FM: Rediscovering the Joy of Human-Made Logo Design in Personal Projects

Bob Dunn — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 13:51:15 +0000

Choosing a hand-drawn logo crafted by an artist infuses your site with warmth and personality. This personalized touch celebrates creativity and connection, making every visit feel special and authentic. It's a joyful expression of individuality.

WPTavern: #229 – Amy Kamala on Art, Tech, and Open Source: A Journey Through WordPress and Community

Nathan Wrigley — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 13:00:00 +0000

Transcript

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, what draws people into the work of open source projects.

So on the podcast today, we have Amy Kamala.

Amy’s journey into tech is anything but conventional, starting with a master of fine arts from UCLA, and a passion for art that eventually bled into, and was overtaken by technology. Since 2018, she’s been an active contributor to WordPress, serving multiple teams such as the Hosting and Core Teams.

Her career zigzags through key roles at DreamHost, InMotion Hosting, Pantheon, Canopy Studios, and local government. Picking up everything from technical support and web development, to managing teams of designers and DevOps staff. Along the way, Amy has organised WordCamps, led teams, and is currently being sponsored by Elementor for her open source work.

Today’s conversation gets into the chaotic, creative, overlap between art and tech and how those different mindsets can feed one another, especially in the world of WordPress. We talk about the blend of creative and logical thinking needed in web development and why skills like user experience, curiosity, and even willingness to fail publicly can set you apart.

We then turn to contribution. What draws people to volunteer in an open source community? What Amy gets out of participating far beyond her paid hours, and the messy journey from being an eager helper to an essential part of the team.

She explains the unique feeling of the WordPress community, the importance of being welcoming to new contributors, and why being outgoing and not afraid to ask questions can be your biggest asset.

If you’ve ever wondered about the blurred lines between arts and code, why people throw themselves into volunteer work in the WordPress ecosystem, or what’s really at the heart of this global community, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Amy Kamala.

I am joined on the podcast by Amy Kamala. Hello, Amy.

[00:03:22] Amy: Hello. Thank you for having me.

[00:03:24] Nathan Wrigley: You’re very welcome. Amy was introduced to me by Jonathan Desrosiers, who’s been on this podcast many, many times before. I don’t exactly recall the nature of that introduction, but I’m very glad to have you on the podcast today. The intention really is to have a broad, wide-ranging, no-holds-barred conversation, I think about contribution, why people do it, and the community in general. So we’ll see where it takes us.

Amy, firstly, thank you for joining us, and I wonder if you wouldn’t mind just telling the listeners a little bit about yourself. Honestly, you can go in any direction you like with that. Maybe if you, I don’t know, bind it to WordPress or contribution or whatever it may be, that would be good.

[00:03:59] Amy: Thank you too. Thank you so much for having me. I’m happy to be here. So I’m from Venice Beach, California, and I’m actually an artist and my background is in art. I have a Master of Fine Arts degree from UCLA. But a lot of my artwork was supported by technology, and at some point, technology crossed over, took over, and now my technology is supported by artwork.

I’ve been contributing to WordPress since 2018. In 2019, I became a team rep for the hosting team, and I am now on my sixth non-consecutive year as a team rep. And this year I’m also a Core team rep, which has been really fun and I love working with both teams.

I started working in the tech industry in 2015 in social support for web host, DreamHost. I was there for about five years, a little bit less than five years. I worked my way up from social support to technical support to live chat, and then helped form a specialised WordPress support team. And I was taking escalations, training team members, devising and documenting team processes. And while I was there, I helped strategise and implement new WordPress products which made revenue in beta, and that was really fun. I got to work directly with the CEO and the VP of product, and I learned a lot doing that.

Then I left, and I became a tech lead at a web dev agency, and then the pandemic hit, and we all know how that went. And then in 2020, I started working for InMotion Hosting as their web development manager. I was responsible for over 23 online corporate assets, five web servers, multiple Jira projects, and also the supporting infrastructure, the DevOps pipeline, GitLab, so on and so forth. And I loved that. It’s actually, that was one of the best jobs I’ve ever had. They’re a great company. It was amazing working there. I had an amazing boss. Totally great. I still have friends from there, and from DreamHost for that matter. And DreamHost was also great. I have a special love in my heart for DreamHost. I’ve known those guys for a really long time.

And then I was recruited by Pantheon to be a solutions architect for their professional support team. That didn’t work out for me as I had hoped, and I left a little bit less than a year later and started being a web developer for my local government. Again, I was recruited. I didn’t pursue these jobs. I may have gone in a different direction if I had. And that was a year-long contract. It ended in the end of 2023, and I’ve actually just been freelancing ever since then. I have a contract with a company called Swishtech. They’re not a WordPress company. They’re not even a web development company. They are an AutoCAD. They train and sell AutoCAD software. And they’re great too. And I also am sponsored by Elementor to contribute to the WordPress open source project.

[00:06:58] Nathan Wrigley: Gosh, you really have done the whole lot, haven’t you? There’s just almost no stone that you haven’t turned over and looked at the underside of. That really is a fascinating story, yeah.

[00:07:09] Amy: Thank you. There is, I considered completely abandoning both of those careers, art and tech and going into psychology and becoming a therapist at some point recently over the past few years.

[00:07:22] Nathan Wrigley: Right, okay. Well I could definitely talk about that. There’s somebody very close to me in my family who does that kind of work.

Can I ask, this is a complete segue, the fact that you pursued art at such a high level tells me that there must be some yearning inside of you for that side of life, you know, the artistic side, the creative side and what have you. I’m wondering if there’s any bit of technology that satisfies that, or do you find that you have to go back to the art to sate that craving? Or are there creative pockets inside of tech that allow you to sate that sort of desire to be creative?

[00:08:00] Amy: So that’s a great question and very insightful of you. Yes, so in 2015 when I started working for DreamHost, I’ve known the founders and some of the managers of DreamHost since like 1999-ish. That’s a different story, but I had just finished grad school and I was kind of in a bad living situation and I just needed a job, any job. I didn’t care what job. And so I hit them up and I found like a entry-level social support, entry-level job that I qualified for. It’s pretty easy to qualify for that. Hit them up and said, “Will you recommend me for this job at your company?” And of course they did. I still went through the interview process and like did typing tests and so on and so forth. But that’s how I ended up.

So it was kind of just circumstantial that I started working in tech. And then once I was there, I tend to get really hyper-focused, and I really hyper-focused on my work at DreamHost on moving up and learning technical things. I’ve always kind of had an aspect of technical. When I was doing art, strictly art, just art, I was still doing technical things. In undergrad I got into, well, so I started, I learned HTML when I was like 18 years old in the year 2000. I was an HTML programmer. It was one of my first jobs. The other job, my first job was working at Venice Beach at one of the stores down there. But like first real job, HTML programmer for a web development agency and graphic design.

And then I went to undergrad and I did a lot of fine art, sculpture, video installations. And working with video is pretty technical. You’re using computers. I also learned Photoshop at Otis where I went to undergrad. I still use it. It’s like one of my primary mediums for making art. But working with video is pretty technical. You’re doing editing, you’re working on a computer, there’s definitely a technical aspect to it.

And I also, I had a boyfriend at the time who was doing web development, and so I started learning PHP and Perl. And I started using PHP as a tool to make my animations. I was making little animations at the time, and video art interactive. So I did some installations that utilised interactive elements that actually used web technology.

Then I was working at an animation studio on a Red Hat box. So I had to, I learned Linux, and I also was introduced to Avid which is a high-end, professional video editing software or film editing software. And then I was working at a film post-production facility where I was using DOS, which is Command Line. And also I was working in the tape room transferring tape formats from one to the other. It was pretty technical. And I was also helping their web team manage the online video assets, uploading and downloading with FTP and so on and so forth. So there’s always been an element of tech integrated in my art.

And to answer your question, working in tech primarily, there’s definitely an element of art that supports, that has supported my career in tech. UI/UX design and graphic design rely on the same fundamentals as fine art. Composition, colour, so on and so forth. And so my training there, and I have some, I don’t like doing graphic design. I, like, actually really hate it, but I do have some professional experience doing it. And that led me to be able to lead teams of designers and developers. At InMotion Hosting, I had five developers and three UI/UX designers on my team, who I was the manager of.

So it wasn’t just development that I was doing there. It was also user experience, very user experience-focused. And so my experience with art has definitely supported my experience with tech and vice versa.

Yes, there’s definitely a yearning that, you know, I wanted to do, I wanted to make weird, cute, maybe a little dark experimental films. And I haven’t been doing that for the past 10 years or so.

[00:11:54] Nathan Wrigley: I always think that the motto for WordPress is code is poetry. I think if you peel back the curtain on that just a little bit, obviously, it may be that you’re just trying to create a website, but there are creative ways of doing that. But also code code really does unlock something, but still it’s quite a logical thing. And I’ve always found those two things difficult to overlap. The sort of Venn diagram of logic meets creativity that, I don’t know how well they fit together. But it sounds from what you’re saying that you feel that the two things have married well in your career.

They’ve enabled you to do things because, I don’t know, maybe it’s thinking outside of the box or something like that. Your capacity to think differently to other people. But I’ve always found that curious. I’ve never had a particularly artistic grain of anything in me. I’m much more logical than I am creative. So I’ve always sort of struggled to see how those two things marry up.

[00:12:49] Amy: Oh, well, you know, that’s actually something that I’ve thought about a lot. And the too long, didn’t read, answer for me about that is, so art is experiential. It’s not about the object necessarily. It’s not even about your skills. It’s about creating an experience. The viewer, relationship between the viewer and the item that they’re looking at. Books, movies, music, all of that, it’s experiential. It creates an experience. And so do websites, so does software, so does using the software.

One of the reasons that Apple is so successful is because of the user experience, because they focus on it being an easy, intuitive, fast experience to use their products. And so when you think about it in terms of user experience, and in terms of just human experience, there’s a lot of crossover.

[00:13:41] Nathan Wrigley: When you worked at some of those companies that you mentioned, I presume that you were surrounded by lots and lots of people, in an office environment. So this question, I hope it lands correctly. I’m certainly not trying to put anybody in a box or stereotype anybody. But did there tend to be a fairly interesting split between the kind of character that you would find on the, I don’t know, making the website look nice, let’s say. You know, putting the pixels on the page, the design and what have you, and then the people who are writing the code in order to make those designs a reality.

I just wonder what, if there’s an aisle down the middle of those two camps where, okay, the artistic people, they’re all over there, look at them being artistic, and over there, there’s all the coders, look at them crouched over their computers being logical. I don’t know if there’s a there there, but I’ve always found that curious too.

[00:14:25] Amy: Well, it crosses over in web development. A lot of web developers are doing, as a web developer, you have to do CSS, SAAS, you have to style the front end. If you’re on a, you know, a big professional team, you’re going to have designers, and then you can just pull the styles from software. But if you’re on a smaller team, which, you know, the majority of people end up working at some point on very small teams or even, like, a one-person team, you do it. And so there’s quite a bit of crossover in web development.

In software development, you’re probably always going to have a bigger team, and so you’re going to need designers. But web development, there’s always web developers that like have a history in graphic design, have a history in UI/UX design that ended up also coding. And those designers don’t necessarily tend to be really great at like PHP and JavaScript, but they do tend to be phenomenal at CSS.

[00:15:18] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, interesting. Yeah, okay. Thank you. I took us on a total detour there. That was really not intentional, but it was kind of fun peeling back the curtain a little bit there.

[00:15:27] Amy: Well as a team lead, it really helps to know people’s strengths and talents, that you’re likely to have developers who are more logical and who, like, they can bang out some code. It’s going to function. It’s probably going to have all of the crosses and the dots and the so forth. But then you also have developers who are more visual, but they just kind of like ended up working in development. And that’s who you would want to tap to make something look really nice but still be functional.

[00:15:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. It’s a rare and wonderful thing when you encounter that character who can do all of it. I have a friend, a very dear friend who, it doesn’t matter what task you put in front of him, he just excels at all of it immediately. And it’s rare, you know, because there is this sort of, most poeple get into a niche, don’t they, and they become good at a particular thing. And as the world requires us more and more to be specialised in one thing or another thing, we do tend to lean into, I don’t know, I’m a CSS person, or I’m a PHP person, or I’m into JavaScript, graphic design or whatever it may be. And when you encounter that one character that can do literally all of it, I’m a bit in awe, frankly. Quite a lot of my jealous genes kick in and.

[00:16:31] Amy: That’s very interesting. I am the one character, you know, I’ve had my hands in, DevOps, system administration, but also design, art, user experience, accessibility, so on and so forth, which has served my career, you know, being a web development manager, it was absolutely necessary to have that range of skill set. But I will say that I don’t specialise in any of those things. I’m not like a, you know, JavaScript specialist or anything like that. I’m not the SMC on all of those technologies, but have a good umbrella overview that allows like cross-functionality.

I wouldn’t mind specialising in something like that, but I just haven’t really found a niche. I kind of ended up in leadership roles because I’m outgoing and chatty. And so that reads as leadership ability. And I’m good at organising. So those are some leadership skills. And so I kind of ended up, but I ended up in leadership roles before I had mastered anything other than like drawing and maybe video editing. And so in a way that’s been really good and it’s led me on this career path, and also in a way it’s been really bad because I’ve not been able to focus on any specific skills to excel in those. I guess I’ve excelled in team management.

[00:17:50] Nathan Wrigley: It sounds like you’ve not done too badly. It also sounds from, I mean I’m reading between the lines here, and forgive me if I’ve misconstrued what you were saying. It also sounds like from the go, since you finished your arts program, it sounds like you’ve been quite intentional. You know, when opportunities have arisen, the way you’ve described it makes me feel that you can sense an opportunity and you grasp it with both hands, and you’re willing to learn something which maybe last week you’d never heard of, but this week, okay, that’s a thing. Let’s give that a go. Again, forgive me if I’ve got that wrong, but it sounds like you’re quite a force of nature. Let’s go with that.

[00:18:23] Amy: Thank you. That’s correct. I love learning new things, new skills. I’m never like, well, I’m only going to focus, that’s part of it too. It’s a conscious choice to not focus on just one thing. I did at one point kind of like sit down and say to myself, we have to make a decision, art or coding? And I actually determined that I should just stick with tech, the technical end of things because that makes more money than art, even like with a full-time job.

[00:18:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. It is difficult, isn’t it, to become an artist in whatever field of art that may be. I think the chances of you making that work from an economic point of view are much more unlikely than they are.

[00:19:06] Amy: Well, I could tell you as a fine artist, I have made $0.

[00:19:10] Nathan Wrigley: Right. Okay. Well there you go. That puts it into stark relief. That gives us some idea.

It also sounds from what you’re doing that you’re on more of a journey than you are arriving at a destination. And what I mean by that is, it feels like maybe if I chatted to you in a decade’s time, who knows where you’re going to be. It’s more of a, this is where I am now. Tomorrow might present something entirely different. Again, I could have that wrong.

[00:19:32] Amy: No, I think that’s actually totally correct. I’ve kind of, I haven’t really been that intentional with my direction. I tried to be when I, you know, made a decision, art versus tech, to go with tech. Secondary decision, I had already decided to go with art and then, you know, switch careers. But at this point I don’t have, like I don’t dream to be a product manager or dream to be, you know, a coder or a specific thing, a software engineer.

I’m not quite sure to be honest. I do know that I love working in the tech industry, that I love working on teams, I love working on software, I love collaborating and focusing on user experience. And I even, I really actually, I loved being in technical support. Being social and chatty is both a blessing and a curse because my entire career exists because I’m outgoing and social and chatty, and I just randomly message people and start talking to them or randomly walk up to people. You know, and that’s how I ended up in all of it pretty much, and even working on releases.

And that’s also helped me to be able to do those roles because I will randomly message anyone and be like, hi, blah, blah, blah. So that really works to my benefit. But it also, like sometimes I say too much, or I definitely talk too much, way too much, way too frequently. And I might like be bothering people. And I’ll ask them. But at DreamHost, Kira Schroder and Mika Epstein both worked at DreamHost at the same time as me. And because I’m not shy and I am apparently not afraid to talk to people, I started messaging them and asking them questions. And not just them, but the other developers and leads, and the VP of product and so on. It helped that I already knew them, but just started asking them questions.

And also, being willing to be embarrassed and to look stupid is a huge plus because you learn a lot from making mistakes. If you make those mistakes in front of people, you’re going to remember. You’re going to remember the answer to those mistakes. And that’s kind of what I’ve been doing. I’ve kind of stumbled up, and asked a lot of stupid questions, which I’m still doing.

[00:21:46] Nathan Wrigley: I’m just going to interrupt you there very quickly because I love when I meet people who have no shame about failure. I’m being really serious. You know when you meet that character who literally doesn’t have the capacity to feel shame for their inability to do a thing that they’ve never done before? I don’t know, you see somebody who’s picked up a tennis racket for the first time and clearly can’t do anything useful with it, whatever it may be. Just imagine almost any scenario. But they are absolutely happy to do it in front of other people.

I know for me that’s not a gift I possess. I could be racked with sort of, oh, shame and all sorts of other things because I haven’t managed to achieve this level of competency out of the gate. And when I see people doing that, you know, failing willingly in front of other people, I’m always, always thinking, I really should be more like that.

Because I’m glancing around thinking, where are the people that are pouring scorn on them? And the answer is, they’re never anywhere to be seen. There’s nobody, generally speaking, looking and going, look at you. You messed up with the tennis racket. No, there’s just people looking going, oh, hang on a minute. No, what you need to do is this.

[00:22:58] Amy: Right, try this technique and.

[00:22:59] Nathan Wrigley: Right, people around to support. And yet I seem to have, that is a thing in me which I suspect I’ll take to my grave, to my great cost. So well done for being that characteristic.

[00:23:11] Amy: Thank you. Well, I do have shame and fear of, I don’t prefer to fail in front of, for example, 54,000 people in the Core Slack channel. But I’ve done it so many times at this point, I’m like, yeah, I’m going to. I’m going to. I’m going to learn and I’m going to do better next time.

Also in, way back in the day had a brief stint with performing. I was in a theater group, and one of the things that I learned in that theater group, and it really, really stuck with me, is that when you have an audience, the audience is rooting for you. They want you to win. They want you to succeed. They want to hear what you have to say. They want to see you do your whatever it is you’re there to do.

And so when you think about it, I have horrible stage fright, so this doesn’t fix my stage fright but it does kind of fix the mentality of like being embarrassed potentially, or being afraid of failing in front of people. But you go into a room to lead a meeting, or to do whatever it is that you’re doing and you are going to be nervous, but it’s inevitable that you’re going to mess up because you’re human. And to look at it in the way that like, I’m going to mess up and everyone’s on this journey with me and they support me and they want me to win, you know? We’ll fix it together, we’ll learn together, we’ll.

[00:24:23] Nathan Wrigley: We need more of that. Don’t know how many times I’ve preached that gospel to my own children, only to not be able to actually carry it on myself.

I’m going to pivot us slightly. I’m going to sort of draw us into the WordPress space because it’s a WordPress podcast after all. You found yourself in some fairly, I don’t know, important decision-making processes, sort of like contributing to Core and what have you. Can you just chart the journey for that? Like, how did you get to the point where you were contributing your own, presumably free time in some cases? Maybe it was on the company dollar, you know, maybe you were sponsored to do that. I think you implied earlier that that was the case. How did you end up picking WordPress and whichever team that you’ve spent most of your time in? Just chart that journey for us.

[00:25:04] Amy: So that leads us back to DreamHost. DreamHost back in the late, around 2017, DreamHost was, they’re a regular web host, and they were putting in a concerted effort to become a WordPress, a quote unquote, WordPress host. So they were looking into contributing and actively contributing to the project, you know, looking for more PR and marketing opportunities and being a sponsor, so on and so forth. And the hosting team, which has been my main team, was born directly of that.

The hosting team was originally a, primarily DreamHost / wordpress.org project. There have been many other hosts that have been involved. But primarily, at the very beginning, it was spearheaded dramatically by DreamHost and wordpress.org. And so DreamHost was telling its employees, hey guys, we want to be a WordPress host. Hop into WordPress Slack and go to meetings and, like, represent. So they weren’t offering to like any special contribution contracts or anything like that. They were just encouraging people to check it out and get involved in whatever capacity they felt inclined to.

And so I did. I hopped in the hosting channel. I went to a hosting meeting, and I wasn’t expecting this because I didn’t know at the time. I know now. So the hosting team originally was trying to do video meetings. The first meeting I went to was a video meeting, and I knew everyone in the room already. It was a bunch of DreamHost people, but there were also people from other web hosts who I knew from, you know, mutual contacts. So I knew everybody in the room already in one way or another, and so it was a very, very soft landing for me.

It was easy to get involved because I had an in with all those people and with the team reps. Kira Schroder was one of the team reps. It also helps when the people in the project are really friendly and welcoming. And that has been my experience, that the other contributors, the team reps, and the team leads are very welcoming. Might be a different story on the development end. But in terms of just being involved with community and team happenings, usually you’ll get a very warm welcome.

And certainly the hosting team, if anybody wants to hop in and contribute to the hosting team or participate as a team rep, we’re going to be very welcoming. We’re going to want you to come. We’re going to be encouraging. We’re going to help guide you. We’re going to be super patient and we expect confusion, questions, stupid questions, mistakes, and so forth because that’s just how it goes. And so having someone on the other end receiving you really can make all the difference.

So the contributors that are listening today that can receive new contributors, be as warm and welcoming as you possibly can be. And it does kind of take a lot of extra effort to guide people, but I think it’s worth it, and you build relationships and strong ties along the way. And you never know what that person can do and what they will do and how that later on benefits you.

So I got a really warm welcome. The hosting team didn’t even exist until I think it was 2017. 2018 I joined and started contributing. I became a team rep in 2019. And a lot of that is because I’m really outgoing, and I just was like blah, blah, blah-ing in the meetings all the time. And so that also makes me visible. In a remote, a fully remote space, I’m actually less chatty in person, although I think people would probably argue with that.

But it really, really helps to be outgoing and to jump in, like throw yourself in the fire. Throw yourself in the fire because you may or may not be thrown into the fire by someone else. It’s a really good way to learn. It’s very intimidating. I actually, I prefer more hand-holding onboarding than being thrown into the fire. But you can throw yourself into the fire in a gentle capacity. Like, hey, I volunteer to take team meeting notes, or volunteer to update some documentation. These are really kind of low-pressure things that you just need to know English, and how to type to do it. And, you know, it starts the ties between people and your presence in the project and so forth.

So I was really just hosting team for a very long time. At some point, I think it was, I joined Ladies of WordPress, I think the Slack community is, which is just like women who are involved in, women contributors basically, and befriended a couple people in that space. And one of those people I befriended was Francesca, or Francina is her Slack name, who is a Core contributor. I branched out and started going to Core meetings, like waving in at the new contributor meetings and so forth. I wasn’t quite as chatty in there because at the time it was like 30,000 people, which is a lot of people still. Now I think it’s 54,000 people in that channel.

So Francesca roped me in to, and I volunteered. You know, being not shy is really, really the key in this scenario. Being not shy led me to befriend people who then roped me into these projects, and I started contributing to Core, running release model working group meetings to kind of examine and improve the release process. And then at some point, so before every release, there’s a call for volunteers. And anyone can volunteer, you just need a wordpress.org account. Anyone can. And then of those volunteers, they form the release squad.

So I started volunteering. 5.6 is the first Core release that I was involved in. I was also working at InMotion Hosting at the time as a web development lead. And so I was working really, really, really long days. So I wasn’t quite as engaged in that release as I would have liked to been, or as I was with 6.9 and 7.0. But it was a good like backend release squad experience. And I learned a lot and made connections.

And the other contributors are really, really supportive. If you ask them for help, they’re going to help. And if they think you need help, they’ll offer to help even if you don’t ask. And so it’s kind of, there is some competition, and there is some criticism that happens, but for the most part everybody is really, really, really supportive.

So how I ended up being sponsored though, so I was joining from DreamHost on the clock. I was pretty much always working when I worked at DreamHost. I was working like these insane, like, 50, 60, 70 hour weeks. So I was pretty much always working. So I was joining on the clock. I was wearing many hats with them, and that was one of them. So I was not officially sponsored by them, but I do credit them as a past sponsor because of obvious reasons.

And thereafter I became a tech lead at a web dev agency called Canopy Studios. And they market themselves as being an open source contributor. They contribute to WordPress and they contribute to Drupal. And so they’re looking for their employees to be contributors, and they set aside three hours per week to contribute to your project. So they were sponsoring me for three hours per week. At the time I was doing way more than three hours per week. I was doing meetups, I was helping with WordCamp LA, I was helping with the Release Model Working Group, and I was a Hosting Team rep, and I was speaking at Camps.

So it’s a lot. It was really, like way more than three hours a week. But they, because of that sponsorship it kept me inclined to continue engaging with the project. And then InMotion Hosting had never officially sponsored a contributor, but one of my fellow hosting team reps was a developer at InMotion. That’s how I kind of ended up there. And so they were familiar, obviously they’re familiar with the WordPress project, and they’re familiar with contributing. I just straight up asked them if they would be willing to sponsor me. I was just like, hey, I do this thing. You guys want to use this thing for your marketing and PR, and how about you officially sponsor me? So they sponsored me for 10 hours a week. But again, I was working really, really long days, and I wasn’t able to fully dedicate myself to it as much as I would like to.

Also, that was around pandemic time. So the pandemic definitely affected my ability and everybody’s ability to contribute and engage. And then after that, I didn’t have a sponsor. I kept contributing because it was kind of like part of my thing. The Hosting Team had become special to me, and I guess that the element of me getting hyperfocused is probably key also to why I might contribute for free. Because I like will get involved in something, and then it becomes important to me, and I’m focused on it, and I’m going to carry it probably, hopefully carry it through whether I’m paid or not.

So I wasn’t sponsored for a while there. And then in 2023, I did a talk at WordCamp Europe. So I have family that lives in Israel. My brother lives in Israel. That context is important for this story. But WordCamp Europe that year was in Greece. I had been to Greece before. I love Greece. It’s like one of my favorite places. I’m going buy a house on an island there someday. But Greece is really close to Israel, so after WordCamp Europe, I went to Israel and visited my family.

Before WordCamp Europe, I had done some podcasts and written some articles, and in those conversations, at some point it was brought up that I’m Jewish, and Jewish American, obviously. And I don’t know any other contributors that are Jewish. At that time, zero. I didn’t know a single one. I thought there weren’t any. And Jews are a world minority, so there aren’t that many that I know of, but there are a few.

So somebody directed me to Miriam, Miriam Schwab, who is, I didn’t even care who she was. I was like, yay, I get to make a new friend. But she’s the community manager for Elementor. And so I contacted Miriam trying to make a new friend. I was like, yay, another Jewish person that I could be friends with that contributes to WordPress. Little did I, I didn’t even, like I knew what her job role was, but it never occurred to me that Elementor might want to sponsor me, or that they’re looking for contributors to sponsor or anything like that.

And so she invited me when I was in Israel to go to their headquarters, you know, meet their CEO, be shown around, meet other staff members, play on their, in their little old school arcade and so forth. And I was there like, yay, I’m making new friends. Totally naive completely to the fact that there was any professional interest whatsoever, which was silly. I was just so excited to make a new friend, or multiple new friends. And so then Miriam started talking to me about sponsoring me, and that’s how I ended up being sponsored by Elementor. So really kind of what you said, like a very unintentional chain of events that sort of just ended up working out the way it did.

[00:35:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, looking back, there’s a thread there, isn’t there? But it’s only with the benefit of hindsight looking back that you can probably see the thread. On a day-to-day basis, it probably doesn’t quite feel like that. Are you currently sponsored by Elementor? Are you, in fact, are you sponsored by anybody currently? Yeah, okay.

[00:36:00] Amy: I am. So I’m sponsored part-time, 10 hours a week by Elementor. And again, I’ve been spending way more than 10 hours per week. So if anyone wants to sponsor me on top of them, please contact me.

[00:36:10] Nathan Wrigley: Can I ask about that though. Why? I mean the question is probably obvious to you, but I don’t know on what level you’ve inspected that part of you. Obviously there’s a why. You’ve alluded to it. You know, there’s friendship there and there’s habit, and you’ve been accustomed to it and, you know, you like being in that community, and the people there are nice.

But just sort of drawing the veil back a little bit more. Why do you give more time than your allocation, let’s say, from Elementor? Why does the 10 hours not stop on the clock like you would do for a regular job? You know, 5 o’clock winds along and exactly 5 o’clock you put your tools down, and you go off, and you go home, and what have you. What do you get out of it? What’s the thing that is satisfied by this?

[00:36:49] Amy: Well, so it’s part personal and part professional. So I tend to not draw clear boundaries when it comes to work. I tend to like, if my shift is over, but the task isn’t complete, I will finish that task. Depending on, you know, details and so forth. So I guess there’s a bit of a level of dedication that maybe doesn’t even need to be there, but that’s fueled me in a lot of ways.

Why do I contribute to wordpress.org specifically, even if I’m not paid? I do find it personally meaningful. Working with other people, making new friends, contributing to something bigger than me, participating in something bigger than me, giving to the world in one way or another, I find that personally meaningful. And it’s kind of kept my life a little bit more full and more rich over the past eight, nine years. And so it brings value to me in that way.

I have friends of a decade now from, you know, engaging with WordPress. It’s led me to jobs, and it’s led me to other opportunities and to meet really interesting people. And so there is a personal element to that for me personally. And I think that probably a lot of people also, maybe if somebody is more of an introvert, they might not have that same level of benefit that I, as not an introvert, have. Because I get a, the personal connection benefit and the meeting people is really rewarding to me.

But there’s also a lot of professional benefit being a team lead. We don’t say team lead, we say team rep, but it is a leadership position. So leading a team for a major software project has been pretty beneficial to getting jobs, getting opportunities, and just kind of a general professional portfolio. The Hosting Team is a bit of a red-headed stepchild and is kind of like quiet and nobody really knows that it exists. Except for maybe recently because of me talking about it. And it has been for a long time.

It started to blow up a lot, like way back in 2020-ish, 2019, 2020. And the pandemic kind of really threw a wrench in that. And then some other things over the years have also thrown wrenches in that. There was the whole hosting page debacle, and rift between .org and web hosts, that’s still currently affecting. So the Hosting Team is pretty, pretty quiet. It’s not like a big, Core is not quiet, Hosting Team is really quiet.

So that makes it easier to engage. But there’s definitely professional benefit that a lot of my jobs have been because of WordPress, or because of someone I met through WordPress, or my experience with contributing to WordPress just boosts my appeal to employers. So there’s that too.

And on top of that, you build skills. You know, I now have multiple repos that I’ve been a maintainer for, for years. And I had those skills to begin with, but you refine and define your skills more through experience and through working on teams and so forth.

[00:40:03] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know, it’s really interesting the order in which you stack those answers. I feel, I could be entirely wrong about this. I feel like in the corporate world where everything is out and out profit, imagine, I don’t know, evilcorp.com or whatever it may be. I feel like the calculation there might be exactly the opposite. You know, you put them the other way round. You get the skills, which allow you to then advance your career, and the meaningful bit is just maybe there, maybe not.

But the way that you stack that with the meaningful coming first is really interesting because I have that suspicion as well that the majority of the people in the WordPress project, if they were to truly ask themselves that same question, would probably arrive at a similar answer. That meaningfulness bit, it often doesn’t get talked about. It’s just kind of, oh, we all understand, we’re here, we’re having a nice time and what have you.

But that meaningful bit, I can’t put my hands on it. I can’t explain what that is, but that’s the same for me. There is something significant and meaningful about being involved in something, like you said, bigger than you, that has the capacity to improve people’s lives. And you don’t often get the chance to elucidate that thought and say it out loud. But when you do, it’s nice to know that that’s a part of your character, I think. That that that bit matters apparently more any other bit, because that’s the bit that tumbled out of your mouth first of all.

[00:41:26] Amy: Actually way more. Honestly way more than it because I am smart, I’ve taken many IQ tests. I might do and say stupid things, but nonetheless I have a high IQ, and very capable, and I have numerous different talents. I could do any variety of things. I think that if I were to be dropped in any work environment, I would excel, or at least be competent in that work environment. It doesn’t quite matter what it is. That’s, you know, my perception of myself, and I’m also a huge advocate of learning on the job. I think that companies should be hiring people who don’t know what they’re doing, and then teaching them what to do. That’s personally my take on it.

And so the meaningfulness is, it’s way more powerful than, I could make money and I could, obviously we all have to survive, but it kind of all folds into itself. That you get involved in something because it’s meaningful, and then you like learn and build skills and make connections and end up making money from it.

If people come to WordPress trying to make money, I think that you can absolutely, and probably a lot of it, but it’s the wrong values. It’s not a match for open source values and for WordPress values. And the WordPress values are one of the, probably the thing that attracts me to the WordPress open source project the most.

[00:42:52] Nathan Wrigley: Right. And I think me too. I think that was what drew me in the first place. But again, I can’t get my hands around it. I can’t sum it up. But there is a there there. There is a thing. There’s this ephemeral, non, you know, you can’t quite make contact with it, but there’s a certain feeling.

When you go to these events and you see that, you know, this whole thing has been put on by a bunch of volunteers, and the underlying code, which is what we’re all there for anyway, that equally has been largely created by a bunch of volunteers.

Where’s the profit motive for that? Well in many cases, there isn’t much of a profit motive obviously, as you said, for some people there is. That is a curious characteristic. I don’t know, there’s just something about those people that I would like to be in proximity to. Finding it very hard to describe what I’m saying, but there is something about that characteristic that I like to be in proximity to. That’s kind of it, I think.

[00:43:42] Amy: It’s very authentic and genuine. You can feel it as a human being. You can feel it when somebody wants something from you, or maybe I can’t. But most people can feel it, if somebody wants something from you, and that’s their intention. Versus if someone’s interested in you, or compelled towards you for some subconscious or other underlying reason that they’re just like, oh, you seem nice. You seem interesting. You touched on this topic and I like that topic, you know? There’s something very rewarding, and deeply fulfilling, on a human, spiritual. It covers our basic needs as humans for interaction and for community.

And I think that at events it’s even stronger. Like in Slack, you’re all in different locations. There’s definitely, you know, social interaction happening, and friendships being formed, and bonds being built. But at events it’s kind of like that on steroids. There’s a really strong sense of community, really strong sense of belonging together, a really strong sense of doing something meaningful, and contributing to something meaningful, and being part of something meaningful. And I think that’s really powerful. And it satisfies a core human need.

[00:44:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that is so interesting. I’d love to put a survey together and actually ask intelligent questions which drill down specifically into that. Because I think there would be a correlation between the things that you’ve just described, the characteristics that you’ve described, the feelings that you like to be associated with, the events that you enjoy and what have you. I think there’s a correlation between that and the community that we have. I can’t quite prove it.

But time and again, that intuition has proved itself in the real world. You know, you get into conversations like this, and this kind of subject emerges. Why do you do it? Because it’s meaningful. Because I get a great sense of satisfaction from it, and I know that I’m doing something which will be bigger than me, longer living than me, and so on and so forth. So, gosh, that’s really interesting. I’m glad that you share that same opinion.

[00:45:38] Amy: It’s beautiful.

[00:45:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah it is, isn’t it? And that’s the basis upon which the whole project is built.

[00:45:44] Amy: Right. Without the community there’s, it would be a much different thing.

[00:45:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, really so. Sadly, we’re going to have to end it because of the time constraints that we’ve got. But what a fascinating, I think we were just peeling back something really interesting there, but there we go. That’s the time that is allowed for this particular episode.

So anything that you wanted to get out that you didn’t get a chance to? Is there any intelligent question that you wish I had asked you?

[00:46:06] Amy: No, not at all. Thank you so much for inviting me. I’ve really enjoyed chatting with you, and I found it very interesting.

[00:46:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, thank you. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much. This will go out on the wptavern.com podcast, the Jukebox podcast, so if you want to go and check it out over there, wptavern.com.

So all that it remains for me to do is say thank you very much, Amy Kamala, for chatting to me today. Really appreciate it

[00:46:30] Amy: Likewise. Thank you too, and thank you to all your listeners.

On the podcast today we have Amy Kamala.

Amy’s journey into tech is anything but conventional, starting with a Master of Fine Arts from UCLA and a passion for art that eventually bled into, and was overtaken by, technology. Since 2018 she’s been an active contributor to WordPress, serving multiple terms, such as the Hosting and Core teams. Her career zigzags through key roles at DreamHost, InMotion Hosting, Pantheon, Canopy Studios, and local government, picking up everything from technical support and web development to managing teams of designers and DevOps staff. Along the way, Amy has organised WordCamps, led teams, and is currently being sponsored by Elementor for her open source work.

Today’s conversation gets into the chaotic, creative overlap between art and tech, and how those different mindsets can feed one another, especially in the world of WordPress. We talk about the blend of creative and logical thinking needed in web development, and why skills like user experience, curiosity, and even willingness to fail publicly can set you apart.

We then turn to contribution. What draws people to volunteer in an open source community, what Amy gets out of participating far beyond her paid hours, and the messy journey from being an eager helper to an essential part of the team. She explains the unique feeling of the WordPress community, the importance of being welcoming to new contributors, and why being outgoing, and not afraid to ask questions, can be your biggest asset.

If you’ve ever wondered about the blurred lines between art and code, why people throw themselves into volunteer work in the WordPress ecosystem, or what’s really at the heart of this global community, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Open Channels FM: Open Source Changes, WordPress Vulnerabilities, and WordCampUS Community Conversations

Bob Dunn — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 10:18:21 +0000

Open Channels News covers a WordPress supply chain attack, user preferences in plugins, and highlights WordCampUS in Phoenix.

Matt: Beeper Merge

Matt — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 06:40:48 +0000

Beeper has some fun new features where you can merge chats with the same person across multiple networks, polls, labels… Very exciting work happening on that product.

Gutenberg Times: WordPress 7.1 Source of Truth

Birgit Pauli-Haack — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 01:51:00 +0000

Welcome to the Source of Truth for WordPress 7.1!

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.

Estimated reading time

37–56 minutes

8,851 words

This article is also available in German on Krautpress: WordPress 7.1 Source of Truth – Deutsch

Table of Contents

Changelog

Any changes are cataloged here as the release goes on.

August 14, 2025

Added screenshot and copy about the split of the color panels for text and background to the particular section.

August 12, 2026

Corrected the Interactive states section: Global Styles state controls ship for the Button block only.
Change the order of Changelog items to newest updates first.

August 11, 2026

Updated the Highlight grid with latest iteration
Updated the Featured image with the 7.1 color schema

August 5, 2026

Removed the “On This Day” from the Overview
Added wp_get_abilities() filtering to the Abilities API section
Added the notify_post_author filter behavior change.
Added the Navigation font-size propagation change to the Navigation Block section
Added section Host can now tune speculative loading defaults
Updated dev note links from draft previews to published versions (Responsive styles, Filtering Site Editor screens)
Updated the Resources section: linked the published WordPress 7.1 Field Guide

August 4, 2026

Removed On This Day widget information per this ticket. Punted to 7.2 pending more design input.
Corrected the "-current": { "color": { "text": "pink" }” code example.

August 3, 2026

Added info on responsiveEditingEnabled editor setting
Added link to Iframed Editor Changes in WordPress 7.1
Added updates to the Abitilites API
Removed Tags from the headlines as they borked the TOC
Added link to the dev note for the Accessible tooltips
Added Post list table markup changed for accessibility section

July 31, 2026

Added Apply Globally now with review panel
Added Filtering Site Editor screens

July 30, 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

WordPress 7.1 Highlight grid draft August 10, 2026

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.

Resources

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.

Assets

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

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.

You can find more technical details in the Dev Note: Responsive block styles and configurable viewports in WordPress 7.1.

Viewport breakpoint customization

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).

JSON

"settings": {
		"viewport": {
			"mobile": "30rem",
			"tablet": "45rem"
		}
	}

"settings": {
		"viewport": {
			"mobile": "30rem",
			"tablet": "45rem"
		}
	}

Tracking: WordPress 7.1: Block visibility configurable breakpoints and theme.json integration (#75707)

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 Dev Note give you more details Pseudo and custom style states in WordPress 7.1 and more code examples.

JSON

"core/navigation-link": {
  "-current": {
    "color": { "text": "#ff0000" },
    "typography": { "fontWeight": "700" },
    ":hover": {
      "color": { "text": "#0000ff" }
    },
    ":focus": {
      "color": { "text": "#00aa00" }
    },
    ":active": {
      "color": { "text": "#ff6600" }
    }
  }
}


"core/navigation-link": {
  "-current": {
    "color": { "text": "#ff0000" },
    "typography": { "fontWeight": "700" },
    ":hover": {
      "color": { "text": "#0000ff" }
    },
    ":focus": {
      "color": { "text": "#00aa00" }
    },
    ":active": {
      "color": { "text": "#ff6600" }
    }
  }
}

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 )

Tracking: Media Editor Modal task tracking (#73771)

Client-side media processing improvements

[developer][site admin][enterprise]

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)

More in-depth information is available in the Dev Note Client-Side Media Processing in WordPress 7.1

Icons now inherit color, and the Icons API takes shape

[theme builder][plugin author][developer][enterprise]

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 content creators, the most visible change is the Icon block’s picker: it now groups icons by collection, with a tab per collection plus an “All” tab, and your search query carries over as you switch tabs. Custom icons from plugins and themes appear right alongside the core set. The block itself picked up several refinements: it inserts a default icon so you’re never staring at an empty placeholder, offers flip and rotate controls in the toolbar, and shows text and background color controls by default.

For developers: Registering more collections

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.

The Dev Note Registering and rendering SVG icons in WordPress 7.1 holds all the details.

Tracking: SVG Icon API: Iteration for WordPress 7.1 (#75715)

Admin Bar everywhere

[all]

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.

Dev Notes with all the details for users and developer can be found here: Consistent navigation in WordPress 7.1 with persistent toolbar.

New Blocks

[all]

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.

The WaveformPlayer visualization comes with a visualization style selector. You can set waveform and waveform background colors for more granular theming and show the track artwork on the play button, accessible for all visitors. The Playlist and Playlist Track blocks are available in the default block library.

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.

Tracking: Playlist Block: Iteration issue for 7.1 (#77421)

Tabs block

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.

Under the hood, the markup and keyboard behavior follow the best practices set out in the tabs pattern from the W3C ARIA Authoring Practices Guide.

Tracking: Stabilize Tabs Blocks (#73230)

Improved Blocks and Block handling

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
	}
}

"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:

JSON

{
	"styles": {
		"background": {
			"gradient": "linear-gradient( 135deg, #000 0%, #fff 100% )"
		},
		"blocks": {
			"core/group": {
				"background": {
					"gradient": "var:preset|gradient|vivid-cyan-blue"
				}
			}
		}
	}
}

{
	"styles": {
		"background": {
			"gradient": "linear-gradient( 135deg, #000 0%, #fff 100% )"
		},
		"blocks": {
			"core/group": {
				"background": {
					"gradient": "var:preset|gradient|vivid-cyan-blue"
				}
			}
		}
	}
}

All the salient details in this Dev Note New Block Support in WordPress 7.1: Background Gradient (background.gradient)

Cover Block: control video embed providers

[theme builder][plugin author][enterprise][developer]

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.

The details are already reflected in the Cover block’s documentation.

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.

Tracking: WordPress 7.1: dynamic galleries and post-attached media iteration issue (#77117)

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)

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

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.

Tracking: WordPress 7.1: Pattern Editing Iteration (#75717)

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.

Button: Migrate to width block support #74242
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.

Validate additional CSS on mount #78682
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
Block Editor: Allow overriding `disableContentOnlyForTemplateParts` setting #79191

Image handling improved

[end user][site admin]

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
Set placeholder to featured image field #76342

Post Template Layout Improvements

[theme builder][site admin]

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 #7601 v22.7.0

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.

A Dev Note provides a list of miscellaneous Editor changes.

Notes move toward a full commenting workflow

[end user][site admin][developer][enterprise]

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.

Tracking: Notes iteration for WordPress 7.1 (#76316)

Dedicated Identity section

[site admin][theme builder][end user]

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).

Read the Dev note: Media Library infinite scrolling is now enabled by default, with a per-user opt-out.

Hosts can now tune speculative loading defaults

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).

Developer Goodies

[developer][theme builder][plugin author][enterprise]

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.

Read the dev note on the 7.1 changes and the block migration guide for more details.

Ryan Welcher published a guide and a demo plugin. The post editor is going full iframe: what block developers need to know before WordPress 7.1 with code examples and instructions how to fix things if necessary.

Abilities API opens up its execution pipeline

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.

Details and code examples in these dev notes:

Global Styles and theme.json

Text Shadow support for theme.json

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.

JSON

"styles": {
		"typography": {
			"textShadow": "1px 1px 2px red, 0 0 1em blue, 0 0 0.2em blue;"
		},
		"blocks": {
			"core/paragraph": {
				"typography": {
					"textShadow": "1px 1px 2px red, 0 0 1em red, 0 0 0.2em red;"
				}
			}
		},
		"elements": {
			"link": {
				":hover": {
					"typography": {
						"textShadow": "none"

"styles": {
		"typography": {
			"textShadow": "1px 1px 2px red, 0 0 1em blue, 0 0 0.2em blue;"
		},
		"blocks": {
			"core/paragraph": {
				"typography": {
					"textShadow": "1px 1px 2px red, 0 0 1em red, 0 0 0.2em red;"
				}
			}
		},
		"elements": {
			"link": {
				":hover": {
					"typography": {
						"textShadow": "none"

More details in the Dev Note: Text Shadow Support in Global Styles

Text-Align Block Support Migration

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

JSON

{
	"version": 3,
	"styles": {
		"blocks": {
			"core/pullquote": {
				"typography": {
					"textAlign": "center"
				}
			}
		}
	}
}

{
	"version": 3,
	"styles": {
		"blocks": {
			"core/pullquote": {
				"typography": {
					"textAlign": "center"
				}
			}
		}
	}
}

Block Visibility

Adds settings.blockVisibility.allowEditing to theme.json, allowing themes to disable the block visibility feature entirely.

JSON

{
  "settings": {
    "blockVisibility": {
      "allowEditing": false
    }
  }
}

{
  "settings": {
    "blockVisibility": {
      "allowEditing": false
    }
  }
}

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.

You’ll find more details in the Dev Note New Block Support in WordPress 7.1: Minimum Width

Design System Theme Provider

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 Dev Note has more: Design System Theming in WordPress 7.1

Admin color schemes in Site Editor

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 dev note can be found on the Make Core Blog: Editable blocks inside the Custom HTML block

Block Bindings for list-items and inner blocks

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.

Tracking: Block Bindings in WordPress 7.1 (#77199)

Connectors authentication improvements

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.

Tracking: Connectors: proposal for a PHP-side field registry for connector configuration (#78647)

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).

Dev Note is now available with the details: Introducing name and informational tool tips in WordPress 7.1

Filtering Site Editor screens

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.

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

Open Channels FM: Software Lock-In and AI Tools for Modern Web Businesses

Bob Dunn — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:33:00 +0000

In this episode, Bob and Adam chat about managing digital workflows, tackling challenges like email overload, CRM usage, and the benefits and downsides of AI tools.

Open Channels FM: How AI Agents Target Open Source and Why Storage Is the New AI Bottleneck

Bob Dunn — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 10:03:53 +0000

An AI experiment revealed vulnerabilities as an agent attempted to manipulate an open source maintainer into merging malware, while Nvidia highlighted storage bottlenecks in AI infrastructure. Efficiency is now paramount.

Aaron D. Campbell: My WordPress Origin Story: The One-Line Patch That Changed My Career

Aaron D. Campbell — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:42:35 +0000

I started using WordPress because it was a practical tool for client work. One tiny patch turned it into a community, a career, and a lasting lesson about what open source makes possible.

The post My WordPress Origin Story: The One-Line Patch That Changed My Career appeared first on Aaron D. Campbell.

Matt: OmFest Registration

Matt — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 21:54:47 +0000

Thank you to everyone who expressed interest in shaping OmFest. We’re still working out some details, but we’ve got a Luma registration page for the event up. Please join on September 29, 2026, Om’s 60th birth anniversary, for an eclectic conference curated by his different communities to celebrate the many facets of Om.

If you’re just tuning in, our dearest loved one Om Malik passed away in June. This grieving process has been a rough one for me, but it has inspired some positive life changes. I’m traveling with a real camera again! A Nikon D6. I’ve shot tens of thousands of frames on the D-series, so it feels like home, but it also has some nice new features like built-in GPS (I used to use an attachment for that) and USB-C.

I’ve also become very driven to be meticulous. I miss Om’s harsh but often true feedback, but his voice in my head is a good reminder that if you do something, it’s worth doing it well. I’m kinda a hot mess (still blessed! ) so this will be a journey but the progress already has been rewarding. Excellence is a habit. We can always hold ourselves to a higher standard.

Open Channels FM: How AI Is Shaping Domain Abuse Monitoring

Bob Dunn — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 12:20:00 +0000

AI is becoming crucial for monitoring domain abuse, enabling automated analysis and real-time detection. However, careful oversight is essential to avoid errors, especially as domain registrations surge.

Matt: Super-organized

Matt — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 23:54:59 +0000

I have so many tools for organization and management across Asana, Google Workspace, P2, and Linear, but they’re not really connected. I’m trying to get everything in one place so there’s no data duplication, a single source of truth, and everything is always linked and accessible. It feels good, like spring cleaning, to go through everything. Woo has an initiative they call Mise en place with a similar idea. Which is why you’ve also seen those bug fixes and clean-up happening. With AI, this should be easier than ever.

Gutenberg Times: WordPress 7.1 RC, 7.0.3 Security Release, Block Runner, New Playground UI and more — Weekend Edition 372

Birgit Pauli-Haack — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 08:18:54 +0000

Hi there,

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 7.0.3 shipped 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 7.1 by 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 plugin that 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.

The previous years are also available:
2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025

Building Blocks and Tools

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 Bridge from 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.

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

Featured Image:

Matt: Toni on Verge

Matt — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:30:22 +0000

Toni Schneider, Automattic’s founding CEO, board member, and now CEO of Bluesky, has a great conversation with Nilay Patel on The Verge’s Decoder podcast (YouTube, Pocket Casts). Automattic invested in Bluesky back in 2023, and I’m very excited to see what they figure out in open social protocols.

Open Channels FM: Signal – Navigating Human Value in an AI-Driven World

Bob Dunn — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 10:58:00 +0000

This week's recap highlights key insights on human connection in AI, marketing challenges with Google Ads, and the importance of simple tasks.

WordPress.org blog: WordPress 7.0.3 release

John Blackbourn — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 18:55:30 +0000

WordPress 7.0.3 is now available

WordPress 7.0.3 is now available which features several security fixes. Because this is a security release, it is recommended that you update your sites immediately.

You can update to WordPress 7.0.3 by downloading it from WordPress.org, or visiting your site’s Dashboard → Updates and clicking Update Now. Sites that support automatic background updates will begin updating shortly.

For more information, please visit the WordPress 7.0.3 HelpHub site.

Security updates included in this release

The security team would like to thank the following people for responsibly reporting vulnerabilities and allowing them to be fixed in this release:

Pre-auth reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) on the login screen with potential to lead to PHP code execution reported by the team at pwn.ai.
Contributor+ stored cross-site scripting (XSS) in posts via the emoji settings element reported by Asaf Mozes (amosec)
Contributor+ stored cross-site scripting (XSS) in the Post Content block reported by N05ec@LZU
Contributor+ stored cross-site scripting (XSS) in Quick Edit on sites with a large number of users reported by Naveen S and Ajmal Moochingal
Contributor+ stored cross-site scripting (XSS) in the Post Date block reported by Alex Concha of the WordPress Security Team
A privilege escalation issue on multisite networks with user registration enabled, allowing a user to create a new site reported by Aikido Security
An information disclosure issue in the Latest Comments block exposing comments on password-protected posts reported by Ehtisham Siddiqui of the WordPress Security Team
Enumeration of post slugs reported by HDWSec
Disclosure of notes in comment feeds reported by Elio Gubser
Author+ CSS injection via a bypass of the safe CSS attribute filter reported by Anthropic
Bypass of the email address confirmation flow reported by Omar Hasan
A server-side request forgery (SSRF) issue in URL validation allowing requests to link-local ranges reported by Andrew Mohawk and multiple independent reporters

Backports

As a courtesy, these fixes are being backported, where necessary, to all branches eligible to receive security fixes (currently through 4.7). As a reminder, only the most recent version of WordPress is actively supported. The backports are in progress and will ship as they become ready.

WordPress 7.1 RC2 has also been released, containing all applicable fixes.

CVE and GHSA references

Details of the login screen XSS vulnerability can be found in the advisory: CVE-2026-64638 / GHSA-52p2-r8wf-jcrf.

Thank you to these WordPress contributors

This release was led by John Blackbourn. In addition to the security researchers mentioned above, WordPress 7.0.3 and its backports would not have been possible without the significant contributions of the following people:
Aaron D. Campbell, Aaron Jorbin, Adam Silverstein, adrianmoldovanwp, Aki Hamano, Alex Concha, Andrew Duthie, Andrew Serong, annezazu, Barry, Bernie Reiter, Daniel, Daniel Richards, David Biňovec, Dennis Snell, Ehtisham Siddiqui, Erwan Le Rousseau, Fabian Kaegy, fiocavallari, George Mamadashvili, gubser, Isabel Brison, Jarda Snajdr, Jb Audras, Jeremy Felt, Joe Dolson, Joe Hoyle, John Blackbourn, Jon Surrell, Jonathan Desrosiers, Khokan Sardar, Lance Willett, lucasbustamante, lucatume, Marco Ciampini, Marin Atanasov, Mohammad Jangda, Mukesh Panchal, Paul Kevan, Peter Wilson, ramonopoly, SergeyBiryukov, vortfu, Weston Ruter

Join us for the launch of WordPress 7.1 at WordCamp US 2026, August 16–19.

Matt: Our Core Division

Matt — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 12:06:20 +0000

Inspired by Automatticians James Kemp and Dave Smith, I’ve been thinking a lot about how much of our discord in the design of WordPress stems from the differences of our two big tribes: Bloggers and Builders.

Many of the OG developers of WordPress, including myself, tend more towards the blogging side. Writers, photographers, podcasters, journalists, the people for whom a reverse chronological stream on the homepage is the most obvious thing in the world. We link out a lot, love comments, social features and think a lot about the editor as a writing environment.

Builders are the site shapers, webmasters, the agencies, the companies, the content managers that think in a more page-first rather than post-first way. Tagging? Blogroll? Date-based permalinks? Who needs them. Give me custom fields, rich templates, a site editor, to craft beautiful sturdy pages that will stand the test of time. A store with a catalog of items where what changes is the inventory and ratings, not the content.

The Builders right now dominate our core development discourse, which makes sense. They hold a lot of the economic share with merchants and rich websites. They’re also more loyal. The Bloggers love their WordPress as the place they truly own and call home, but Bloggers have an account on every channel where there’s an audience, they syndicate out with an ephemerality mindset, because that reader/listener/follower connection is the spark that keeps their flame alive. A Builder would never be a digital sharecropper on someone else’s domain.

Dave Smith has been doing some very interesting explorations of a simpler site editor, and you hear his Builder bias around 3:20 in how obvious a static homepage as default seems to him.

The good news is we can coexist as we have at least since WordPress 1.5. We just need to give a little more love to the Blogger side, there’s so much cool stuff we could do in the Fediverse with RSS, ActivityPub, ATProto, blogrolls (link manager is still in wp-admin!), pingbacks…

Open Channels FM: Creative Insights and Real Talk on Modern Marketing Challenges

Bob Dunn — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 09:45:00 +0000

Marketing's evolving fast. Creators and businesses must adapt as SEO and ads fade. Experimentation and multi-channel strategies are key to surviving now.

Matt: AutoMattBot

Matt — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 04:11:53 +0000

I’m trying out this thing, it’s trained on my blog posts and public talks, that you can chat with as me on Telegram. Behold: AutoMattBot.

Update: This is powered by Delphi.ai and it appears very broken right now, people are sending messages and on my side it looks like it’s responding but they’re not seeing it.

WordPress.org blog: WordPress 7.1 Release Candidate 1

Benjamin Zekavica — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 15:37:33 +0000

The first Release Candidate (“RC1”) for WordPress 7.1 is ready for download and testing!

This version of the WordPress software is still under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it’s recommended to evaluate RC1 on a test server and site.

WordPress 7.1 RC1 can be tested using any of the following methods:

Plugin	Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a WordPress install. (Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream.)
Direct Download	Download the RC1 version (zip) and install it on a WordPress website.
Command Line	Use this WP-CLI command: `wp core update --version=7.1-`RC1
WordPress Playground	Use the WordPress Playground instance to test the software directly in your browser. No setup required – just click and go!

The scheduled final release date for WordPress 7.1 is August 19, 2026. The full release schedule can be found here. Your help testing Beta and RC versions is vital to making this release as stable and powerful as possible. Thank you to everyone who contributes by testing!

Please continue checking the Make WordPress Core blog for 7.1-related posts in the coming weeks for more information.

What’s in WordPress 7.1 RC1?

WordPress 7.1 RC1 contains more than 145 updates and fixes since the Beta 4 release, including 57 in the Editor and 88 in Core.

For an overview of what’s new in WordPress 7.1, read the Beta 1 announcement and the WordPress 7.1 Dev Notes. For a comprehensive summary, see the WordPress 7.1 Field Guide.

You can also explore the technical details of all issues addressed since Beta 4 using the links below:

GitHub commits for 7.1 since July 29, 2026
Closed Trac tickets for 7.1 since July 29, 2026

New Features since Beta 1

Icons API: New APIs for registering icons and icon collections in Core, ready for plugins to extend.
Speculative loading configuration: Speculative loading defaults can now be configured via environment variables and constants.
Email notifications for @mentions: Email notifications have been introduced when mentioned in a Note.
Shareable Revisions: Share links to specific revisions for faster collaboration.

Want to look deeper into the details and technical notes for this release? These tickets and pull requests are just some of the latest updates:

#GB-79839: Apply globally: choose which modified block styles to apply
#GB-80814: New responsiveEditingEnabled editor setting to hide responsive styles
#GB-80107: Tabs: toolbar buttons to reorder tabs
#GB-80046: DataViews: shift-click range selection
#65636: Preload REST API requests fetched on editor load
#65613: Notes are excluded from comment feed queries
#65491: KSES allows the autofocus attribute on dialog elements
#65517: Multisite upload limits are enforced when sideloading media from a URL
#62757: Update the jQuery UI library to version 1.14.2

How you can contribute

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

Get involved in testing

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

Your help testing the WordPress 7.1 RC1 version is key to ensuring that the final release is the best it can be. While testing the upgrade process is essential, trying out new features is equally important. This detailed guide will walk you through testing features in WordPress 7.1.

Update your theme or plugin

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

Thanks for continuing to test your themes and plugins with the WordPress 7.1 beta releases. With RC1, you’ll want to conclude your testing and update the “Tested up to” version in your plugin’s readme file to 7.1.

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

Test on your hosting platforms

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

Want to test WordPress on your hosting system? Get started with configuring distributed hosting tests here. Thank you to all web hosts who help test WordPress!

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

An RC1 haiku

A candidate stands
the desert sun tests its strength
Arizona waits

Props to @krupajnanda, @annezazu,
@amykamala, @wildworks and @masteradhoc for collaboration and review

Join us for the launch of WordPress 7.1 at WordCamp US 2026, August 16–19.

WPTavern: #228 – Priscilla Collado Ramirez on Reducing WordPress Beginner Anxiety

Nathan Wrigley — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 13:00:00 +0000

Transcript

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the themes, the blocks, and in this case, reducing WordPress beginner anxiety in a multitude of ways.

So on the podcast today we have Priscilla Collado Ramirez. Priscilla travelled 14 hours from Costa Rica to attend WordCamp Europe, making her one of the furthest attendees at the event, and for good reason. She’s an educator, fashion designer and wellness coach, and has a unique perspective on a challenge many in the WordPress community face, how overwhelming WordPress can be for beginners.

Having once quit WordPress 17 years ago, due to information overload, and a lack of community support, Priscilla’s story comes full circle, as she now dedicates herself to helping entrepreneurs and creatives find their way in the WordPress ecosystem. Her work focuses on demystifying those first confusing moments, offering practical steps, and much needed reassurance for anyone who’s ever opened a fresh install and wondered, what on earth do I do next?

The conversation is focused on why newcomers often feel stuck, paralysed by too many choices, the classic it depends advice, and a fear of breaking something or everything. We get into the importance of understanding individual learning styles, whether linear or spiral, as Priscilla labels them, and meeting students where they are, sometimes with literal breathing exercises and wellness techniques to lower stress and unlock real learning.

Priscilla explains how confidence in WordPress is built through action, and why celebrating small wins, like successfully installing a single plugin, is essential. She also shares her approach to bringing holistic, calm, and patient mentorship into WordPress education, something that’s as relevant for agency leads as it is for first time bloggers.

If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by WordPress’ infinite possibilities, struggled to find your place in its community, or just want practical wisdom on making the path easier for beginners, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Priscilla Collado or Ramirez.

I am joined on the podcast by Priscilla Collado Ramirez. Although I know that’s not the correct way to say it, would you please say your name for me?

[00:03:44] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: It’s good, it’s good. I’m Priscilla Collado Ramirez, and I’m from Costa Rica.

[00:03:48] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I appreciate it. Thank you. You get the award without a doubt coming the furthest, I think, to WordCamp Europe this year. I don’t know how many miles it is, but you said, I think it was 13 hours.

[00:03:59] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Yeah, 14 hours on the plane. Today is travelling. But it’s all worth it, because this country in Europe, it’s beautiful. So I can do it all the years, all the months. Yeah, I can do it.

[00:04:13] Nathan Wrigley: I have to ask though, why come all the way across, so many hours on a plane and what have you. Do you have a community where you are? Is there a thriving kind of Costa Rican WordPress scene? I don’t know anything about it.

[00:04:28] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Okay. Yeah, in Costa Rica is a big community. It’s the biggest community in whole Latin America, in Costa Rica. I have a friend, she works for GreenGeeks web hosting, so she empowered me to do this. And the WordCamp Europe, because being a speaker is one of my dreams come true.

I already do it in my country, but I want to get more knowledge and know more people. And when she told me about this, I said, yeah, I can do it. Yeah, I want to do it.

[00:05:06] Nathan Wrigley: That is remarkable. A 13 hour plane journey. That’s pretty impressive. And I confess, I didn’t know that Costa Rica was sort of the place to be if you’re in South America. But now I do. Thank you. And I know that you’ve basically just come out of the presentation room, you’ve just finished the subject that you were talking about.

And the subject that you were talking about is really interesting to me at least, because this casts me back. I’ve been in the WordPress space since about, I don’t know, 2015, something like that. So I’ve got a few years under my belt.

But I do remember at the time when I began using WordPress, turning up to events like this and feeling a bit like a fish out of water, not really knowing what to do. Not really knowing what to do with the software, either. Not really knowing what I should install, whether I should install anything, whether I was using the best thing, or the worst thing or what have you. And that kind of was the nature of your subject.

But rather than me telling everybody what you were talking about, do you just want to summarise what it was that you stood up and presented about?

[00:06:02] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Yeah, of course. And I feel the same way that you.

Well, my talk is about why WordPress feels overwhelming for beginners. I was that beginner that I don’t want to install. And WordPress, it’s great, but sometimes gives you too many options, right? So for beginners, sometimes that options feels paralysing because we need to start with one at the time.

I saw all the topics for this event, and I think, yeah, maybe I can share a little bit of my story with WordPress. And I talk about, I quit WordPress 17 years ago.

[00:06:47] Nathan Wrigley: You quit it?

[00:06:48] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Yeah. I’m a quitter.

[00:06:50] Nathan Wrigley: My story going back, oh, 12 years or whatever it was, that’s nothing. You got 17 years. That was when you quit. Okay, carry on. Sorry.

[00:06:58] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Yeah, no, 17 years ago, I was at university, and I was studying advertising and web design. I saw the options, too many options, too many things, I don’t know. And I feel overwhelmed. And I said, this is not for me. I’m so dumb. I’m slow. No, no.

And 17 years later, I’m here as an educator, and I help entrepreneurs and beginners to understand the WordPress environment.

[00:07:29] Nathan Wrigley: What brought you back then? After all that period of time away, what was the catalyst that brought you back? Why did you explore it again?

[00:07:36] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Because I have a fashion school, and I saw my students deal with web designers and sometimes they charging so much money. I see it in the beginners, in my students, I saw that we have a problem with understanding that sometimes the things are not too difficult. We can learn about new tools and new WordPress.

[00:08:06] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so this was all about your students then. So this was an idea of, I guess the world is kind of an expensive place to be, and one expense that you can get rid of is the cost of your website. There’s tools out there. You can, if you wish to, build it yourself. And then you found WordPress again. How is it the second time? Did you ever go through, I’m going to quit it for a second time, or was it better the next time you came across it?

[00:08:29] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Yeah, and my brother is an engineer and I’m in like a category of non-technical people because I’m a fashion designer. I’m an educator, and I’m a wellness coach. And I think, yeah, maybe I can study a little bit, and if I use my education tools to understand how the brains for the creative people works and try to, out of the box, that sometimes the engineers have, and the creative people. It’s like a disorder, a disorder brain. I can help to these people to understand this environment in this community. And they can do it like I do.

[00:09:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So we’ll get into the bits that you think are problematic with beginning with WordPress in a minute. But just going back to your students and what have you. How’s it been for them? When you are looking at what they’re able to do, has it been a road of success, or has there been quite a lot of failure for them? Basically sum up how your students have coped.

[00:09:43] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Okay. I don’t know, there’s two types of students, right? So we have the students that have a linear path learning. Some students learned like A, B, and C. Okay, you understand things easily. But some of them don’t understand the things like that.

So I try to create a platform, or we can call it like a type of education, and helps to understand, first how their brain works, and later understand the type of learning that I can teach.

[00:10:24] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, let me just make sure I understood that. So you try to figure out what their brain accepts most readily? And then once you figure that bit out, then you begin the WordPress education from there. Okay, that’s interesting.

And you say there’s kind of two types that you’ve kind of determined. And what are those two types?

[00:10:40] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Lineal.

[00:10:41] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, so I think probably linear, like straight lines.

[00:10:46] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Yeah, we have the straight lines and the spiral.

[00:10:49] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, yeah.

[00:10:51] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: So my mind is on the spiral. And that’s why I feel dumb in these technical environments. But I learned that if you learn some topic at the time and without the stress, you can do it and you can follow this community.

[00:11:10] Nathan Wrigley: So you just used an interesting word there. You said that you have felt, maybe you don’t feel it here, I don’t know if you do or not. But you said you’ve felt dumb in the past. You know, you’ve turned up to the events and you felt like a fish out of water, we might say that. Just. What the heck am I doing here? Where do I fit into this jigsaw puzzle?

And obviously you felt it long and hard enough that, firstly you left, and then come back, given it a second shot. So what are the things that you have felt dumb about? What are the things that have perplexed you in the past? What are the things that have drawn you to making this presentation?

[00:11:47] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: I felt in that time overwhelmed for the too many options. I feel that in that time in my country, WordPress wasn’t so popular and was a men’s environment. There’s no women. So I feel like, I don’t know, I’m not from, I don’t know what to be here. And now, four years ago, I’ve been talking with the women community on WordPress and I feel like, I don’t know, confident and they believe in my knowledge.

And I think that, yeah, I can do it again. I can approach to the community and I can learn, and I can be like a mentor too, and help beginners to understand that it’s not the technical environment. It’s how the community engage with your goals and can be used, and how can help with your goals.

[00:12:50] Nathan Wrigley: So I’m just going to dig into something you said a moment ago, which was about the community where you are. I don’t know if it’s still the same, but you implied that it was mostly men.

Have you found female WordPressers where you are? Or have you had to get on Zoom calls or something like that in order to find that community? Or has it grown so that it’s not just men where you are now?

[00:13:14] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Yeah. I assist to the first women speakers in 2023. And I saw like, okay, this is a WordPress group for women. And that group was for speakers from WordPress, but women. So I was like, okay, WordPress is not only men’s, WordPress is not only technical people. And, well, I can approach to that community. 17 years ago wasn’t like that.

All men and square men. Because I know there is a lot of spiral men, but in that age, yeah, was like square men and my brother is a little bit like a square. And I was like, no, I’m funny and I want to talk, and I want to be a speaker and what. Now I feel that I can approach to my goals with WordPress because I changed my mind and my feeling about the community and WordPress.

[00:14:20] Nathan Wrigley: So just moving away from the community side and all of that kind of stuff, just dealing with the, actual software that you download from the internet and you put on a server somewhere, and then you begin to build a website. I presume that that’s part of this as well, that it’s difficult to begin because when you install a version of WordPress, you’re kind of left to your own. You know, there’s not really much in the way of assistance. You have to find the assistance somewhere. You have to a YouTube channel or some friendly person that will stand over your shoulder and help you out.

What are the sort of impediments, the problems that you think we have for people beginning with WordPress that you would like to be solved?

[00:14:58] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Yeah. First of all that everybody thinks that WordPress is only a website. And I want to share this. WordPress is not only a website, right? It is a community. And you can approach and say, I wanted to learn about how to do a blog and how to do a website. But the community is more than that. I think that people don’t understand yet that what is WordPress?

[00:15:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. well I went for, I probably used WordPress for four years, maybe three and a half, four years, something like that, before I knew there was any kind of community. I mean I realised that there was something because the software got made. So I realised somewhere behind the curtain, there must be people doing this. And I’m getting it for free, so they probably are not getting paid mostly to do it.

But I didn’t attend because I didn’t know there was anything to attend. And then I showed up to an event in London, which was probably my closest larger event at that time. I was quite surprised. I was thinking, okay, so there were about 600 people there, I really wasn’t expecting that. I thought maybe there’ll be like 12 or 15 or something. Showed up, 600 people. And for me that was kind of the moment WordPress became a little bit more interesting, because I realised that, okay, it isn’t just pixels on pages, it’s not just the websites. There’s actually a whole community of people behind it.

And one of the things that I discovered fairly quickly was that those people shared, there was a lot of overlap between them and me. You know, just a lot of things in their lives seemed to sync with a lot of things in my life. We had broad agreement on a lot of things. We all wanted the project to be successful. And so discovering the community, like you said, was a really important thing.

But nevertheless, I still think I would’ve carried on using it even if I hadn’t of discovered that community, because by that point I’d got over the problem of what plugins to install and how to actually use the software.

Yeah. So let’s move on to that. In terms of the actual software, so we’ve got the community, we know that exists. What are some of the problems that you’ve seen, I guess with your students, or maybe personal experience? Some of the problems with the actual software. What are some of the things that you’ve encountered?

[00:17:21] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Yeah. I encountered that there’s too many options, and the people do not know how to install. And that’s a beginner’s questions. Why should I install plugins, themes? And for technical people it is like, okay, it depends.

[00:17:39] Nathan Wrigley: Oh always it depends.

[00:17:41] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Always, it depends. And, for beginnings, that feels paralysing.

[00:17:45] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That’s an interesting phrase, isn’t it? So when you mean paralysing? So we say it depends, meaning, oh, try everything. See what works. Where you are saying that in your experience, it depends means don’t do anything, we don’t know, not sure.

[00:18:00] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Yeah. And the beginners don’t know what to do, right?

[00:18:03] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, yeah, that’s not helpful, is it, it depends, really when you say it like that?

Okay, so how do we overcome that? I don’t know what we do apart from keep saying, it depends. I guess we’ve got to try and encourage people to try this.

Okay, let me rewind a bit. So my parents, when I put the phone in their hand for the first time, the mobile phone, I had it all set up for them, you know everything was working, and I gave it to them and assumed that they would have the same approach as me. Which was, just play around with it and then you’ll figure it out.

Oh, no. No touching anything was, will I break it? Is this going to destroy it? If I press delete here, does that mean the whole thing’s going to like be, does this app going to disappear at this point?

So, I think that’s what you’re saying, is basically there’s this fear that if I install something and then I don’t need it, or I don’t like it, well then what do I do? Is it kind of that? This fear of it.

[00:18:59] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Yeah, because you feel overwhelmed, and you feel paralysing. And you feel like, okay, there’s a learning path, right? So we have the excitement. So, yeah, I’m going to do WordPress. Then confusing. What is this? And then it is like, no, I don’t know, maybe this is not for me because there’s so many options.

I try with my students to go one step at a time, and understand, first, what is a plugin? Right? Do you need a plugin or not? Do you need a theme or not? Do you need SEO plugin or, I don’t know?

So I am trying to, first of all, work with entrepreneurs because some entrepreneurs sometimes doesn’t get it. I don’t know, what is an email? How to send an email. They are so intelligent, and so capable to learn things, but sometimes, like as educators or mentors, we have in our minds that people learn easily. And sometimes it’s not. So you have to teach like a child. And not because the people was stupid, right? It is like because that people, the learning process is different.

[00:20:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I suppose you’ve got to just get to the point where you’re comfortable. So for some people who are, I don’t know, let’s go for the word technical. Technical people who’ve got a background in using computers, they do it all day, every day. And they experiment with new things. I suppose if you put them in front of WordPress, they’re off. They’re just going to do that kind of thing. But I totally get what you mean.

So for me, technology, I will experiment and I’ll play, because I know that nothing can basically actually break. If something goes wrong, I can just delete it. So I’m thinking about apps on my phone, on my computer, and WordPress, and plugins, and themes and all of this. I fully understand that nothing will kill it. Well, hopefully nothing will kill it, and I can just remove what I don’t understand.

But then again, you pick me up and put me into a different industry, I’ll be that person. I’ll be the person that needs the baby steps, I think you said that needs the child steps, because I’m not in familiar territory. So I can’t think an example off the top of my head, but pick me up, basically put me anywhere there’s no technology, and I will feel that same anxiety. What do I do? can you check that what I’ve done is safe? Okay. Can you double check? And will you triple check just to make sure that everything is safe. And I suppose that’s what you’re saying, is just little baby steps. get people into it. And once they’ve gone through the baby steps, hopefully they can act on their own.

[00:21:54] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: This is a phrase that I been thinking too much in this talk, because it is some word that you said, and you said about confidence. And I wrote that confidence does not come before action. Confidence is built through action.

[00:22:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s true, isn’t it? And so everybody at some point has to go through that barrier. Some people seem to be full of confidence, regardless of what is, but there’s a lot of people who are not. And if you walk them through the baby steps I suppose, as you said, and tell them, do you need a plugin? What is a plugin? This is a plugin. How do you get a plugin to be put on your website? Can you delete a plugin? And then same thing with themes and custom code and all of those kind of things. And does that work? Do you notice that people go from like, ah, fear, to oh, this is all right.

[00:22:47] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: They think, this is not so hard that I was the, I will be. I don’t know, I have all types of students and all types of socioeconomic types. And I have students like 50 to 60 years old. And they think, no, I’m too old to think learning website, and learning design things. And I’ve been creative. The constructivist system is a strategy in education, the constructivist, and the principle idea is you learn by doing.

[00:23:27] Nathan Wrigley: Confidence through action, like you said, basically.

[00:23:29] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Exactly, exactly. And so you can be on the learning path, making little mistakes and getting more confidence to feel safe in the learning environment.

[00:23:42] Nathan Wrigley: Are you a patient person?

[00:23:45] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Sometimes.

[00:23:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Because when I was earlier describing my parents and the phone, there’s kind of a bit of me, which when I’ve demonstrated the same thing nine times, and every time the output of those, okay, do it this way, do it this, okay, now do this, now this. And on the 10th go, it’s still the wrong thing in the exact same way. I just wondered if there was a bit of that? If there is just some impediments which, I don’t know, some people just never get over. If WordPress is just generally too hard for some people. Or do you always pursue it and succeed? Do you always get people through, and get them to that confident stage?

[00:24:23] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Yes. Yeah, yeah. Every day. Yeah. Like every day. And I think that the mentor and the educator has to feel love with that work, and teaching with love, first of all.

And then, understand that people doesn’t learn in the same way. I can say older people because I’m older, and you saw an older people, and you think, this is older than me, but it isn’t.

[00:24:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. and some people are kind of, what, we would describe as kinesthetic learners. So they doing is the way. Some people are kind of auditory, and they hear the solution and they learn from hearing. And other people it’s visual. You know, they see the, watch a video and, oh, I’ve got that now. And I guess you’ve got to figure out which ones, how they fit in. If I show you once, you’re fine. If I show you once, well that’s not going to work. You’ve got to actually do it and copy me. And once you’ve figured out what kind of learners they are. You must have a lot of time for these people by the sounds of it.

[00:25:25] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Yeah, of course.

[00:25:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and do you literally have an endless amount of time to educate them or do you have like a, I don’t know, you’ve got 10 hours or whatever it is and after 10 hours we’re going to get new people in? Or do you just stick with them throughout the whole journey?

[00:25:38] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Yeah, yeah. And most beginners and most entrepreneurs isn’t that way, right? And they’re so excited to understand the process. And when I explain how the brain works, they think, oh, yeah, it’s not the system, it’s me.

[00:25:59] Nathan Wrigley: But also I can do something about it.

[00:26:00] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Yeah.

[00:26:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay. That’s interesting. Okay.

I’m going to give you superpowers for a minute. I’m going to say that you are in charge of WordPress entirely. It’s up to you what we do to improve this experience. What would you change? that could be the software. It could be education that you suddenly provide, you know, you would whip up many, many courses or whatever. I don’t know. I’m just curious to know what you think.

So again, superhero powers. You get to decide the future of WordPress. What little changes would you make here and there?

[00:26:32] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: I’m going a little bit too far off WordPress, and I’m going to bring wellness tools first.

[00:26:41] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So it gets bigger.

[00:26:42] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Yeah, it’s bigger. I’m a wellness coach first of all, and first you have to try to understand the stress, and your mind. And then you can learn. I feel like my superpower will be an educator in wellness first, because we have to manage the stress of learning.

[00:27:04] Nathan Wrigley: So you have to approach the computer, but calmly. You have to get there and arrive in an equanimous state. Nice and calm.

[00:27:14] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Yeah, and understand that the delete button doesn’t exist. Because you are going to learn that, yeah, you can delete it, but you are going to breathe, and stay calm, and you won’t be delete anything because you, on the learning process of your mind understanding that everything is a process.

After that, I have an idea, I don’t know my superpower, I would like to do the mentor of the mentors first.

[00:27:49] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, teach the teachers.

[00:27:51] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Yeah, yeah. Because we have mentors in WordPress, but the mentors sometimes doesn’t study at the university education, right? Is an engineer trying to teach another engineer, or an engineer teach to entrepreneur or a beginner, so their minds works different.

[00:28:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. I’ve encountered this in the real world. You know the educator who gets really angry with you and tuts, sort of goes tut tut, because you’re not doing what the way they would do it. It just turns out that, if you just ask me in a different way, I’ll probably figure it out.

[00:28:29] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Yeah, exactly.

[00:28:30] Nathan Wrigley: Sorry I interrupted, carry on. So educating the educators.

[00:28:33] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: And in all the fields is the same way, because I’m a fashion designer too, but I have to learn how to be an educator, and how to try to explain some things to my students and try to get off to my mind box.

So I want to make some changes too, and add some of these tools on WordPress. I don’t know, maybe this is my superpower, like be a spiral mind.

[00:29:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah. But I think teaching the teachers. So I think we would use the word pedagogy for that. Meaning, how to teach basically. The science, if you like, of imparting knowledge. And maybe there is nothing like that at the moment. And if there isn’t something like that, it would be interesting to explore how different people with different minds and different approaches. Maybe your first idea of everybody approach the computer in a calm way. Maybe that gets rid of some of that problem. At least we’re approaching and we’re not getting we begin.

But I think you’re onto something there, in that I know that I don’t learn in the same way as my children do. I don’t learn in the same way as my parents do. And so having that in the background, and educating the educators so that they’re aware that those kind of things exist.

Okay, you’ve still got the superpowers. Is there anything else that you would do before I take them away?

[00:29:56] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Okay, okay. I think that understand the brain is a supercomputer. It’s also a big topic because you can programming your mind. I would love to teach that people can programming itself. I don’t know what other superpower.

[00:30:17] Nathan Wrigley: Well that’s okay. You’ve had it for probably about five minutes now. That’s more than most people get.

So yeah. So in your experience, I know that you are obviously trying to overcome this problem, and it sounds like you get most people through it, and people manage to come out the other side and are, you know using WordPress successfully. But despite that, do you still think out there in the wider community, not where you are, do you still think that people are being turned off by the problem at the beginning of, I don’t know what to do. I think that I should be able to figure this out, but I can’t. I’m frustrated. It’s annoying me. Ah, move on, or forget the whole thing altogether.

[00:30:53] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Okay. I give you some tools. I wrote it. Limit the choices. Yeah, because one plugin at a time. Yeah, understand one topic at a time.

[00:31:05] Nathan Wrigley: When you say that, are you, meaning, let’s say for example, that we’re getting into the, oh, I don’t know, the realm of SEO, we’ve managed to get into that subject. We know that there’s like 500 SEO plugins. Just show them one, just pick one, concentrate on that one and figure out how that works. And then maybe reveal that there’s others or something like that.

[00:31:25] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Yeah. But sometimes, maybe I have to understand your world first, and maybe you don’t need SEO tools? Because maybe you wanted to sell, I don’t know, plants. So do you really need a SEO plugin? Yeah, maybe not. So I have to understand your business first, or your purpose first, and then I can share you one plugin for that.

[00:31:56] Nathan Wrigley: Right, so, but at the end of the day, it’s still limit it rather than the plugin overwhelm. 78,000 plugins on the repo or whatever it is. One at a time is probably for a beginner more than enough. Learn how to install it. How to uninstall it. Learn the kind of things that you can do with it, whether that’s SEO or a form plugin or whatever. Okay, it looks like you’re ready for another one, yeah.

[00:32:15] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Yeah. I have, normalise confusion.

[00:32:19] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so be happy with being confused and muddled up.

[00:32:23] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Yeah, because it’s a new topic for you. So you have to understand that it is fine if you feel confusion, because your brain is adapting to that learning process.

[00:32:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, we’re not good at that, are we? We’re really good at being annoyed by confusion. Confusion’s the enemy in many ways, isn’t it? But it’s really not. I mean, who can expect to learn something new and immediately understand everything? No, but we don’t allow ourselves to do that, do we? We get annoyed with confusion.

That’s a good one. I like that. Carry on, sorry.

[00:32:54] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: And celebrate the small wins. I’m doing right now. I’m realise that I have to celebrate the small wins, because sometimes we overwhelm and have too many expectations. It is one step at a time, baby steps.

[00:33:11] Nathan Wrigley: So that one is basically when something goes right. So once you’ve got over your confusion and something’s gone right, sit back, examine it. Ah, well done. Pat on the back kind of thing. Yeah, okay. That’s nice.

[00:33:22] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Yeah. And emotional reset tools.

[00:33:26] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. You’re going to have to explain that one.

[00:33:29] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Okay. I’m going to explain you here, because I want to explain you pretty well, and sometimes I get I stuck in the language.

Okay, when beginners get frustrated, we must do simple pauses, like breathing. The process of breathing is called pranayama. In pranayama is the art of the breathing. When we born, the first thing that I will do is breathe. And when you are crying, the people say, no, no, breathe, breathe, right? And when you are, I don’t know, when you swimming, and you.

[00:34:09] Nathan Wrigley: Drowning maybe.

[00:34:11] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Drowning yeah, you want to breathe. So the breathing is so important.

[00:34:16] Nathan Wrigley: So this is part of the pausing thing. Just pausing, breathing, okay.

[00:34:20] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Yeah. They also reduce the cognitive overload. And help beginners continuing learning with more clarity, that regulates the brain and the stress.

[00:34:32] Nathan Wrigley: So I don’t think I do any of those things when I’m learning. I just sort of plough on and expect myself to do really well. And when I don’t, I get miserable and annoyed. And I don’t ever think about, okay, calm down, breathe, congratulate yourself. The thing is I mostly do learning by myself. You know, I’m in a room and I watch a video or I read something, and so there’s nobody there to tell me to breathe, calm down, relax, congratulate yourself. So I’m glad these people have got you in their lives to, make all of this happen.

Sorry, carry on.

[00:35:03] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: No, no. And one of the phrases that I want to the people understand is the learning doesn’t happen in stress. It happens when the mind feels safe enough to explore.

[00:35:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, well I can identify with that. That makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? When you’re uptight and worried about things, nothing sticks ever, does it? So back to calm, I suppose.

[00:35:30] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Yeah yeah.

[00:35:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s all good advice. Yeah I wish I could do it.

[00:35:36] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Yeah. And sometimes, yeah, the people feel overwhelmed with the stress first. I have too many mentors that causing me stress and, I don’t know, they don’t give me confidence in anything of I been learning.

[00:35:55] Nathan Wrigley: It sounds to me like what you are proposing. We would probably call it holistic. So it’s treating the mind, the body. They’re the first bits. If you haven’t got those intact and working for you, it doesn’t matter how many times you read that book, you’re never going to learn anything.

[00:36:12] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: But sometimes the word for holistic for technical people is like you’re a hippie.

[00:36:17] Nathan Wrigley: Well, there is a bit of that, isn’t there? I think technical people often have an approach to this kind of stuff, which is fairly dismissive, sort of at arm’s length. Because it’s not science, if you know what I mean. It doesn’t sort of come under that umbrella. I wonder how much resistance actually, if I put you in, you know, had a chat with a thousand of the people out there at the moment.

[00:36:38] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Oh, the people go away.

[00:36:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay. Okay. But you know it works. And everybody knows this kind of stuff works. Because if you’re calm, I suppose the difficulty would be, you’ve got to allow yourself to accept that you need to be calm, and you need to be approaching it in this kind of way. And that’s difficult. I would find that quite difficult. You know, if I came to your educational institute, if you like, if you were teaching me WordPress, there would be a bit of me at the beginning, which would be thinking, okay, just tapping the watch, and thinking when does the WordPress begin?

And you are probably saying, we need to be calm now, you know? So I guess you’re going to have to fight that fight.

[00:37:13] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Yeah. Yeah. And last year I was a speaker in my country, and I’m talking about how manage the stress, the people that works like eight hours on the computer. You can use too many tools to release the back, the breathing. And everybody needs release the stress. Sometimes in technical environments, the people don’t engage with the holistic path because they think that.

[00:37:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I confess I’ve had years of doing that kind of stuff. Just expecting my body to be able to keep pace with whatever I’m doing, and expecting that if I sit in a chair for 12 hours, that everything’s going to be fine. I’m just going to stand up and walk away. And of course, it’s not.

Do you know, it’s really interesting, I don’t know that anybody’s doing this. Maybe you know a load of people that are carrying out this kind of a practice. But it feels like you’ve kind of, forgive me if I’ve got the wrong language here, but it feels like you’ve kind of bolted something close to meditation onto technology. Which is really curious, because I don’t know that anybody, maybe this is common where you are. I don’t know, but.

[00:38:27] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: No, it’s not. It’s not because I’m a sound therapist, and I’m a sound healer. The sound can heal you. I am trying to people understand that you can’t live like a computer. You are not a computer. You can program in your brain like a computer, but you are not a robot. And you need to stop.

[00:38:51] Nathan Wrigley: I think, we’re too attached to our devices, aren’t we? I think whenever the mobile phone came along, we finally gave up free time. And email is there 24/7. Social media’s there 24/7. Technology’s there 24/7. Yeah, breathe is basically what you’re saying.

[00:39:10] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Yeah. And in my country, no, it is not common. It is not common and it is a little rare. And maybe in another country it is normal to finish your labour at work and meditate one minute.

[00:39:26] Nathan Wrigley: Oh no. Nobody does that where I live, no.

[00:39:30] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: I don’t know if there is any country, doesn’t do it, right?

[00:39:32] Nathan Wrigley: That would be nice. Yeah you’d probably feel really good after that.

[00:39:35] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Maybe in China? Maybe Japan?

[00:39:38] Nathan Wrigley: Maybe where they a different approach to living. Do you want to roll your thing out? The way that you are doing this, do you want to roll that out to other people? Do you want people to kind of approach you and, I don’t know, study what you are doing, and then go off and do that kind of thing elsewhere? Is that part of why you’ve come to an event like this? To sort of preach the gospel of this idea, this way of learning?

[00:40:01] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Yeah, yeah. I would love to. I would love the people understanding maybe, I don’t know, create me a plugin about wellness. I don’t know.

[00:40:12] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so anybody listening to this, Priscilla wants communication with people who think they might be able to step in. I know of several people who have, let’s say things like meditation as part of their daily ritual and things. In which case, anybody who’s listening to this, where’s the best place to find you online? If people want to get in touch and talk about these wider problems, education, learning, calming down, meditation, those kind of things, where would we find you?

[00:40:37] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: On Gravatar. On WordPress page, and Instagram too.

[00:40:42] Nathan Wrigley: I think I’ve got the details of most of those, but if I don’t, I will get them from you, and I will put them on the WP Tavern website. So if you search for the episode, dear listener, with Priscilla in it, I don’t know the number of that episode just yet, but if you search for the episode with Priscilla in it, if you’ve got intuitions that you’d like to help out, go and find this episode and you can reach out. And you never know, maybe something will come of that.

So Priscilla, thank you for chatting to me today.

[00:41:07] Priscilla Collado Ramirez: Oh, thank you too. And remember to breathe.

On the podcast today we have Priscilla Collado Ramirez.

Priscilla traveled 14 hours from Costa Rica to attend WordCamp Europe, making her one of the furthest attendees at the event, and for good reason. She’s an educator, fashion designer, and wellness coach, and has a unique perspective on a challenge many in the WordPress community face: how overwhelming WordPress can be for beginners.

Having once quit WordPress 17 years ago due to information overload and lack of community support, Priscilla’s story comes full circle as she now dedicates herself to helping entrepreneurs and creatives find their way in the WordPress ecosystem. Her work focuses on demystifying those first confusing moments, offering practical steps and much-needed reassurance for anyone who’s ever opened a fresh install and wondered, “What on earth do I do next?”

The conversation is focused on why newcomers often feel stuck, paralysed by too many choices, the classic “it depends” advice, and a fear of breaking something (or everything). We get into the importance of understanding individual learning styles, whether linear or spiral (as Priscilla labels them), and meeting students where they are, sometimes with literal breathing exercises and wellness techniques to lower stress and unlock real learning.

Priscilla explains why confidence in WordPress is built through action, and why celebrating small wins, like successfully installing a single plugin, is essential. She also shares her approach to bringing holistic, calm, and patient mentorship into WordPress education, something that’s as relevant for agency leads as it is for first-time bloggers.

If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by WordPress’s infinite possibilities, struggled to find your place in its community, or just want practical wisdom on making the path easier for beginners, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Why WordPress feels overwhelming for beginners – Priscilla’s presentation at WordCamp Europe 2026

Priscilla on WordPress.org

Greg Ziółkowski: The Abilities API in WordPress 7.1: Lifecycle, Schemas, and Discovery

Greg Ziółkowski — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 12:11:55 +0000

The Abilities API gives WordPress plugins a common language for describing and executing units of functionality. An ability has a stable name, human-readable metadata, input and output contracts, a permission check, and an execution callback. Other PHP code can discover it without knowing which plugin registered it, while REST, WP-CLI, JavaScript, MCP, and AI integrations […]

HeroPress: The First 10 Years, The Next 10 Years – પહેલાંનાં ૧૦ વર્ષ, આગળનાં ૧૦ વર્ષ

Jina Parekh — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 02:30:00 +0000

આ નિબંધ ગુજરાતીમાં પણ ઉપલબ્ધ છે

Hear Jina read her story aloud in her own voice.

Sometimes I wonder how life connects the dots.

A LinkedIn follow. A few conversations with someone I didn’t know much about at the time. And today, somehow, those small moments have led me to write my story on HeroPress. If someone had told the girl who graduated from college in 2015 that one day she would be sharing her WordPress journey here, I would never have believed them.

Diving In

My first ten years in WordPress weren’t just about learning how to write code. They were about learning how to grow through uncertainty, motherhood, self-doubt, and, most importantly, community.

I joined my first company in 2015, fresh out of college. I knew Core PHP, but WordPress was completely new to me. I had only heard its name before my interview. My first month was as an unpaid trainee, and by the second month I was already building websites for clients. Soon after, I was given the opportunity to work on the plugin, Oasis Workflow. Those five years became my real classroom. I learned plugin development, worked with React and Gutenberg during their early adoption, and discovered that WordPress was much more than a CMS—it was an ecosystem that never stopped evolving.

Building A Product

Around the same time, an opportunity came my way to build a Google Sheets integration for Contact Form 7. That small feature eventually became GSheetConnector. As more users adopted it, their feedback shaped the product. Ten thousand users became twenty thousand, new requirements became new features, and in 2018 we launched the Pro version. What started as a single integration gradually grew into a family of connector plugins. Looking back, it taught me one of the biggest lessons in product development: listen to your users, because they will help build the roadmap with you.

In 2019, I attended my first WordCamp in Vadodara. Until then, WordPress had mostly meant code and client work. WordCamp introduced me to the people behind the software. I made new connections, learned from contributors, and realized there was an entire community that believed in sharing knowledge instead of keeping it to themselves.

Then came the most challenging chapter of my life.

Everything Everywhere, Upside Down

Between 2020 and 2025, I was leading our company’s Vadodara branch while the world suddenly changed because of COVID-19. Like many others, I shifted to working from home. During the same period, I became a mother. My days became a balance of meetings, deployments, household responsibilities, and raising my daughter. Working from home gave me flexibility, and I will always be grateful to Mr. Abdullah for trusting me with that flexibility, but it also came with responsibilities that are difficult to explain unless you’ve lived them.

For five years, my focus was simple: my family and my job. I wasn’t learning new technologies. I wasn’t attending events. I wasn’t contributing to WordPress. As AI, modern development workflows, and new technologies continued to evolve, I often felt as though the industry had moved ahead while I was standing still. It was an uncomfortable feeling, and for a long time I questioned whether I had fallen behind.

Going To WordCamp

Everything changed again in late 2025 when GSheetConnector sponsored WordCamp Surat. Meeting people from the community reignited something I had been missing. Soon after, I learned that WordCamp Asia 2026 would be held in Mumbai. I wanted to attend, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the practical challenges. Could I travel with my daughter? Could we afford it? Would everything work out?

I applied for the Zeel Thakkar Scholarship with hope more than confidence, and to my surprise, I received it. My husband took leave from work so he could travel with me and help take care of our daughter. His support made that journey possible.

Contribution Day at WordCamp Asia wasn’t the success I had imagined. My development environment failed at the last moment. My WordPress.org account was temporarily blocked, and to make matters worse, my phone shut down, leaving me without access to my authenticator codes. I sat there feeling completely blank, wondering if I even belonged in that room.

Instead of giving up, I walked over to the Community Team table.

That decision quietly changed my direction.

Building Community

There, Devin introduced me to the process of becoming a Meetup Organizer. I returned home, completed the required training over the following month, attended another meetup to learn from experienced organizers, and received constant encouragement from people like Pooja Derashri and Aditya Kane, who patiently answered every question I had.

In June 2026, we successfully restarted the Vadodara WordPress Meetup. Only a handful of people attended, but to me it represented something much bigger. It reminded me that communities don’t begin with hundreds of people. They begin with one conversation and a willingness to show up.

Looking back, I realize that my first ten years were about building my career. I hope my next ten years will be about building people.

Forging Ahead

I want to strengthen our local WordPress community, encourage students through Campus Connect programs, and help more women—especially mothers who believe their careers have stopped—rediscover opportunities in WordPress. I want to contribute more to WordPress itself, continue learning emerging technologies like AI, build a plugin of my own, and one day attend WordCamp Asia outside India with my daughter and husband by my side. My Daughter already asks me if we’ll be there next year at Malaysia, and every time she does, I’m reminded that dreams don’t have deadlines—they just need commitment.

If my journey has taught me one thing, it’s this: WordPress is not just about software. It is about people.

Every meaningful opportunity in my journey began because someone answered a question, shared knowledge, offered encouragement, or simply believed in me.

To every woman in tech—and especially every mother trying to balance family, work, and her own dreams—please remember this: you are doing better than you think. Take one step at a time. Reach out to people. Ask questions without fear. Help even one other person if you can.

Because that’s what WordPress has taught me over the past ten years.

Connect. Learn. Grow.

And then help someone else do the same.

પહેલાંનાં ૧૦ વર્ષ, આગળનાં ૧૦ વર્ષ

ક્યારેક મને લાગે છે કે જીવન કેવી રીતે એક પછી એક ઘટનાઓને એકબીજા સાથે જોડતું જાય છે.

લિંક્ડઇન પર કરેલું એક ફોલો. એવી વ્યક્તિ સાથે થયેલી થોડી વાતચીત જેને હું તે સમયે ખાસ ઓળખતી પણ નહોતી. અને આજે, એ જ નાનાં-નાનાં પ્રસંગોએ મને હીરોપ્રેસ પર મારી પોતાની વાર્તા લખવા સુધી પહોંચાડી છે. જો ૨૦૧૫માં કોલેજમાંથી ગ્રેજ્યુએટ થયેલી મને કોઈએ કહ્યું હોત કે એક દિવસ હું અહીં મારી વર્ડપ્રેસ સફર શેર કરીશ, તો કદાચ હું ક્યારેય વિશ્વાસ ન કરતી.

વર્ડપ્રેસ સાથેના મારા પહેલાંના દસ વર્ષ માત્ર કોડ લખવાનું શીખવામાં જ ગયા નથી. આ વર્ષોએ મને અનિશ્ચિતતા વચ્ચે આગળ વધવાનું, માતૃત્વને સ્વીકારવાનું, પોતાની જાત પર શંકા હોવા છતાં હિંમત રાખવાનું અને સૌથી મહત્વનું – સમુદાયનું સાચું મહત્વ સમજાવ્યું.

૨૦૧૫માં, કોલેજ પૂર્ણ કર્યા પછી મેં મારી પ્રથમ કંપનીમાં જોડાઈ. મને કોર પી.એચ.પી. આવડતું હતું, પરંતુ વર્ડપ્રેસ મારા માટે સંપૂર્ણપણે નવું હતું. ઇન્ટરવ્યૂ પહેલાં મેં માત્ર તેનું નામ જ સાંભળ્યું હતું. પ્રથમ મહિને હું કોઈપણ પગાર વિના ટ્રેઇની તરીકે કામ કરતી હતી, અને બીજા મહિને જ હું ગ્રાહકો માટે વેબસાઇટ્સ બનાવતી થઈ ગઈ. થોડા જ સમયમાં મને કંપનીના ઓએસિસ વર્કફ્લો પ્લગિન પર કામ કરવાની તક મળી. એ પાંચ વર્ષ મારા માટે ખરેખર એક યુનિવર્સિટી સમાન રહ્યા. મેં પ્લગિન ડેવલપમેન્ટ શીખ્યું, રિએક્ટ અને ગૂટનબર્ગ સાથે તેમની શરૂઆતના સમયમાં કામ કર્યું અને સમજાયું કે વર્ડપ્રેસ માત્ર એક સી.એમ.એસ. નથી, પરંતુ સતત વિકસતું અને બદલાતું એક વિશ્વ છે.

એ જ સમય દરમિયાન મને કોન્ટેક્ટ ફોર્મ ૭ માટે ગુગલ શીટ્સ ઇન્ટિગ્રેશન બનાવવાની તક મળી. એ નાનું ફીચર ધીમે-ધીમે જીશીટકનેક્ટર તરીકે વિકસતું ગયું. વધુને વધુ લોકો તેનો ઉપયોગ કરવા લાગ્યા અને તેમના ફીડબેકએ જ આ પ્રોડક્ટનું ભવિષ્ય ઘડ્યું. દસ હજાર યૂઝર્સ વીસ હજાર થયા, નવી જરૂરિયાતો નવા ફીચર્સ બની અને ૨૦૧૮માં અમે તેનું પ્રો વર્ઝન રજૂ કર્યું. એક જ ઇન્ટિગ્રેશનથી શરૂ થયેલી સફર અનેક કનેક્ટર પ્લગિન્સ સુધી પહોંચી. પાછળ વળી જોઉં ત્યારે સમજાય છે કે પ્રોડક્ટ બનાવવાનો સૌથી મોટો પાઠ મને અહીં મળ્યો—તમારા યૂઝર્સને સાંભળો, કારણ કે તેઓ જ તમારી સાથે મળીને તમારા પ્રોડક્ટનો આગળનો રસ્તો નક્કી કરે છે.

૨૦૧૯માં મેં વડોદરામાં મારું પ્રથમ વર્ડકેમ્પ અટેન્ડ કર્યું. ત્યાં સુધી વર્ડપ્રેસ મારા માટે માત્ર કોડ અને ગ્રાહકોનું કામ હતું. વર્ડકેમ્પએ મને આ સોફ્ટવેર પાછળ રહેલા લોકો સાથે પરિચય કરાવ્યો. નવા સંબંધો બન્યા, કોન્ટ્રિબ્યુટર્સ પાસેથી શીખવાની તક મળી અને મને સમજાયું કે અહીં એક એવી સમુદાય છે જે જ્ઞાનને પોતાની પાસે રાખવામાં નહીં, પરંતુ બધાં સાથે વહેંચવામાં વિશ્વાસ રાખે છે.

પછી મારા જીવનનો સૌથી પડકારજનક સમય શરૂ થયો.

૨૦૨૦થી ૨૦૨૫ દરમિયાન હું અમારી કંપનીની વડોદરા બ્રાન્ચ સંભાળી રહી હતી અને એ જ સમયે કોવિડ-૧૯ને કારણે આખી દુનિયા બદલાઈ ગઈ. બીજા ઘણા લોકોની જેમ હું પણ વર્ક ફ્રોમ હોમ કરવા લાગી. એ જ સમયગાળામાં હું માતા પણ બની. મારા દિવસો મીટિંગ્સ, ડિપ્લોયમેન્ટ્સ, ઘરકામ અને મારી દીકરીના ઉછેર વચ્ચે સંતુલન જાળવવામાં પસાર થવા લાગ્યા. વર્ક ફ્રોમ હોમે મને લવચીકતા આપી, અને તેના માટે હું શ્રી અબ્દુલ્લાહની હંમેશાં આભારી રહીશ કે તેમણે મારા પર વિશ્વાસ રાખ્યો. પરંતુ આ લવચીકતા સાથે એવી જવાબદારીઓ પણ આવી જેને માત્ર એ વ્યક્તિ જ સમજી શકે જે આ જીવન જીવી હોય.

પાંચ વર્ષ સુધી મારું સમગ્ર ધ્યાન માત્ર બે બાબતો પર હતું—મારો પરિવાર અને મારી નોકરી. હું નવી ટેક્નોલોજી શીખી શકતી નહોતી, કોઈ ઇવેન્ટ્સમાં જઈ શકતી નહોતી અને વર્ડપ્રેસમાં કોન્ટ્રિબ્યુશન પણ કરી શકતી નહોતી. આર્ટિફિશિયલ ઇન્ટેલિજન્સ (એ.આઈ.), આધુનિક ડેવલપમેન્ટ વર્કફ્લો અને નવી ટેક્નોલોજી સતત આગળ વધી રહી હતી, અને ઘણીવાર મને એવું લાગતું કે આખી દુનિયા આગળ વધી ગઈ છે જ્યારે હું એ જ જગ્યાએ ઊભી છું. લાંબા સમય સુધી મને પોતાને જ પ્રશ્ન થતો રહ્યો કે શું હું ખરેખર પાછળ રહી ગઈ છું?

૨૦૨૫ના અંતમાં બધું ફરી બદલાયું, જ્યારે જીશીટકનેક્ટરએ વર્ડકેમ્પ સુરતને સ્પોન્સર કર્યું. ત્યાં સમુદાયના લોકો સાથે મળવાથી મારી અંદર કંઈક ફરી જીવંત થયું—એ ઉત્સાહ, જે કદાચ હું વર્ષોથી ગુમાવી બેઠી હતી. થોડા સમય પછી ખબર પડી કે વર્ડકેમ્પ એશિયા ૨૦૨૬ મુંબઈમાં યોજાવાનું છે. હું જવા માગતી હતી, પરંતુ મનમાં અનેક પ્રશ્નો હતા. શું હું મારી દીકરી સાથે મુસાફરી કરી શકીશ? શું અમે આ ખર્ચ ઉઠાવી શકીશું? શું બધું સારું રહેશે?

મેં ઝીલ ઠક્કર સ્કોલરશિપ માટે અરજી કરી. મારા પાસે આત્મવિશ્વાસ કરતાં આશા વધુ હતી. અને મારા આશ્ચર્ય વચ્ચે મને સ્કોલરશિપ મળી ગઈ. મારા પતિએ પણ રજા લીધી જેથી તેઓ મારી સાથે આવી શકે અને અમારી દીકરીની સંભાળ રાખી શકે. તેમના સાથ અને સહકાર વગર આ સફર શક્ય બની ન હોત.

વર્ડકેમ્પ એશિયાનો કોન્ટ્રિબ્યુશન ડે મેં જે રીતે કલ્પ્યો હતો એવો રહ્યો નહીં. છેલ્લી ઘડીએ મારું ડેવલપમેન્ટ એન્વાયરમેન્ટ કામ કરવાનું બંધ થઈ ગયું. મારું વર્ડપ્રેસ.ઓર્ગ એકાઉન્ટ થોડા સમય માટે બ્લોક થઈ ગયું અને ઉપરથી મારો ફોન પણ બંધ થઈ ગયો, જેના કારણે ઓથેન્ટિકેટર કોડ્સ પણ ઉપલબ્ધ રહ્યા નહીં. હું ત્યાં એકદમ શાંત, ગભરાયેલી અને ખાલી મનથી બેઠી હતી. મનમાં માત્ર એક જ પ્રશ્ન હતો—શું ખરેખર હું અહીં હોવા લાયક છું?

પણ હાર માનવાને બદલે હું કોમ્યુનિટી ટીમના ટેબલ તરફ ચાલી ગઈ.

એ નિર્ણયે શાંતિથી મારી સફરની દિશા બદલી નાખી.

ત્યાં ડેવિનએ મને મીટઅપ ઓર્ગેનાઇઝર બનવાની સમગ્ર પ્રક્રિયા સમજાવી. ઘરે પરત આવ્યા પછી મેં જરૂરી ટ્રેનિંગ પૂર્ણ કરી, અનુભવી ઓર્ગેનાઇઝર્સ પાસેથી શીખવા માટે બીજા મીટઅપમાં હાજરી આપી અને પૂજા દરશ્રી તથા આદિત્ય કાણે જેવા લોકો પાસેથી સતત પ્રોત્સાહન મળતું રહ્યું. તેમણે મારા દરેક પ્રશ્નનો ધીરજપૂર્વક જવાબ આપ્યો.

જૂન ૨૦૨૬માં અમે ફરીથી વડોદરા વર્ડપ્રેસ મીટઅપ શરૂ કરવામાં સફળ રહ્યા. માત્ર થોડા લોકો હાજર હતા, પરંતુ મારા માટે તેનો અર્થ ઘણો મોટો હતો. એણે મને શીખવ્યું કે સમુદાયની શરૂઆત ક્યારેય સેંકડો લોકોથી થતી નથી. તેની શરૂઆત એક વાતચીતથી અને હાજર રહેવાની તૈયારીથી થાય છે.

આજે જ્યારે હું પાછળ વળી જોઉં છું, ત્યારે સમજાય છે કે મારા પહેલાંના દસ વર્ષ મારી કારકિર્દી બનાવવામાં ગયા.

હવે મારી આશા છે કે મારા આગામી દસ વર્ષ લોકો બનાવવામાં પસાર થાય.

હું અમારી સ્થાનિક વર્ડપ્રેસ સમુદાયને વધુ મજબૂત બનાવવા માંગું છું. કેમ્પસ કનેક્ટ જેવા કાર્યક્રમો દ્વારા વિદ્યાર્થીઓને વર્ડપ્રેસ સાથે જોડવા માંગું છું. ખાસ કરીને એવી મહિલાઓ અને માતાઓને મદદ કરવા માંગું છું જેમને લાગે છે કે તેમની કારકિર્દી અટકી ગઈ છે. હું વર્ડપ્રેસમાં વધુ કોન્ટ્રિબ્યુશન કરવા માંગું છું, એ.આઈ. જેવી નવી ટેક્નોલોજી શીખવાનું ચાલુ રાખવા માંગું છું, એક દિવસ પોતાનું પ્લગિન બનાવવું છે અને મારી દીકરી અને પતિ સાથે ભારતની બહાર યોજાતા વર્ડકેમ્પ એશિયામાં હાજરી આપવી છે.

મારી દીકરી આજે પણ મને પૂછે છે, “મમ્મી, આપણે આવતા વર્ષે મલેશિયા જઈશું ને?” અને દર વખતે મને યાદ આવે છે કે સપનાઓની કોઈ સમયમર્યાદા નથી હોતી—તેને ફક્ત સમર્પણની જરૂર હોય છે.

મારી સફરે મને જો એક વાત શીખવી હોય, તો એ આ છે—

વર્ડપ્રેસ માત્ર સોફ્ટવેર નથી. વર્ડપ્રેસ એટલે લોકો.

મારી સફરમાં આવેલી દરેક મહત્વપૂર્ણ તક કોઈક વ્યક્તિએ મારા પ્રશ્નનો જવાબ આપ્યો, પોતાનું જ્ઞાન વહેંચ્યું, મને પ્રોત્સાહિત કર્યું અથવા માત્ર મારા પર વિશ્વાસ મૂક્યો—ત્યાંથી જ શરૂ થઈ હતી.

ટેક ક્ષેત્રમાં કામ કરતી દરેક મહિલાને, અને ખાસ કરીને દરેક એવી માતાને જે પરિવાર, કામ અને પોતાના સપનાઓ વચ્ચે સંતુલન જાળવવાનો પ્રયાસ કરી રહી છે, હું માત્ર એટલું જ કહેવા માગું છું—

તમે જેટલું વિચારો છો, તેના કરતાં ઘણું સારું કરી રહ્યા છો.

ધીમે-ધીમે એક સમયે એક પગલું ભરો.

લોકો સાથે જોડાઓ.

પ્રશ્ન પૂછવામાં ક્યારેય ડરશો નહીં.

અને જો શક્ય હોય, તો ઓછામાં ઓછા એક વ્યક્તિને આગળ વધવામાં જરૂર મદદ કરજો.

કારણ કે છેલ્લા દસ વર્ષમાં વર્ડપ્રેસે મને આ જ શીખવ્યું છે—

જોડાઓ. શીખો. આગળ વધો.

અને પછી, કોઈ બીજા માટે પણ એ જ માર્ગ સરળ બનાવો.

The post The First 10 Years, The Next 10 Years – પહેલાંનાં ૧૦ વર્ષ, આગળનાં ૧૦ વર્ષ appeared first on HeroPress.

Matt: Michel the GOAT

Matt — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 01:58:57 +0000

I don’t usually blog all my comments other places, but while drafting a completely different blog post I came across this great post, Michel Valdrighi: The Coder Whose Code Never Went Silent.

I had to leave a comment, because Michel’s story is not well-known.

Michel Valdrighi is the GOAT. His elegant code and impeccable aesthetic paved the path for WordPress to follow, and he did it with a prescient belief in Open Source. It seems obvious now, but in 2001, software that wasn’t just free but gave you Freedom was a radical idea that made people look at you funny. He showed me that code could be poetry, that beauty in simplicity is harder to achieve than complexity.

Mike Little and I met hanging out on the b2/cafelog Sourceforge and Freenode IRC channel, both drawn in by what Michel had created. It all started on a little island called Corsica.

Bonus: After publishing, Jetpack’s Related Post feature led me to this Best Blogging Software? post where Michel commented, months before the famous Blogging Software Dilemma. See, even back then people were arguing about static vs dynamic sites.

Open Channels FM: Open Minds Balancing AI Innovation with Authentic Human Connection

Bob Dunn — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 08:29:20 +0000

This episode discusses the impact of artificial intelligence on human skills and connections, emphasizing concerns about overdependence on technology, authenticity in communication, and the importance of retaining essential human abilities.

Matt: Gabriel Dawe

Matt — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 04:23:30 +0000

New artist I’m obsessed with: Gabriel Dawe. I love the colors and craft, very Mesh. If his site were on WordPress, we’d definitely commission some pieces. Hat tip: Jason Nichols.

Open Channels FM: The Evolving Landscape of Digital Identity and AI

Bob Dunn — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 14:27:00 +0000

Digital identity is rapidly evolving due to AI and new authentication methods, necessitating secure access and robust management for both users and automated agents.

Open Channels FM: Follow Open Channels News on X @OCFMNews

Bob Dunn — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 08:30:00 +0000

Founder Bob Dunn rebranded his @BobWP account to @OCFMNews for Open Channels News, expecting existing followers to appreciate the new focus on news and podcast content.

Gutenberg Times: Gutenberg Changelog #133 – Gutenberg 23.6 Release and WordPress 7.1

Gutenberg Changelog — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 08:21:46 +0000

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.

Show Notes / Transcript

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

Show Notes

Special Guest: Faith Ruth Imokol

WordPress Events in Uganda

Upcoming Events

WordPress in Education Showcase 2026 August 7, 2026
WordCamp Lira 2026 29+ 30 August 2026
WordCamp is in Jinja 19th – 20th September 2026
WordPress Campus Connect Central and Eastern Uganda Schools 2026

Past 2026 Events

WordPress 7.1

More Developer Notes for WordPress 7.1

What’s new of Gutenberg 23.6

The post editor is going full iframe: what block developers need to know before WordPress 7.1

Video w/ Ryan Welcher: iframed post editor canvas

Stay in Touch

Did you like this episode? Please write us a review
Ping us on X (formerly known as Twitter) or send DMs with questions. @gutenbergtimes and @bph.
If you have questions or suggestions, or news you want us to include, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com.
Please write us a review on iTunes! (Click here to learn how)

Transcript

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.

Matt: Tesla Spyware

Matt — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 05:27:00 +0000

I noticed my Model X was uploading ~2.6gb of something to Tesla when it parked and connected to WiFi.

Hopefully turning all these settings off stops it; otherwise, I might need a new car. But are any good?

Gutenberg Times: WordPress 7.1 is afoot, Gutenberg 23.6, iframed post editor, Abilities API, Studio Code and more — Weekend Edition 371

Birgit Pauli-Haack — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 01:17:00 +0000

Hi there,

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.

Have a fabulous weekend!

Yours,
Birgit

WordPress 7.1 updates

WordPress 7.1 Beta 4 was release this week.
It’s still time to Help Test WordPress 7.1
The WordPress 7.1 Source of Truth is out.

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 episode Why WordPress 7.1 Will Improve Your Workflow is also available as video.

More Devnotes:

There are still more to come and they will be published next week, together with the WordPress 7.1 Field Guide.

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

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.

Gutenberg 23.6 released

Last week, Gutenberg 23.6 was already released. The WordPress 7.1 tech co-lead. Aki Hamano highlighted in his post What’s new in Gutenberg 23.6? (July 22, 2026)

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.

The previous years are also available:
2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.

If your custom blocks touch the global window or document, WordPress 7.1 will break them. Ryan Welcher walks through the forced 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.

Welcher also published a detailed tutorial: The post editor is going full iframe: what block developers need to know before WordPress 7.1

What’s new in Playground?

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.

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

Featured Image:

Matt: Possible Futures of Happiness

Matt — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 16:54:41 +0000

At Automattic, we don’t have customer service or support, we have Happiness Engineers.

There’s also a #ceo Slack channel where anyone can drop in and request a meeting, which my esteemed colleague Damianne President did, and this morning we had an interesting chat that set my mind racing about how we might engineer happiness in the future.

One overriding assumption: Personal agents will trounce company agents in most cases.

Your personal agent can — or soon will — know all your history, your calendar, your email, your preferences, and your photos, and it speaks your language. So much time is wasted in traditional support trying to see through the customer’s eyes, or authenticate them. That goes away, but watch your thinking! It’s so easy to fall into the mental model trap of legacy chatbots and data models.

As a company, your website, your WordPress, documentation, tutorials, menus, manuals need to be amazing and up to date. That’s the source of truth, and an agent will read all of it!

The interface and APIs remain because that’s useful to both human visitors and the agents.

Whenever possible, make support public. More blogs and bbPress. I actually weep a little when I think of how many beautiful words are written by our Happiness Engineers that are only ever seen once in a chat box or email thread.

My goal with our products is that support is radically available, and you almost never have to use it.

If you’re in a support role, I think you can pick a lane based on where you get energy.

If you love looking at screens, I think there’s a future where customer service wizards are watching over an Iron Man-like interface, armies of chat bots talking to people, where they can see how they’re going and intervene or nudge them as needed. There’s a ton of work in tuning agents and interactions.

If people recharge you, I actually think this will be the greatest era. All of the basic, mechanical stuff will be automated, but I think human connection will be what economists call a Veblen good, more in demand even as it is more expensive.

I think Happiness Engineering in the future will look a lot more like community building. A bot can’t host a meetup or a WordCamp.

I was the biggest Waymo fanboy, but this year with lots of trips to and from hospitals with Om I found myself craving human connection and used Uber more than ever. (It also gave me a chance to practice the one repeatable way that money can buy happiness, which is keeping a couple Benjamins in your back pocket and surprising people with them.)

Open Channels FM: Why Open Source Projects Need a License Before They Need Code

Bob Dunn — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 13:35:00 +0000

Open source fosters creativity but involves complex issues like licensing and ownership, especially in hackathons. Proper planning with appropriate licenses upfront is crucial for project success and flexibility.

Open Channels FM: Signal – Website Development, Fame, Open Source and More Than Just Audio

Bob Dunn — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 17:54:00 +0000

Talk about personal journeys in web development, the complexities of fame, and the benefits of open source, emphasizing enriching content options for listeners beyond traditional podcasts.

WordPress Planet

Open Channels FM: Signal – AI Insights, Open Source Guidance and Commentaries.

Matt: Homework from WordCamp

How models are actually trained

Uncensored models

The open-weight wave

Open Channels FM: AI for the Rest of Us

WordPress.org blog: AI Creates Opportunity While Artists Ship at WordCamp US 2026

Real Artists Ship

Showcase Day Put Real Sites First

Human Judgment in the Loop

Trust Becomes a Product Practice

Learning With Your Laptop Open

Simplicity Gets the Last Word

Beyond the Session Rooms

What Comes Next

WordPress.org blog: WordPress 7.1 “Mary Lou”

Welcome to WordPress 7.1!

What’s inside

Apply responsive styles

Admin bar, now in every editor

A new way to crop

Inline notes with mentions and rich text

Improved media handling

Enhanced details and new blocks

Create playlists

Customize responsive breakpoints

Organize with tabs

Add custom icons

Set interactive styles

A more consistent editing experience

Developer’s toolbox

Accessibility

Performance improvements

And much more!

Learn more about WordPress 7.1

The 7.1 release squad

Thank you, contributors

Get involved

WPTavern: #230 – Adrian Sticea on Navigating the Decline of WordPress Work on Upwork and the Rise of New Opportunities

Useful links

Matt: Surprise DM

Matt: Student Plan

Open Channels FM: How AI is Transforming Open Source Communities and Digital Innovation

Open Channels FM: Are We Forgetting Our Human Skills Thanks to AI?

Gutenberg Times: WordPress 7.1 arrives at WordCamp US, Abilities API for developers, and a new theme for Gutenberg Times and more — Weekend Edition #373

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

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

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor

Ai and WordPress

Open Channels FM: Is Digital Fame Really the Same as Traditional Celebrity?

Open Channels FM: Mozilla, Alibaba, and WordPress Headlines Reflect Changing Definitions in AI and Open Source

Matt: Me.sh on Android

WordPress.org blog: Introducing the WordPress Browser Extension

Open Channels FM: OpenWALDO’s AI Transparency and AT&T’s Cost-Saving Smart Router in Focus

WordPress.org blog: WordPress 7.0.4 Release

WordPress 7.0.4 is now available

Security update included in this release

Backports

CVE and GHSA references

Thank you to these WordPress contributors

Open Channels FM: Rediscovering the Joy of Human-Made Logo Design in Personal Projects

WPTavern: #229 – Amy Kamala on Art, Tech, and Open Source: A Journey Through WordPress and Community

Useful links

Open Channels FM: Open Source Changes, WordPress Vulnerabilities, and WordCampUS Community Conversations

Matt: Beeper Merge

Gutenberg Times: WordPress 7.1 Source of Truth

Changelog

Important note/guidelines

Overview

Resources

Assets

Tags

Priority Items for WordPress 7.1

Responsive styles for blocks

Viewport breakpoint customization

Interactive states styling (hover, focus)

Media editor modal and free-form image cropper

Client-side media processing improvements