The social web’s success stems from standards and protocols like WebFinger and OAuth, which foster ownership, interoperability, and innovation, surpassing the temporary impact of individual platforms.

Logging into your analytics to find a sudden drop in website traffic is incredibly frustrating. Your first thought is usually, “Did I break something, or did Google penalize my site?”

At WPBeginner, we have managed high-traffic websites since 2009. We have seen just about every reason for a traffic dip, from major search engine updates to minor technical settings that accidentally block search bots.

The key to getting your traffic back on track is to calmly diagnose the issue. I’ve helped many site owners through this exact situation.

In this guide, I will walk you through my proven step-by-step process to figure out why your traffic fell and show you how to fix it.

This is a comprehensive troubleshooting article. You can use the quick links below to navigate through the different topics:

Why Did Your WordPress Traffic Drop?

When your website traffic suddenly disappears, it generally means something is preventing visitors from reaching your content or stopping search engines from seeing your site.

Before you start panicking or changing your WordPress SEO settings, you need to understand that this loss is not always a ‘penalty’ from Google.

Knowing the exact cause will help you choose the right fix without wasting time. Generally, traffic drops fall into one of three categories:

• Reporting Errors: Your visitors are still there, but your tracking has stopped working. This often happens if your analytics code is accidentally removed.
• External Changes: Google changed its ranking software (Algorithm Update) or a human reviewer flagged your site for a violation (Manual Action).
• Recent Site Changes: You recently moved your site, changed your theme, or updated a plugin that accidentally blocked search engines.

And sometimes, a traffic drop is simply the result of your website going offline. If you are seeing visible error messages on your site along with the traffic drop, then it means visitors and search engine bots cannot load your pages.

To diagnose and resolve these connection problems, you can see our guide on the most common WordPress errors and how to fix them.

Step 1: Confirm the Traffic Drop (And Check Your Tracking)

The first thing you should do is make sure the data you are seeing is accurate. Sometimes, a drop is actually just a normal seasonal dip or a tracking error.

To check this, you can use MonsterInsights. It is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress and makes it easy to compare your traffic over time.

We use MonsterInsights on WPBeginner to collect all our general website statistics, including engagement rates and most-visited pages.

In my experience, if you see your traffic drop to absolute zero instantly, then it is almost always a tracking health failure rather than a search engine penalty.

Check for Normal Seasonal Dips

In your WordPress dashboard, go to Insights » Reports. Click on the date selector in the top right to open the date picker.

If you are using MonsterInsights Plus or higher, then you can toggle the ‘Compare to Previous’ switch. This will automatically refresh your reports to display your current data alongside the previous period’s data.

You can use the custom date range tool within this calendar to select the exact same time period from last year.

This allows you to check if your traffic usually dips during this specific season, which is a very common trend for businesses.

If your chart shows a similar dip during the same time last year, you are likely just experiencing normal seasonality. You don’t need to panic or make any drastic changes.

However, if this drop is entirely new, or if your traffic is significantly lower than last year, then you have a real traffic drop and should continue to the next steps to find the cause.

Check Your Analytics Connection

Alternatively, if you look at your reports and see that your traffic has dropped to absolute zero instantly, it is almost certainly a tracking health issue rather than a Google penalty.

You should navigate to Insights » Settings to make sure your Google Analytics 4 (GA4) property is still properly authenticated.

If the connection was lost, then your site is still getting visitors, but they simply aren’t being counted. This creates a false traffic drop in your reports, even though your actual search rankings haven’t changed.

In this case, you will see a large blue ‘Connect MonsterInsights’ button instead of your active profile data. Simply click this button to reconnect your account to Google Analytics and start tracking your visitors again.

If you need help setting this up from scratch, or want to make sure your settings are completely correct, see our step-by-step guide on how to install Google Analytics in WordPress.

Step 2: Check for a Google Manual Action

If your tracking is working correctly but your traffic has still dropped, then the next step is to check if Google has manually penalized your site. A ‘Manual Action’ happens when a human reviewer at Google decides your site doesn’t follow their quality guidelines.

To check for this, you first need to make sure your site is connected to Google Search Console.

If you haven’t set this up yet, please see our guide on how to add your WordPress site to Google Search Console.

Once you are logged in to your account, look at the left-hand menu, scroll down to the ‘Security & Manual Actions’ section, and click on ‘Manual actions’.

If you see a message saying ‘No issues detected’, then you are in the clear. However, if you see a specific penalty listed, Google will provide details on what is wrong, such as ‘thin content’ or ‘unnatural links’.

You should also click the ‘Security issues’ tab directly below Manual actions. This will tell you if Google has detected malware or a hack on your site.

When this happens, Google often shows a bright red ‘Deceptive Site Ahead’ warning to anyone trying to visit your site, which will instantly cause your traffic to disappear.

If you find a penalty or security flag, you will need to fix the specific issues and then click the ‘Request Review’ button in Search Console.

When asking Google to reconsider your site, be sure to provide a brief ‘paper trail’ explaining the exact steps you took to clean up the issue (like removing a malicious plugin), as this greatly improves your chances of recovery.

Recovering from these penalties requires you to identify the exact cause (like toxic backlinks or hidden malware), clean your website files, and submit a thorough review request to Google.

For a complete walkthrough on how to handle this cleanup process, see our guide on what the Google blacklist is and how to fix it.

Step 3: Check for Recent Google Algorithm Updates

Unlike manual actions, Google algorithm updates are automated. Google frequently changes its ranking algorithm to improve search results, and these updates can cause your rankings to shift overnight.

The easiest way to see if an update hit your site is by using All in One SEO (AIOSEO). It is the best SEO plugin for WordPress and includes a powerful Search Statistics feature (available in the Elite plan) that overlays Google update dates directly onto your traffic reports.

To see this, go to All in One SEO » Search Statistics in your dashboard. On the ‘SEO Statistics’ chart, look for small vertical lines with a Google icon.

You can actually click these markers to read a summary of what that specific core update targeted.

If a traffic drop happens on the exact same day as one of these markers, then your site was likely affected by that specific update.

Since we switched all our brand websites to All in One SEO, we have relied on these search statistics to monitor our performance. We use the ‘Google Update’ markers on our own charts to quickly identify if a ranking shift aligns with a core algorithm change.

Then, we simply scroll down to AIOSEO’s Content Performance table to see exactly which of our posts lost rankings.

This allows us to pinpoint the cause and react quickly, saving weeks of uncertainty and lost traffic.

Unlike manual actions, you cannot submit a review request to Google for an algorithmic penalty.

To recover, you must identify what the update targeted (such as ‘thin content’ or ‘spammy links’), then rewrite the affected pages to be more helpful and wait for Google’s algorithm to naturally reward your improvements.

For a complete walkthrough on setting up these tracking reports, see our guide on how to monitor Google algorithm updates in WordPress.

Once you have identified the drop, you can follow our step-by-step recovery plan in our guide on how to recover a WordPress site from a Google search penalty.

Step 4: Audit for Technical Errors and Recent Site Changes

If your drop isn’t related to a Google update, then it is often caused by a recent change you made to your own site. This is especially common after a WordPress site migration, a theme change, or a major plugin update.

Verify Search Engine Visibility

First, you should review the ‘Search engine visibility’ setting.

Sometimes developers or site owners accidentally select this box while working on a site and forget to uncheck it when they go live.

Go to Settings » Reading and look at the ‘Search engine visibility’ option.

If the box next to ‘Discourage search engines from indexing this site’ is checked, that is likely the cause of your traffic drop. You will need to uncheck this box immediately and click the ‘Save Changes’ button.

Keep in mind that once unchecked, it can take a few days for Google to recrawl your website and place your pages back into search results, so don’t panic if your traffic doesn’t return instantly.

You should also make sure you haven’t accidentally left your site in ‘Maintenance Mode‘ using a plugin like SeedProd or accidentally set your most important pages to ‘noindex‘ inside your SEO plugin’s advanced settings.

Review Security Plugin Settings

Next, you should check your security plugins. Some security tools use ‘aggressive bot detection’ to stop hackers. But if misconfigured, they can accidentally block Google’s crawlers.

This usually happens if the security settings are set too high or if the plugin fails to recognize Google’s IP addresses as safe.

Audit 404 Errors, Permalinks, and Deleted Content

To see if your site has recently blocked important pages, you can use All in One SEO (AIOSEO) Pro.

First, you will need to make sure the advanced Redirection Manager feature is activated so it can track these errors.

Once that is turned on, simply go to All in One SEO » Redirects » 404 Logs. If you see a sudden spike in 404 errors here, it could mean your URL structure was broken during a recent change.

Speaking of 404 errors, two of the most common self-inflicted traffic drops happen when users change their permalink structure or delete old content.

If you recently changed your URLs (permalinks) without setting up proper 301 redirects, then Google can no longer find your pages, and your content will disappear from search results.

Similarly, deleting old content, especially pages that previously ranked well or had backlinks, will result in an immediate loss of traffic.

If you must change a URL or delete a post, always use a redirection manager, like the one in AIOSEO, to point the old link to a relevant new page or your homepage so you don’t lose that valuable SEO ranking power.

Test Your Website Speed

Another technical issue to check is your website’s load time. If a recent plugin update or theme change drastically slowed down your site, then Google may lower your rankings due to poor Core Web Vitals. People hate slow websites, and search engines do too.

You can test your current website speed using a free tool like Google PageSpeed Insights.

If your score has suddenly dropped, you may need to install a caching plugin or optimize your images. For step-by-step instructions, see our ultimate guide to boost WordPress speed and performance.

Find Other Hidden Blocks and Issues

Accidentally blocking search engines is one of the most common causes of a sudden traffic drop.

These invisible blocks can happen in your global WordPress settings, on individual pages, or through server-level password protection.

To learn where all of these hidden switches are located so you can ensure they are turned off, see our complete guide on how to stop search engines from crawling a WordPress site.

If you have checked these common culprits and still can’t find the issue, you may have a deeper underlying problem. To run a complete diagnostic check of your site’s foundation, see our technical WordPress SEO framework checklist.

Step 5: Verify Your Indexing Status

Sometimes your site is still live, but Google has decided to stop showing certain pages in search results. This often happens because Google isn’t crawling your website efficiently.

You can check this using the Google Search Console account you set up earlier. In the left-hand menu, click ‘Settings’ and then click ‘Open Report’ next to ‘Crawl stats’.

This report shows an overview of how many times Google bots request pages from your site.

If you look at the breakdown and see that Google is spending its time crawling 404 errors or RSS feeds instead of your actual articles, it means Google is struggling to read your site.

This is known as a ‘Crawl Budget’ problem.

WordPress automatically generates hundreds of extra URLs in the background (like author feeds or category tags). If you don’t manage them, then Google wastes its daily crawling budget on these low-value links instead of discovering your real content.

To fix this, you need to clean up these extra URLs so Google can focus on your most important pages. You can do this easily using the advanced Crawl Cleanup feature available in the premium versions of All in One SEO.

To see exactly how to find these wasted links and safely turn them off, see our tutorial on the WordPress SEO crawl budget problem and how to fix it.

Step 6: Scan for Malware and Hacked Content

If you have followed the steps above and still haven’t found the cause, then your site may have been compromised. Hackers often launch ‘SEO Spam’ attacks where they inject junk links into your old posts.

Google will notice and drop your rankings as a result.

You can do a quick manual check by typing site:yourdomain.com into a Google search. If you see foreign characters, pharmaceutical keywords, or strange titles in your search results that you didn’t write, then your site has been hacked.

For hidden hacks like this, you should run a thorough scan of your site using a security tool like Sucuri.

It is a tool we trusted for years to find malicious code and unauthorized redirects that only show up for certain visitors, such as those on mobile devices.

You should also check Users » All Users in your dashboard to ensure no unauthorized admin accounts have been created.

If you suspect your site is infected, you will need to scan your core files, themes, and plugins to isolate the malware.

For a complete walkthrough of the best security scanners, see our guide on how to scan your WordPress site for potentially malicious code.

If your scan reveals SEO spam, simply deleting the visible text on your pages won’t work.

You will need to clean your WordPress database, replace infected theme files with fresh copies, and reset all your passwords.

For step-by-step instructions on this cleanup process, see our tutorial on how to find and remove spam link injection in WordPress.

Step 7: Monitor Your Recovery With Site Notes

Once you have identified the problem that was preventing traffic to your website and fixed it, the final step is to monitor your site as it recovers.

You should not expect traffic to bounce back instantly. It can take Google several days or even weeks to recrawl your site and update your rankings.

The best way to keep an eye on your progress is by using the Site Notes feature in MonsterInsights.

Adding a new note creates a clear timestamp on your Insights » Reports overview. You can even do this directly from the WordPress content editor the moment you hit ‘Update’ on a fixed page.

Checking this chart daily helps you see exactly when your traffic starts to trend upward again, proving that your fixes worked.

You can check your notes to see exactly what changed on that day.

For a detailed walkthrough on how to set this up, see our guide on how to get GA4 site annotations and notes in WordPress. It will show you how to manage your annotations, customize your categories, and add notes directly from your reports or the post editor.

Frequently Asked Questions About WordPress Traffic Drops

When your website traffic disappears, it is natural to have questions about what went wrong and how long it will take to see a recovery.

Here are some of the most common questions our readers ask about diagnosing and fixing traffic drops in WordPress.

1. How long does it take for website traffic to recover?

The recovery time depends entirely on the cause of the drop. If the issue was a simple technical error, such as accidentally blocking search engines in your WordPress settings, you may see your traffic return within a few days of fixing it.

However, if your site was affected by a major Google algorithm update, it can often take several weeks or even months of consistent content improvements before your rankings fully stabilize.

2. Can changing my WordPress theme or updating plugins cause a traffic drop?

Yes. Changing your theme can impact your traffic if the new theme is slower, lacks mobile optimization, or uses a different heading structure (like changing H1 tags to H2 tags). Similarly, plugin updates can sometimes cause conflicts.

This is why we recommend using the Site Notes feature in MonsterInsights to create a timeline of your changes, allowing you to easily see if a drop aligns with a specific update.

3. Can losing backlinks cause my traffic to drop?

Yes. Backlinks (links from other websites pointing to yours) are a major ranking factor for Google. If a high-authority website recently removed a link to your page, or if a site linking to you was penalized, your page might lose its ranking power.

You can use SEO tools to monitor your backlink profile and see if a sudden loss of links correlates with your traffic drop.

4. What if my traffic dropped, but my Google rankings stayed the same?

If your tracking is working and your rankings haven’t changed, but your traffic is still down, user behavior may have shifted. Sometimes, people simply stop searching for a specific topic due to changing seasons or passing trends.

You can plug your main keywords into a free tool like Google Trends to see if the overall public interest in your topic has naturally declined.

Moving Forward: Keeping Your WordPress Traffic Healthy

I hope this article helped you understand why your WordPress site lost traffic and how to get it back. Now that you’ve navigated the immediate crisis and gotten your traffic back on track, you’re in a much stronger position.

Use the lessons you learned here to keep your WordPress site healthy and growing. To help you build on this success and ensure your rankings stay strong, here are some additional resources:

• The Ultimate WordPress SEO Guide – This is our most comprehensive roadmap to ensuring your site is fully optimized for search engines from top to bottom.
• Best WordPress SEO Plugins and Tools That You Should Use – Once you have recovered your traffic, these tools can help you find new keyword opportunities and track your competitors.
• How to Monitor Your WordPress Website Server Uptime – Technical downtime is a silent killer of website traffic. This guide teaches you how to set up free automated alerts so you know the exact minute your site goes offline, allowing you to fix it before you lose visitors and SEO rankings.
• Proper WordPress Update Order – Many traffic drops happen right after a messy update. This tutorial teaches you the exact order to safely update your core software, plugins, and themes to avoid breaking your site.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post Why Your WordPress Site Lost Traffic (And How to Get It Back) first appeared on WPBeginner.

In this 130th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast, Birgit Pauli-Haack is joined by Tammie Lister to discuss the latest developments in WordPress, Gutenberg, and the broader ecosystem. The conversation opens with Tammie sharing insights from her new role at Convesio, where she works on product collaboration within hosting and payments.

The episode highlights Tammie’s upcoming WordCamp Europe talk, focusing on the concept of “human in the loop” with AI. She emphasizes the importance of integrating humanity into AI processes, ensuring that humans are involved throughout, not just at the beginning or end. Both speakers reflect on how AI empowers learning and creativity, with Tammy sharing personal stories about using AI for education and art.

A significant portion is devoted to the anticipated release of WordPress 7.0, which was delayed to accommodate more thorough testing for real-time collaboration features, especially in less powerful hosting environments. Birgit Pauli-Haack and Tammie commend the community for developing a comprehensive testing suite and discuss the challenges and importance of performance, infrastructure, and backward compatibility.

Other highlights include community plugin updates, especially around AI, collaborative editing with Claude by Gary Pendergast, and the growing list of AI providers and skills for WordPress. The duo reviews notable Gutenberg plugin updates (22.9 and 23.0), exploring enhancements such as improvements to the UI component packages, block library features, command palette, and upcoming media editing tools.

The episode wraps up with excitement about continued innovation, the empowerment AI brings to different skill levels, and the ongoing evolution of WordPress as a robust content management and collaboration platform.

Show Notes / Transcript

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

Show Notes

Tammie Lister

• WordPress | X (former Twitter) | BlueSky
• Website tammielister.com/
• WordCamp Europe  Human in the loop means something

WordPress 7.0

• WordPress 7.0 Release Party Updated Schedule
• distributed-rtc-performance-testing
• Roster of design tools per block (WordPress 7.0 edition)

Community Contributions

• Building a block theme from scratch – Workshop resources
• Claudaborative Editing 0.4: Twice the fun!
• AI Across The WP Ecosystem

Gutenberg Releases

• What’s new in Gutenberg 22.9? (8 April)
• What’s new in Gutenberg 23.0? (22 April)
• Media Editor experiment: add experimental image editor and cropper

Stay in Touch

Transcript

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Welcome to our 130th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. In today’s episode, we will talk about WordPress 7.0, Gutenberg 22.9 and 23.0 WordCamp Europe and block themes and so much more. I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and a full core contributor at the WordPress Open Source project sponsored by Automattic. And with me on the show is my longtime friend and regular guest Tammie Lister. And she’s a core committer, chief product officer at Convesio and was the co-lead of the first phase of Gutenberg. Tammie, it’s wonderful to have you in on the show.

Tammie Lister: I’m so pleased to be here.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Thank you. Thank you for the time. So how are you today?

Tammie Lister: I’m great, thank you. How are you?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I’m good, I’m good. You started a new job. So what are you working on in your new position?

Tammie Lister: I’m incredibly lucky that I get to facilitate and collaborate on products within Convesio hosting, and we’re working on a range of different things. We work on both hosting and payments along with some other products. And I’m really excited to be able to do that and kind of grow with that team.

WordCamp Europe

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s wonderful. Wonderful. Yeah. Well, congratulations. So. And you are also a speaker at WordCamp Europe. Your title is Human in the Loop means something and we probably learn what it means.

Tammie Lister: Yeah. So we always kind of had this idea with AI that the human in the loop, maybe it’s just like the prompting that you start with doing and you’re like at the start of the being the human in the loop. And I think as kind of we’re learning to be with AI and we’re learning to see AI as more of integrated. My talk is about how when we use the term human in a loop and I think kind of people just drop it now into product making processes and they drop it into anything that they’re doing. It should be various points in that loop, should be where humans are not just at the start and then having something kind of chucked out of them by AI just produced. That’s not the human being actually in the loop. That’s the human being at the beginning and the end of the loop. Rather than being integrated. That’s kind of the one angle of it and the other is that AI really needs to kind of be integrated in our lives. It already is, but it actually needs to be integrated, not just forced and therefore it needs to learn to kind of integrate with us and it needs to learn to be with us. There are various technologies that are doing that and in that talk I’m going to kind of explore how that happens and how that happens from a product perspective as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, well, that’s going to be really interesting because I, what I, my experience is more like the, all of a sudden the humans become the bottleneck and then some programmers try to work around that and say, okay, we need to get AI, be smarter, but you…

Tammie Lister: still do the opposite. I think if we take the best of humans and combine it with the best of AI, we have the best future.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I think so too. Yeah. Because humanity is all that’s left. Right. And that needs to serve that.

Tammie Lister: And if we don’t have AI with that splash of humanity, one where some of us aren’t going to use it and we, we can evangelize as much for people to use it as possible, but people are going to have a bit of reaction to it and also it’s, it’s going to be kind of that friction when we do use it and going to be like talking to kind of a calculator or a fridge all the time. It’s not going to kind of. And I’m not talking about giving it a cute name or making it kind of that or anthem performance. I can never say that word, that word. That’s not what I’m talking about, talking about and talking about just being able to have a splash of humanity with it and, and how that AI can learn from us as much as we can learn from AI.

And we also, it’s that augmentation as part of it. So I think we’re all learning about how AI can be used both in part of our process as well and how it can make us better at what we do. And you know, there’s this kind of 10x all these kind of things. I think that’s quite a flippant thing because that’s like, well no, we were doing the best we could do before. It just means that we now have the abilities through doing this. So yeah, I’m kind of forming it at the moment and it’s going in lots of different angles and I’ve got to kind of try and take it in one straight angle. But I know for me and many other people, AI in particular the last year it’s been very empowering both from the work that they do and in the kind of personal life. So hopefully there’ll be some take home on things you can use as much as kind of sharing the maybe a more optimistic future perspective.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah I feel the same way. I feel totally empowered to. Yeah. To submit PRs, create more documentation and all that and. And also for writing. Yeah. With English as a second language it’s so much richer when you learn from. From AI to kind of different angles and all that. So it’s a. It’s a really interesting.

Tammie Lister: The point you said about learn from and I think that that’s something really important that we can learn from AI and sometimes we. I cannot remember. I was actually found an article I cannot remember again but there was an article about like it being unlocking education for people. And I know there’s like different conversations about where that is and where your sources are for that, but it actually can like the things that I have learned and the things that I have been able to expand my knowledge base with because I now have access to it that I didn’t have access research PA different things. I’ve been able to. I have one of these things I use in my open claw that’s called Explain this. It’s a skill but it explains it how I understand it. As for me which is a very unique way that I understand things. But it will say it like that. Then it will relate to the job I do. Then it will lead to the areas of interest that I have and I’ve refined that skill to talk to me. Not many people nobody else can do that and I hadn’t got that before so been able to do that and give it things initially do that and then help me break things down has been really really, really important to me.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah that’s the most. The application that I use it most is actually to learn things .

Tammie Lister: Explain this as I would understand this.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So I. I had on my flight to. So I was in Costa Rica and I was on a flight that didn’t have any WI fi and But I still was able to. To take my laptop and open it up and ask a question because I had Olama installed and I had one of the. One of the LLMs there and I learned about Transformers and all that and you can actually ask it to explain it to me like I’m a five year old. And then it gets further and further. There is a whole education school out there that wants the kids to go and learn for themselves and not in a. In a complete setting. I think I would thrive in that because I could they had yeah. Dive deeper into topics that I’m interested in and never Come out. Yeah.

Tammie Lister: I think even, even for me from personal, like creating art with it, doing all these kind of different things like it has been to me. Yeah. So I’m hoping like I’m still forming my talk because I’m a bit of a last minute in that sense. It’s not that last minute, but yeah, five weeks, right? Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: You always do your own pictures, right?

Tammie Lister: Well, I may not. I don’t know.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: You may not.

Tammie Lister: I’m curious about could, could I get AI to create like me? That’s something I’m exploring because it feels like it might be right if it took my pictures. If it took. I don’t know. I have not decided yet on that angle. So more to come on that I’ve been exploring how AI can take my art as a source. I already paint with AI what AI creates. I paint that. So the full circle might be that AI creates from my artwork.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Interesting thing. Interesting. Yeah.

WordPress 7.0 / Announcements

All right, so let’s dive back to WordPress. We have a few announcements. One, the biggest one is last time we talked here on the podcast WordPress 7.0 still had was scheduled for April 9th. That obviously didn’t happen. And before we get into more details here, the good news, we have a new release date and updated information about WordPress 7.0. May 20th is the latest date. And I also put in the show notes the post that kind of announced that beta release candidate cycle resumes with the next release party that’s scheduled for May 8th at 1500 UTC. And then that kind of starts I think it’s two releases that are quasi beta and then two releases that are quasi release candidates. And also in that discussion, there’s also a discussion that the RTC performance testing script that automatically tests for possible architecture approaches for hostings is about to be released and I’ll share the link to the repository. Dorin, not everybody would need that, mostly hostings. But that was also the reason why things got a little bit delayed. So Tammie, I’m going to try to explain this, how I understood it and the reasoning behind it and you can correct me and elaborate what you feel is important.

So if I understood it correctly, the delay was actually requested by Matt, but in coordination with core committers and the hosting team, because WordPress 7.0’s main feature is a real time collaboration project, and collaborators worked on it for over a year and the goal was to get it into best shape in what it can be for the first release. But it had been a whole wide testing done but it was only on enterprise infrastructure. So with the inclusion into core it also needs to work in less powerful hosting environments and hosting companies didn’t have enough time or tools to actually test it. So during the release cycle there was this feedback that they needed more time and test the feature more so they can enable it for many, many clients. They couldn’t they needed to switch it off and that was not the purpose of that. It should be a wide enough application. So the team created a test suite for the hosting companies and also published a death note on how to create an external provider for this offloading of the resource heavy sync process. Because that’s all of a sudden you have not one person on the. On the screen, you have five maybe. And that increases stuff. Yeah. So that’s my understanding.

Tammie Lister: Correct, it was also not necessarily the delay, but there were also kinds of pieces of it table and kind of all right, the pieces were kind of needed to be done or. Or were done and kind of like that. That has implications. I think the too long don’t read is real time collab is complicated. Real time collab is very complicated from an infrastructure perspective and we need to have thorough testing across every implementation. And one of the things which when you think about it, it’s for humans to do real time collaboration. But actually one of the most interesting things is not humans doing real time collaboration.

And actually now we have the testing suite we can actually test with not humans doing it. That’s why I’m kind of fascinated to do some of this testing and that can be even more load bearing. So if you think about like someone like I think one of the cases was like if it’s on a small hosting I only have one person. Well not if that one person gets very excited about agents because that person could have suddenly lots of agents even though their own like a tiny little bit of hosting and they’re not enterprise. They could have made themselves enterprise and they couldn’t have made themselves into that situation just by being at the forward of like agentic work. So we had that balance like on in 7.0 we’re promoting be forward with AI. Agentic is like a word. You might as well like to take a sip of tea every time you hit the word agentic. I don’t think alcohol would be super tissue.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, what a thinking game.

Tammie Lister: I’d be tea drunk. I really would. But it. So people are going to want to push and test it. Right. So I think it is. I would much rather people were cautious with something that someone that works in hosting that would bring down hosting. But I think it is hard for everybody involved when we have to pause a release, when we have to say oops, we’re not doing it now. And oops is one way but hey, we’re not doing it now kind of help. It’s hard. People do not do this lightly. They do not say we’re not going to do release lightly. So, you know, yeah, there’s a lot to be kind of thought about that having been involved with one of the longest ones that was stopped before. It’s a lot for humans to have that. I love that we have a testing suite now. I love that we can have that. This feature is going to potentially in 7.1 and in the patches and in the point release afterwards. And I don’t want to be a doomsayer, but we’re going to have to adjust it, we’re going to have to perform it, we’re going to have to get that feedback. So it needs to be the best bet to go live with and then we need to take it from there. So. But this is now it’s in the best shape it could be, so it can kind of go from there.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So. Yeah, yeah. And you just mentioned that there’s also for the updates and coordination, there’s an. There will be an extra table added to WordPress as well to manage that polling and the intermediate storage of things.

Tammie Lister: That’s not a light thing to do that. That is like, like I, I said it very flippantly, but it’s not a flippant thing.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, no. And there needs to be really thought process in there because it’s gonna be in WordPress for the next 20 years.

Tammie Lister: That’s like building something to the house, right?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So you cannot just tear it down because you don’t like it anymore.

Tammie Lister: No, that’s. That’s definitely.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: People build on it. Yeah. Yes. So May 20th is the next release date and whoever hasn’t tested their plugins and themes with a you get another. Almost a month of grace. Time to do it now. Yeah, don’t wait. Do it now. Sometimes I say don’t wait. Procrastinate now. But this is not the case here. No.

Tammie Lister: And I think you really, if you don’t ever test your plugins on ever releases, test them on this one. Not just because of editing, but also because of the admin interface changes as well. Not changes in a big way, just in a. Just enough that maybe do some testing.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And there’s Also the minimum PHP version is changed to 7.4. Have a bit of a look. Yeah.

Tammie Lister: Just spend half an hour.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. See if it blows up or not. Yeah. And there’s only a late addition to the developer notes. The roster of design tools per block that have been since 6.7 I think it’s now updated to version WebPR 7.0. And one of my next projects is that I create. Create a plugin that actually has a few more table block features. So it doesn’t. Is so yeah rudimentary anymore but especially the sticky header when you have 90 rows in a table. Yeah, that would be really helpful.

Tammie Lister: Yeah I love that because the table block to me is one that I always end up having to do custom work on or I have to do it. If anything in my work is going to take whenever I’m doing don’t always do sites but whenever I do do sites if there’s anything comparison tables such a common thing we end up doing. Right. Like or even if you’re going to do like pricing or comparison whatever you’re going to do at most sites at some point if they’re a SaaS or if they’re a product based they’re going to have something like that on. You always have to do something with CSS on there or even down to like how you put image. Putting images inside there and it’s a bit nickety and all those kind of ways.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s all. Yeah there are some projects out there that I probably won’t tackle but it’s the sticky header and then that you can. The first column can be styled differently than the rest of it and then also have a sticky first column so when you horizontally scroll that you still have the lines in there and merge and unmerge for cells because that really helps. So. But I will see how far it gets. I submitted it to the first version slightly version tiny version to the blog repository and there are 763 ahead of me. So it probably takes two to three weeks. That’s fine with me. Yeah.

Tammie Lister: But I mean that’s a pretty good.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Compared to three months before, you know. Five months or six months. Yeah. So I’m. I’m not worried about that. And it’s gonna be on GitHub anyway.

Community Contributions

So. Yeah, there are other contributions, community contributions. One. I just wanted to let you know that if you have subscribed to the Gutenberg Times weekly edition, you know about that. But it’s the. I have published my workshop resources from the Building a block theme from scratch from WordCamp Asia. And it has all the resources that you need. You have the kind of a little slide deck, but it also has a reference theme and then content that you can put into your studio. Has instructions how to set up WordPress Studio or use Playground and then step by step instructions how to rebuild the theme with the site editor and not touch code. So see how far you get if you want to learn that. But you should be able to do this within an hour or two or three. But you need some familiarity with the site editor, definitely. And the Create block theme plugin. And so that’s for you in the show notes. The next one is maybe you can talk about it. Claudia Borative Collaborative editing with Claude by Gary Pendergast here has a new plugin. Yeah, yeah.

Tammie Lister: So apparently it’s twice the fun. So it’s kind of what I was saying about like clap of editing is great, but one of the things I think a lot of people have been thinking of is like, oh, yes, so that’s humans. No, no, no.

Tammie Lister: What if it could be agents? And this is really worth checking out to have a look at that. Gary is a long time. Is a core committer. Long time worked on. Gutenberg works on in Automattic. So he’s. He’s definitely got the experience to work on it and he’s definitely kind of brewed this up. Super excited about it. It is Claude only at the moment. I think there’s plans to kind of make it a little bit kind of expansive there. Maybe that dropped last night. It’s work in progress and it’s been worked on, so I love that. But to me, this is where I get a bit more excited as someone that’s already trained my. It’s a me problem, but I’ve already trained my open Claude to write like me. Not that it’s going to just write without me being a human in the loop, but because of that, me being able to collaborate with. I call it Exo. With Exo, it means that I can have that conversation, that I can do it within WordPress, which is really powerful for me. I. I do it in Obsidian at the moment. I have been able to take that in and do it in that environment. I was doing something before this plugin.

I was kind of doing like a. A faked version. I had. There was a UK children show called City show and bear with me on this. And I ended up with the characters like doing agent work together just to test collaborative editing for myself because I wanted to see if it could be done and it’s pretty effective to be able to have agents talking to each other and testing. So it is a really good experience. Maybe you’ve got one. Again, it doesn’t have to be that you are as a human doing it. Maybe you have an agent that is looking at your grammar. Maybe you have an agent that is specializing in images. Maybe have a. So you can have agents that are specializing in different things or you can even have someone else’s agent come and do different things for SEO or different. Different stuff. So I think that’s the thing. Like if you are enterprise, you probably have agents that work across the company that do very specialist skills and then you could have them come into the editor. So projects like this are really interesting for that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. No, it’s absolutely fascinating, the whole thing. Yeah. And if you really want to go really, really deep in AI across the.

Tammie Lister: You need snacks for this post.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, definitely. So there is a James LePage who is the head of AI at Automattic, but also the team rep or team lead for the core AI team. He has put together a blog post with. I haven’t counted it, but I’m thinking more than 70 or 80 links about anything and everything that’s done with AI in the WordPress ecosystem from the community AI providers. So WordPress 7 has this connector page where there are three AI providers by default that you can install. But the community also came very fast up with the providers for other LLMs like Mistral for Europe or Open Router provider or Olama provider or Alibaba. So you get a link for all those. Those will not be displayed in default, but once you install the plugin you can connect them to the things and then a lot of plugins that have already implemented the Abilities API. Yeah. From ACF to Jetpack to Fluid Design System for Elementor, Divi, WP and main WP maintenance kind of dashboard. They all come up with mcps. So you can connect your agents with them if you want to. You totally can ignore that segment on the podcast if you’re not interested. Agent skills. They’re not only the WordPress agent skills, but others have also automatic, for instance, published agent skills.

Tammie Lister: Or those skills are invaluable. I’m just gonna say. Yeah, those skills are absolutely. They should be required in any work.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: that you’re doing, right? Yeah, I don’t do any. Anything WordPress development without those agents. Yeah, they’re definitely required reading for your LLMs, your coding agents. Yeah. And then infrastructure agency, Enterprise Adoption Community. So It’s a really long. And I’m going back to that post multiple times in the last two weeks since. Since it was published. So I wanted everybody to know about that too. Yeah, that’s it. Any thoughts for now or would I forgot.

Tammie Lister: Love going there and seeing all the amazing stuff people are building as well, which I think is really important. And to think this is the list today and that list is only going to get bigger.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I think after the last two weeks, the. Since it was published, a lot of things already happened. So I’m kind of thinking it’s the same for me. It’s the same situation like it was when Gutenberg was introduced and I was kind of putting the Gutenberg times together. I’m kind of. Oh, I need to kind of.

Tammie Lister: Yeah. Which is I. I love that problem.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh yeah, totally.

Tammie Lister: We are being creative and we are creating cool stuff.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely. And I’m really amazed by how, how people come up with things and how you work with it, how my co workers work with it, how I explore.

Tammie Lister: Enabling people to have ideas that they, the ideas have sat in their brains or they haven’t been capable of doing this. It’s not so they, they haven’t had the either the language to like the skill language to do. It’s not that they’re not capable, is it that they haven’t had the knowledge to do it right. Everybody is super capable. It’s just empowered them to be able to do it for themselves. Maybe they were a designer, now they can do development, but the developer, now they can do some more designer stuff and then also pairing up with people. I’ve seen a lot of that where people be going like, okay, well this has enabled us to collaborate easier and faster as well. So you don’t just have to be isolated on your own, just talking to a group of agents, which is kind of sad if you only do that. But that’s okay. That’s my life. But you know, actually collaborating with people who are also doing this stuff, like the buzz like that you can get from that is really like I went to Cloud Fest a month ago now and just talking with people about this stuff again, getting that kind of vibe about, oh well, here’s the stuff that I use or here’s the stuff that I use where like an instantly you level up your stack, and you level up what you’re doing and come away with some cool ideas. So every week I talk to someone about this, I come up with a ridiculously long list of tools of cool stuff to try out or I see posts like this, I’m like, okay, well now. And one thing I do, I share the bookmarks. So I’m kind of like getting those bookmarks reminded me so I can be like, okay, well now I kind of pull these out and then I explore those bookmarks. You can even give it to your agent and have a look at your bookmarks with your agent. You really want to do that? Just saying.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, I talk with my husband about it every day. He. He kind of discovered the. Because his company is kind of using Codex and I’m using more clothes so we kind of can combine it. And now I have found a plugin for Claude for Codex. So I’m kind of your interception is there? Yeah, like the. The movie is kind of where your brain kind of clicks a little bit and then you kind of. Okay, moving on. But yeah, his work is totally different than what I do. But we are using the tools that are there and it’s quite an interesting conversation every time.

Tammie Lister: Yeah, great space to be working in.

What’s Released – Gutenberg 22.9

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely. So now we come to the section of what’s released and we have two Gutenberg plugin releases to talk about. One was 22.9 that was released on April 8th and it has a few things. Many of them were actually for the real time collaboration and some of the bug fixes are still there. But yeah, there’s also a lot of work being done in the component space.

Enhancements

And the WordPress UI package is actually has some empty states for the components and displaying some placeholders content when sections have no data and all that. So that is actually throughout the whole WordPress UI package and interesting for developers who use it. The same with the alert dialogue primitive that you can tab into. And there are a lot of other good things in there. Check out the Storybook for the UI packages. Are you working with those packages?

Tammie Lister: Yeah, to me it’s a general nudge. I think a lot of. So one of the experiences I’ve seen with plugin developers at the moment, not just in the work I do, but in general talking at cloudfest or otherwise, is those that maybe hadn’t used it before now actually we’re talking about like with agentic coding because of the skills and because of the ease that they can point to the skills and there actually is one, they’re starting to be able to use them way more. It’s not no longer a case of go to Storybook, click on a component, be able to pull and then work out from the pace between Figma and that was actually like it seemed easy, but it was quite a gap for people to function in.

And because you can actually use the skill and then you can be like. So one of the plugins I love is Superpowers. It’s a plugin that allows you to do brainstorming. I love brainstorming with the bots. And so I can just be like, okay, this is what I want to do. And now tell me before you do it. I’m a bit of a control freak that way. And then it can kind of come back, but it will. These are the skills I want you to use. Tell me what components you’re going to use. Look at this repo. And you can literally be like, so for me, here’s my. Here’s my dusty plugin. Can you look at my desk? I’m calling my plugin dusty. Can you look at my dusty plugin? Can you come up with my plan of how I would fit these into the dusty plugin that I’ve made? And I’ve done this, some of my older stuff and it’s been like, okay, yes, here’s the newer components that you could do. And I’m like, well, thanks. And it will be able to parse it, come out of a plan. Then you work with it. And that’s. It’s pretty. Very impressive that it can do that and it can pick it. So I think leaning into that being your guide and if you say stay true to. So say like, what is the native use of tabs? What is the native use of these components? It gets it really well. So.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that’s how I approach it too, you know, to kind of point it to the repos and see if you, you don’t have to come up with things. Yeah, it’s kind of.

Tammie Lister: Yeah, yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And that’s also for. For plugin developers who have their own interfaces. Yeah. That they have to maintain.

Tammie Lister: Yeah. You can get rid of like 80% of your interface that you don’t have to maintain. And to a good point, to that often people think, okay, well, it means that I therefore don’t have any personality or I don’t have any style or I don’t have anything. No, no, no. What you can do is you can bring the buttons in. I’m a little bit of a purist about I still want the primary button to be the primary button and I don’t want to like a secondary and all those kinds of things. But you can bring styling into it. You can bring graphics, you can bring headers, you can bring different tonal stuff into it. But just if everybody knows what a primary button is in WordPress, no matter what plugin they’re using, that is fantastic because it’s also already tested by Accessibility Team. If it’s updated, it’s updated for everybody, which is amazing. And yeah, it’s so much easier going forward. And it’s responsive out of the box.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s definitely easier for the user. They don’t have to learn a new interface for every plugin. And if they have.

Tammie Lister: Now it’s. Now it’s to this, to the right side, now it’s to the bottom, now it’s to the. No, it’s always. Tabs are here and I think just stabilizing the interface to that. Once we stabilize every experience, we can do some wacky stuff, we can bring some awesome graphics, we can bring some personality back to it, but we have the experience being the same and I think we have to separate maybe the experience from the visual art. And if we do that, we have a thing that works really well, but also is really shockingly beautiful as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, yeah. So in the block library we have some additional features. One is that the black ground gradient support can now be combined with the background images. So that’s really cool because then you have an overlay and you can have this really shiny designs there. I love that.

Tammie Lister: Now that seems like that’s a kind of small thing just there. But honestly, that’s a major thing for theme design, being able to have that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And there is an experimental forms block and if you haven’t tried it yet, you need to open and open up the Gutenberg Plugin Experiments page and check it. But it now also supports hidden fields and that makes it much more feasible to be used in form if you want to put your forms together. And I don’t know if you can. I need to play around with it some more. I haven’t yet. But what happens with the action and where does it go is definitely something that I need to figure out there. Because that’s the biggest part on form plugins that you can. Where does the data go? Yeah. So what else do we have?

Tammie Lister: Commands. I think we go down to the command block, don’t we? Oh, command palette. I see blocks everywhere. Apparently. So on the command palette we have that we add sections to Command palette and introduce recently used functionality. This is such a quality of life.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. Especially when you can get more commands in, you never find it. So the search is really important.

Tammie Lister: This is interesting because I never used to use this. Sorry, confession time. I never used to use this, but I use it all the time now. It’s weird. I think I use it all the time because I use it all the time now on Mac. It is strange and I think it’s just like I now expect everything to have it. It’s. It’s a weird thing. So. Yeah, it makes a lot of functionality to me. Like when it first happened, I was like, nice feature.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I don’t use it. Yeah. But I think I wasn’t going to use it.

Tammie Lister: It was more like. I used to feel that way about voice chat. I’m. I take sometimes some features. I weirdly being that’s my thing, I take a little bit of time to warm up to. But this one I did, I definitely could see the use, but now I. It’s part of my workflow and I can definitely see, like, I find that I know how to hit it and I will hit it and I will use it, so. And I want it in everything now. So.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Nice. Yeah. Just a way of caution. You need to enable that in the experiments page as well. There’s a workflow palette experiment, one of those. It’s getting longer and longer. I still need to write that post that explains all those experiments because there’s no documentation. So. Yeah.

Tammie Lister: Somehow they’re kind of hidden down the back.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, they’re hidden because they’re waiting for feedback. But you can’t give any feedback when you don’t know how it works. So it’s all a little bit circular.

Tammie Lister: Excursion is features.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So. And even the description is like. What does that even mean? Yeah. So. And. And then we go down to the experiments in the changelog and the Post Editor is an experiment for. To look like the Page Editor in the Site Editor. And now it also has some field. Yeah. For excerpts and sticky and. And all that revision.

Tammie Lister: Full fleshed addition to it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And I have found that certain things don’t work in the Post Editor, but they only work in the Site Editor. So bringing in the Post Editor to the Site Editor would help with some of those features. So there’s another experiment that we talked a little bit about, the previous release, because it came into 22.8. That’s the experimental guidelines. They were called content guidelines. Now they’re only guidelines because it’s clear it’s content and they have been refactored and improved with Typescript. I just wanted to point that out. That’s something that you. When you have agents coming to your website, you can guide them through your guidelines on how. What to do with it and what not to do and all that. So it’s a really good interface to look at. Well, there are a lot of PRs in here, but I think the next one that I want to point out is Gutenberg 23.0.

Gutenberg 23.0

Tammie Lister: Two versions of one.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: One done. And that was only released this week. We are recording this on February of February we’re recording this.

Tammie Lister: I’m not doing March again.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: No March. We are jumping right into April and it’s April 24th. We are recording this. And Gutenberg 23.0 was released on April 22nd. Again. A lot of components updates for WordPress, the UI, they’re really hopping on that. It’s phenomenal.

Tammie Lister: And honestly, I’m just gonna say that is needed. If you’re building stuff, you’re building applications or we’ve been talking about like themes. The theme of this is have fun, build stuff, do things. This is what we need. We need this interface to be our LEGO kit to be able to do that. That’s something like I have way too long a list of things I want to play with and me and Exo are going to have some fun time with all these components. So that’s exactly what people are doing. And the more these components we have, the more fun people can have building. And that’s. That’s the cool thing about this.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, No, I definitely let my AI soon because I’m building a plugin. Right.

Enhancements

But anyway, so in the block library, there’s one thing to point out that I selected was that the search block has a fix now and the color settings actually apply also to the input fields when the button is disabled. Because sometimes you don’t need a button, but you need the color settings to persist. The tabs block got a few changes. It was actually refactored from the previous version. That’s why it didn’t make it to WordPress 7.0. So contributors are really working on it to get it ready for 7.1. Yeah, we definitely have some more when it gets to. Out of experiment.

Tammie Lister: Very wanted block.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s a wanted block for everybody. Yeah, or change them. And Here is the. In 23.0 was the name change from the Guidelines Experiments component to. From content guidelines to Guidelines. And it’s out of experimentation.

Tammie Lister: Shortcuts for moving blocks via tool tips. Maybe you can explain this one. I don’t think I’ve kind of seen this one in Block Editor.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, the space shortcuts for moving Blocks via tool tips. Yeah.

Tammie Lister: Oh, okay. That’s kind of cool. So it’s actually just kind of visualizing the shortcuts, which is really good. So you actually get the shortcuts rather than having to bring up the shortcut panel. Oh, okay. That’s super good. So I kind of didn’t see that one. I love that. I love finding sneak surprises of cool stuff. I’m just saying, like that is also the cool thing about all these releases. Sometimes you find one that’s pretty cool.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And they’re buried through all the technology one. Yeah. Yeah. So I was at, in. At the meetup in Salzburg and this week and it’s only an hour and a half from here with. With a train. I love going by train. So I did some work. One of the features that people are really talk to or kind of that talk to them is actually the columns block in a paragraph. What’s in 7.0 where you can just highlight the paragraph block and then say give me columns and then you can put it in two columns. And that’s just so, so easy because you don’t have to fiddle around with columns. With the columns block, you don’t have to measure which one is faster because it does it automatically. So that’s a really nice feature.

Tammie Lister: And quality of life things is things we always would do. And it just. When the editor does expectations of what you would do, that’s when it’s next level. And it’s also refinement. It shows maturity of the editor, maturity of using it and also listening to user feedback.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right. And the other. So we didn’t talk about it, but I don’t want to prolong this, but do you have a favorite feature from Webpoint 7.0 apart from the real time collaboration and the AI connectors?

Tammie Lister: Apart from real time collaboration and the AI, you’re just picking all like my favorite children and then take. Can I actually go a little bit wide and include.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Tammie Lister: Any tiny little quality of life bug fix? Because I think any track ticket we manage to close or quality of life bug fix that comes in that and we don’t necessarily highlight them. And I know we’re talking about features and we’re talking about stuff like that. That. But I would also say apart from that, anything in Storybook or that say or a component or anything like that, that that is going to be my favorite because it just means that we can build more cool stuff. But honestly, like yeah, it’s. It’s not a feature but it’s like any tickets we closed Anything we improved that isn’t visible or seen, that’s amazing for me.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So what really got the people excited about 7.0 is the new revisions panel with 23.0 in Gutenberg. It also comes to templates, template parts and to patterns, which is really kind of going through the whole editor and edit screen where you can have the revision screen screen.

Tammie Lister: I am very happy to see that gone because that slider needs to be buried. Bless it. It is old. We did it a while ago and

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, it definitely needed to go. But I think the implementation interface.

Tammie Lister: Not an interface of today. We can debate what the interface today is, but it is not that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, I like that it’s it. It knows about blocks and it has these night color changes and you can. You actually can do it in the block editor. You don’t have to go out of that and come in again.

Tammie Lister: You have to go do it. I’m all for being in different frames of mind thinking when you can move to different spaces, but no, no, not in this one.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So yeah, I pointed that out. It’s coming, people, even if you missed it in 7.0.

Tammie Lister: So your favorite feature coming. Because you asked me mine. So is that your favorite apart from AI and apart from collaborative energy? Because you’re not allowed to pick those either.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: If I click that. Yeah. Well, I like that. You can have now video backgrounds in external video URLs for cover. For the cover block is really cool. And I like the revisions. It’s definitely the. Yeah, because I did the Source of Truth and there’s all the things in there. But I looked at the revisions and it was 64 and I said, oh, it can handle that. That’s awesome. IT can handle 64 revisions in the block editor in the first thing. Yeah. So I also like the Source of Truth. Where is it? Here it is. I need the list in front of me so you kind of remember what’s coming. WordPress 7.0 and my Internet just gave out. No, Tammy is still here. Can’t be the Internet. Oh, I definitely like the breadcrumbs block. Yeah, that’s really cool.

Tammie Lister: Yeah. And that actually really. Because many times you’ve had to hack around it using like the navigation block or doing something really funky.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And. And you need a plugin for that. Yeah. And it’s such a.

Tammie Lister: Literally I’ve seen people use the navigation and then just do like a port of it into a plugin or something like that. That’s what they’ve kind of taken or hard They’ve just done some weird stuff. I’ve seen some weird combinations break. So having a native one is really good.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Really good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then the other one was the gallery lightbox that it actually has navigation now. Yeah. You can go through back and forth. Yes. So it was kind of missing from the last implementation, but yeah. So that’s pretty much it. It’s kind of. I. I like all of it. But yeah, those are the. The favorite ones.

Tammie Lister: So it’s honestly like. I think that’s the thing. Not picking the two. That is going to be good. But for me it’s captive editing. Again, not with humans.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I. I only excluded it because we talked about it before already.

Tammie Lister: I know. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And. And it kind of. Yeah, yeah. So what’s that?

Tammie Lister: That’s going to be interesting to. To see in demos. Right. Rather than having to have two people on stage doing it, we’re going to be able to see in demos like having non humans.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. You know. No, I definitely want to try Gary Bendergast plugin to kind of figure out how I can use that to my. Because I’m in WordPress all the time with the good work times and I need some help there. Yeah. So. And I had a few workflows kind of with how do I find stuff and all that already and like a research. So. Right.

Tammie Lister: I have a first draft in for you could get the change logs, pull them in first of all.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, we can. So but what’s also.

What’s in Active Development or Discussed

And now we come to the what’s in active development and discussed and one of them is the media editor experiment that a group of contributors are working on. That’s a new component. It started with the image cropper. Yeah. Kind of have a better image cropper that kind of. Because the one that we have where it just kind of enlarge it and then kind of figure it out where to go. Yeah. I need a drag and drop kind of thing to crop things.

Tammie Lister: And also that the native cropper doesn’t always work.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right. Yeah, yeah. So Ramon and Andrew are working on that and they had. They have it. It’s still a PR that’s not yet merged, but you can test it in Playground and I hope you can test it in Playground now. I think they wanted to put it in today and. And hook it up to the experiment page so you can test it. But it’s when you’re on an image block and you click then on the cropping tool, it opens up a new modal and then you can do all. You can rotate. You can enlarge and resize it, and you can crop it and you can do all kinds of things. Okay, it’s merged now. Excellent. Thank you. So I’ll merge.

Tammie Lister: So I think it’s still experimental, but it is merged. So even better than Playground. It is merged and you can try it on experimental. I think based on what I’m looking at on the PR, that’s what it

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Looks like, but it’s not in 23.0 yet. It’s because it was merged after. Yeah.

Tammie Lister: She says in a big voice.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: A big voice. It’s in 23.1. Yeah.

Tammie Lister: Oh, yes. Okay. Try to remember numbering. That would be good. 23.1. I went straight to 24.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, but it’s going. But you can test it through the Gutenberg nightly because that’s already in the playground. So it’s really cool. It’s so early that people want to need some input from the users. So go and play with it. And with that, we’re coming to the end. It’s been a wonderful experience with you, Tammie. Thank you so much. Is there anything that you want to talk about that you didn’t get to. Because I restricted you.

Tammie Lister: You did not restrict me at all. Thank you so much.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right, well, how can people find you when they want to look for

Tammie Lister: You as normal, comatose to all the things. And I look forward to seeing whoever’s going to WordCamp Europe as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Awesome. Awesome. So, as always, the show notes will be published in GutenbergTimes.com podcast. This is episode 130. And if you have any questions or suggestions or news that you want us to include, send them to changelogutenbergtimes.com that’s an email address changelogutenbergtimes.com so I thank you all for listening. It was good to be with you, Tammie, and thank you for your time. And this is goodbye until the next time. Bye.

Tammie Lister: Bye. Bye.

Hi there,

Good news, dear friends. WordPress 7.0 has a new release date! May 20, 2026. Announced on Friday, the post featured the updated release party schedule: All release parties happen in the Make #core Slack channel. Everyone is welcome to join.

This week, I also traveled to Salzburg, Austria to discuss WordPress 7.0 features with the local community. It was a great joy to meet so many fellow community organizers from WordCamps Vienna, Europe and Kampala, as well as the local meetup organizers and participants from Salzburg.

Enjoy the hopefully restful weekend.

Yours,
Birgit

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

Ray Morey, The Repository has the skinny about WordPress 7.0 Gets a New May 20 Release Date

Jonathan Desrosiers and Max Schmeling of the WordPress Core team has published Distributed RTC performance testing, a bash/PHP load-testing tool for the real-time collaboration HTTP polling endpoint coming in WordPress 7.0. Hosting providers can run scenarios — baseline, single idle, sustained polling, burst concurrency, and two-client editing — then submit results directly to WordPress.org. Only curl and bash are required, with WP-CLI optional. If you’re a host and need reporting credentials, ping Jonathan Desrosiers (@desrosj) or Amy Kamala (@amykamala) in the #hosting Slack channel.

JuanMa Garrido introduces the WordPress Core Dev Environment Toolkit, a desktop app for macOS, Windows, and Linux that eliminates the painful setup that burns through Contributor Days before anyone writes a line of code. Powered by WordPress Playground, it bundles Git, Node, and npm as JS/WASM — so you install the app, click a button, and you’re cloning wordpress-develop, running a dev server, and generating Trac patches without touching a terminal.

The latest Dev note arrival brings you Roster of design tools per block (WordPress 7.0 edition). I updated a previous version for WordPress 7.0, summarizing design support changes across the last ten releases. WordPress 7.0 adds seven new blocks — Accordion, Breadcrumbs, Icon, Math, Post Time to Read, and the Term Query family — and renames Verse to Poetry. I also removed the Pattern Overrides/Block Bindings column, since both features are now opt-in per block and attribute, making a single checkbox no longer meaningful.

Gutenberg 23.0 ships a revisions panel for templates, template parts, and patterns (experimental), and completes the Site Editor’s Design › Identity panel with Site Title and Tagline fields alongside the existing Logo and Icon. Real-time collaboration gets legacy meta box compatibility via a new opt-in flag, plus reliability fixes for concurrent edits and corrupted sync updates. 174 PRs merged, with 8 first-time contributors.

For the Gutenberg Changelog episode 130, Tammie Lister and I chatted about AI in Art and WordPress, WordPress 7.0 and Real-tine collaboration and Gutenberg plugin release 22.9 and 23.0. The episode will drop in your favorite podcast episode over the weekend. I hope you listen in and enjoy our conversation.

The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #129 Artificial Intelligence, WordPress 7.0 and Gutenberg 22.8 with Beth Soderberg, of BeThink Studio

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

Brian Coords, developer advocate at WooCommerce, walks you through a prototype plugin called WP Content Types, a block-native take on custom post types and fields built directly into the WordPress interface using Data Views and Data Forms. You’ll see AI generate a Recipe content type, configure fields with core components, connect templates through block bindings, and explore a “Fields Only” modern UI. It’s a V1 vision for content modeling that leaves legacy backwards compatibility behind.

Coords implementation goes much further than a similar project “Create Content Model” Autumn Fjeld and Candy Tsai demo’d at WordCamp Asia 2025 in Manila, Philippines. Their repo is available on GitHub including links to the talk and demo video.

In his latest video, Wes Theron walks you through using block dimensions to control layout in WordPress — without touching any CSS. You’ll learn how to find the dimensions panel in the editor and learn when to reach for padding (space inside a block), margin (space around it), block spacing (gaps between child blocks), and minimum height. Each setting gets a practical demo so you can confidently build cleaner, more polished pages with better visual hierarchy.

Alex de Borba makes a pointed case in Why Developers Keep Reaching for Builders Over Block Themes that the “block themes can’t compete” narrative is more habit than fact. With theme.json v3, register_block_style(), synced patterns, and wp_enqueue_block_style(), you can build design systems, reusable components, and performant layouts without proprietary tools — and without locking your clients into someone else’s ecosystem when developer relationships change.

At WordCamp Asia, the WordPress Speed Build Challenge returned for a second round: experienced builders had 30 minutes, a surprise brief revealed live on stage, and nothing but the Full Site Editor — no page builders, no custom code. Watch how they tackle layout, content, styling, and real-time problem-solving under pressure while narrating their decisions. A fun, unscripted window into smart site editor workflows for anyone curious about block-based building. The recording is now available on WordPressTV.

Upcoming Events

The 6th annual Web Agency Summit runs April 27–30, 2026. It’s free, virtual, and built for agency owners ready to stop winging it. Hosted by Vito Peleg, Stephanie Hudson, and Andrew Palmer, four days of live expert sessions cover the full agency arc: Build, Expand, Scale, and Thrive. Speakers include Eugene Levin from Semrush and Karim Marucchi of Crowd Favorite. Think of it as a week-long podcast you keep open while you work.

If you’re in New York on April 29, dev/ai/nyc with Hilary Mason is worth your evening. Hilary Mason — CEO of Hidden Door, founder of Fast Forward Labs, and former Chief Scientist at bit.ly — joins Jesse Friedman, who leads WP Cloud at Automattic, for a fireside chat on AI, creativity, and human-computer interaction. Doors open at 5:30 PM at Automattic’s NoHo space on Crosby Street, with drinks and bites after. Registration is on Luma. The event is free of charge.

The Checkout Summit in-person event just wrapped up in Palermo, Sicily — don’t be sad you missed the arancine and Aperol Spritz. Organizer Rodolfo Melogli of Business Bloomer will reassemble 18+ speakers for the online edition, {Reloaded}, on May 7–8, 2026 starting at just €20. The WooCommerce-focused lineup covers SEO after AI, MCP integrations, hosting security, Shopify comparisons, and scaling strategies — practical sessions, zero fluff, built for developers and agency pros.

Rae Morey, The Repository has the skinny for you in Can’t Make It to Palermo? Checkout Summit Is Going Online in May.

Uganda’s biggest annual student web design competition, Website Projects Competition 2026, takes place on June 9, 2026 at Busoga College, Mwiri. Under the theme “Fueling Innovation Through WordPress,” 20 student teams across three age categories — Cubs (12 & under), Rising Stars (13–18), and Explorers (18+) — compete by building and pitching WordPress websites to a live audience of 200+. Sponsored by Automattic and Woo. Registration and sponsorship are open.

WordPress Accessibility Day 2026 is a free, 24-hour global livestream on October 7–8, 2026, dedicated to accessibility best practices for WordPress developers, designers, and content creators. The volunteer-led nonprofit event includes live captions and ASL interpretation for all sessions, with corrected transcripts published afterward. It’s pre-approved for IAAP continuing education credits. Sponsorships are now open, ranging from $150 Microsponsors to $5,000 Platinum packages.

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

Gina Lucia, freelance writer, published a beginner-friendly walkthrough on what WordPress block patterns are and how to use them for OllieWP. You’ll learn how patterns differ from synced patterns, templates, and template parts, why block themes unlock their full potential for headers, footers, and full-page layouts, and how to browse, preview, insert, and customize curated patterns in Ollie’s pattern library. A handy primer if you’re moving from classic themes into the full site editing experience.

Nathan Wrigley sits down with Brian Gardner to talk block themes, AI, and the future of WordPress design. The Genesis co-creator argues that many developers are still judging the block editor by a five-year-old experience — and missing how far it’s come. He shares his work on Powder, explores how tools like Ollie and Miles are bridging AI-generated design with native WordPress blocks, and asks the question keeping him up at night: do we still need hundreds of themes, or is one solid base theme plus vertical-specific patterns actually the future?

JC Palmes, WebDev Studios and regular guest on the Gutenberg Changelog, makes the case that block themes can replace one-off chaos with repeatable consistency on large team projects. The approach: start with a shared starter theme, build a reusable pattern library, and centralize design decisions in theme.json. She also tackles the less glamorous side — onboarding developers, running QA, and finding the right balance between editorial freedom and long-term maintainability. Practical and team-focused, it’s a playbook worth your time if you’re managing multi-site or multi-developer WordPress work.

Anne Katzeff walks you through using the Cover block as a Hero section with a Call to Action. Starting from default settings, she shows how alignment (wide or full width), overlay color and opacity, minimum height, focal point, and inner block layout work together to create a polished hero.

Katzeff also created a companion video tutorial to follow along with how she manipulates the cover block for her purposes. All very practical and beginner-friendly.

AI in WordPress

Automattic’s head of global expansion James Grierson argues in WordPress: The Operating System of the Agentic Web that WordPress’s open-source transparency, 90,000+ plugin ecosystem, REST API, and MCP support make it the ideal foundation for AI agents. WordPress.com’s full MCP write capabilities — launched in March 2026—let agents create and manage content via natural conversation. Challenges remain around legacy code, inconsistent plugin quality, and PHP perception, but Grierson sees AI itself as the solution to those very problems.

Inspired by a trip to WordCamp Asia 2026 in Mumbai, Chandra Patel built the WordPress REST API Playground — a free plugin developed entirely with Claude Code in just 2–3 hours. The three-panel interface lets you browse all registered REST API routes, build requests with schema-driven form fields, and view syntax-highlighted responses with timing info. A handy Code tab generates ready-to-use JavaScript, PHP, and cURL snippets for every request. Available on GitHub.

Pablo Postigo used Studio Code, Automattic’s new AI coding agent for building WordPress sites locally, to finally redesign Govoid.es, a geek news blog he co-founded in 2009 that’s been dormant since 2013. He used Claude to craft a detailed design brief, fed it to Studio Code (running Claude Opus 4.7), and got a complete minimalist dark-mode block theme generated in one shot, with only a couple of hours of refinement before pushing straight to production. Studio Code is still in alpha, there will be dragons

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

If you run a WooCommerce store, then you’ve probably heard that ChatGPT now lets users shop for products directly inside the chat interface. A user asks something like “I need a blue yoga mat under $40” and ChatGPT responds with actual products from registered merchants, complete with prices and stock availability.

It is a brand new sales channel but most WooCommerce store owners have no idea how to get listed.

In this guide, I’ll show you exactly how to get your WooCommerce products appearing in ChatGPT’s shopping results.

I’ll cover everything from registering as an OpenAI merchant to generating your product feed and submitting it for approval.

Here is a quick overview of topics covered in this guide:

What is ChatGPT Agentic Commerce?

ChatGPT Agentic Commerce — also called ChatGPT Shopping — is a feature that lets people discover products inside a ChatGPT conversation and click through to buy from the merchant’s store.

Here’s what the customer experience looks like: a user asks ChatGPT something like “I need a blue yoga mat under $40” and ChatGPT responds with actual products from registered merchants, complete with prices and stock availability.

The user then clicks through to your WooCommerce store to complete the purchase.

This works through the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), which is a system that connects your WooCommerce store to ChatGPT’s shopping layer. ChatGPT reads your product feed, understands what you sell, and surfaces your products in relevant conversations.

OpenAI launched the merchant program in late 2025. It’s currently live for U.S. merchants, with global expansion rolling out.

Why Sell on ChatGPT with WooCommerce?

• High-Intent Product Discovery: Your products appear directly in ChatGPT’s shopping results when users ask relevant, specific questions. This places your brand in front of customers at the exact moment they are seeking expert guidance and recommendations.
• Direct Store Traffic and Retention: Since users click through to your WooCommerce store to complete their purchase, you keep full ownership of the customer relationship. This allows you to capture email sign-ups, build brand loyalty, and manage your own customer data without a middleman.
• Increased Revenue via Contextual Upsells: Driving users to your own site means you can present them with relevant upsells, cross-sells, and order bumps at the point of purchase. For most stores, this added revenue per order makes product discovery a more profitable long-term strategy than restricted native checkout options.
• Seamless Integration with Clean Data: Providing a compliant product feed with identifiers like GTIN or MPN ensures your store is “AI-ready.” This structured data helps ChatGPT understand your catalog perfectly, leading to more accurate and frequent recommendations.

Overall, connecting your WooCommerce store to ChatGPT allows you to bridge the gap between AI-driven research and your own high-converting checkout experience.

What You’ll Need Before You Start

Before going through the steps, make sure you have:

• A WooCommerce store running on WordPress
• Products with accurate data — titles, descriptions, prices, and stock status
• Product identifiers (GTIN or MPN) for each product (I cover how to add these in Step 2)

How to Sell on ChatGPT with WooCommerce (Step by Step)

Here’s how to get your WooCommerce store set up to appear in ChatGPT’s shopping results, starting with the merchant application.

Step 1: Register as a merchant with OpenAI

The first thing you need to do is apply to become an OpenAI merchant.

You’ll need to fill in your business details, your region, the types of products you sell, and agree to their policies.

After you submit, you’ll get a confirmation email. OpenAI reviews your application and contacts you when the next stage opens, which is when you’ll be asked to provide your product feed.

There’s no official timeline published. From what merchants have reported, the initial review can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.

The key thing: apply now. The earlier you’re in the queue, the sooner you’ll get access as OpenAI expands the program.

Step 2: Add GTIN or MPN identifiers to your WooCommerce products

This step confuses most WooCommerce store owners, and it’s the step almost no guide online explains properly.

OpenAI requires each product in your feed to have a unique identifier. The two types it accepts are:

• GTIN (Global Trade Item Number): the barcode number on a product. It includes UPCs (12 digits), EANs (13 digits), and ISBNs. If you’re reselling other brands’ products, then their GTIN is usually on the product packaging or the manufacturer’s website.
• MPN (Manufacturer Part Number) — the reference number a manufacturer uses to identify a specific product. If you make your own products, then your internal part number works here.

To add these identifiers in WooCommerce, go to Products » All Products, open a product, scroll down to the ‘Product data’ section, and look for the ‘SKU’ field.

You can use the SKU field for your MPN if you don’t have a separate GTIN field available.

Below that you will find the option to add GTIN, EAN, UPC, and ISBN.

Tip: If you have a large product catalog then updating products one at a time could take some time. However, if you are in a hurry, simply go to WooCommerce » Products, click ‘Export’ to download your product data as a CSV file. You can open this file in a spreadsheet app like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. Add your GTINs or MPNs and then re-import the CSV back to your WooCommerce store.

For details, follow our tutorial on importing and exporting WooCommerce product data.

How do you find and add GTIN or MPN?

Here are a few common scenarios:

• You make your own products: create an MPN using a consistent format like BRAND-CATEGORY-001. That’s a valid identifier.
• You sell handmade or one-of-a-kind items: use a unique MPN per item.
• You’re not sure what your GTIN is: check the manufacturer’s website, your supplier’s product sheet, or the barcode on the physical product.
• Products like books have ISBN as their global identifier.

Step 3: Install a ChatGPT Product Feed Plugin

To generate a product feed that meets OpenAI’s commerce specifications, you’ll need a plugin.

The plugin I’ve found most capable for this specific use case is Product Feed Pro by AdTribes.

It is the most powerful WooCommerce product feed plugin on the market that supports ChatGPT / OpenAI as well as Google Shopping, TikTok, several advertising platforms, and popular comparison engines.

This helps you showcase your products on multiple platforms, including OpenAI / ChatGPT.

First, you need to install and activate the Product Feed Pro by Adtribes plugin. For details, see our tutorial on how to install and activate a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you’ll need to visit the Product Feed » License page to enter your license key. You can find this in your AdTribes account dashboard.

Once you have activated the license, you are ready to set up your product feed for OpenAI / ChatGPT.

Step 4: Configure and Generate Your Product Feed

After activating the plugin, navigate to Product Feed » Create Feed in your WordPress admin.

From here, enter a name for this feed and choose your country. After that, select ‘OpenAI Product Feed’ under the Channels option.

Below that, you need to select the file format for your feed. I recommend using JSONL because it is OpenAI’s preferred format.

Click ‘Save & Continue’ to move on to the next screen.

This will bring you to the Field Mapping step. Most OpenAI attributes are pre-filled, so you just need to review and confirm the mappings or fill in any empty ones.

If you have custom fields that are not listed, you can add them manually by clicking the ‘+Add custom field’ button at the bottom.

Once finished, click the ‘Save & Continue’ button.

After that, the plugin will take you to the Data Manipulation tab.

Here you can set up advanced manipulation like changing a field to be used as a different data point.

If you are unsure, simply skip this by clicking the ‘Save Changes’ button.

Next, the plugin will take you to the Filters and Rules settings. This allows you to create custom filters and display rules for your feed.

Lastly, you can enable UTM tracking in Google Analytics.

This allows you to track your ChatGPT feed performance in Google Analytics.

Bonus Tip: The easiest way to set up Google Analytics is by using MonsterInsights. It is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress and comes with powerful eCommerce conversion tracking features.

Finally, click the ‘Generate Product Feed’ button to save and generate your OpenAI product feed.

Step 5: Submit Your Product Feed to OpenAI

Once OpenAI approves your merchant application (from Step 1), they’ll send instructions to submit your product feed through the merchant portal.

Go to Product Feed » Manage Feeds page and copy your ChatGPT product feed URL.

Now, you need to submit the feed URL to OpenAI by following the instructions in the email they sent you. They will run an automated validation process against their commerce specifications. This usually takes 24 to 48 hours.

If your feed fails validation, then the portal will tell you which fields are missing or incorrectly formatted.

Common issues include:

• Missing GTIN or MPN on some products
• Price formatted incorrectly (needs to include currency code)
• Product images that are too small or using an unsupported format

Fix whatever the validator flags, regenerate your feed, and resubmit.

Once your feed passes validation, your products will start appearing in ChatGPT’s shopping results for relevant user queries. Users will see your products, click through to your WooCommerce store, and complete their purchase there, where you can also offer them relevant upsells or cross-sells to increase the order value.

FAQs About Selling on ChatGPT with WooCommerce

What if my products don’t have GTINs?

This is the most common sticking point. If you resell other brands’ products, the GTIN is usually on the product packaging, in your supplier’s product sheet, or on the manufacturer’s website. If you make your own products, you can use your own MPN, a part number you create and assign consistently.

Handmade or one-of-a-kind items can use a unique MPN formatted something like YOURSTORE-ITEM-001. For digital products or services, check OpenAI’s current merchant spec because requirements for non-physical products may differ.

How long does OpenAI merchant approval take?

OpenAI doesn’t publish an official timeline. From what merchants have shared publicly, the initial review takes anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. After approval, feed validation typically takes 24 to 48 hours.

The practical advice: apply as early as possible. The queue is real, and early applicants get access first.

Can I sell digital products on ChatGPT?

Physical products are the primary focus of ChatGPT’s current commerce feature. Digital downloads, subscriptions, and services may have different requirements or may not yet be supported. Check OpenAI’s current merchant guidelines for the latest on non-physical product categories because this is an area where the program is likely to expand.

Will this replace my WooCommerce store?

No. ChatGPT commerce is an additional sales channel, not a replacement for your store. Your WooCommerce site remains your primary storefront and the system that processes all orders.

How much does it cost to sell on ChatGPT?

Registering as a merchant and submitting a product feed is free. You’ll need a product feed plugin, check the plugin’s website for current pricing.

OpenAI hasn’t announced any platform fee or revenue share for sales made through ChatGPT, but check their current merchant terms before launching.

Do customers need a ChatGPT account to buy?

Customers need to be signed into a ChatGPT account to interact with the shopping feature. Browsing and seeing products in chat results works for most users.

Start Getting Your WooCommerce Products Discovered in ChatGPT Today

ChatGPT’s commerce channel is genuinely new territory for WooCommerce store owners.

The good news: getting your products listed is more straightforward than it looks. It’s mainly a matter of working through the steps in the right order.

To recap:

• Apply as a merchant at chatgpt.com/merchants.
• Add GTIN or MPN identifiers to your products, install Product Feed Pro by AdTribes, generate your OpenAI feed, and submit it for validation.

Additional Resources for Growing Your WooCommerce Store

• How I Use AI to Autogenerate WooCommerce Product Descriptions
• 5 Ways to Use AI in WooCommerce (Save Time & Make Money)
• I tested 9 best AI automation tools for WordPress (my honest reviews)
• How to Automatically Add WordPress Products in Google Shopping

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Sell on ChatGPT with WooCommerce (Agentic Guide) first appeared on WPBeginner.

Welcome to the Source of Truth for WordPress 7.0!

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

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

Changelog

Any changes are cataloged here as the release goes on.

• April 23, 2026
  • WordPress 7.0 has a new release date: May 20th, 2026! (see post).
  • The RTC performance testing script automatically tests all 4 possible architecture approaches. Follow the instructions on the repository. Still under development, though. Release and Call for hosting testing planned for Friday April 24. (See Slack discussion)
• April 17, 2026
  • Update on new release date no later then 4/22.
• April 1, 2026:
  • Added information from Extending the 7.0 Cycle by release lead Matias Ventura
  • Changed release date to TBD
  • Updated Real-Time Collaboration section with additional information.
• March 30, 2026:
  • Fixes for clarity and grammar.
  • Changed feature image of the post.
  • RTC: Added Introduce filters for the polling intervals (76518)
• March 27, 2026: First edition

Important note/guidelines

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

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

Overview 

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

WordPress 7.0 introduces several new features and performance enhancements.

Key new features include:

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

Furthermore, WordPress 7.0, entails:

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

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

WordPress 7.0 is set to be released on April 9, 2026 at Contributor Day of WordCamp Asia.
The new release date will be announced no later than April 22. (see Ventura’s announcement)

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

Important links:

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

Assets 

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

Tags

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

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

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

Priority items for WordPress 7.0 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Treating patterns like a single block ^[all]

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

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

What’s New for Patterns:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visual Revisions ^[all]

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

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

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

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

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

New Blocks

Breadcrumbs Block ^[all]

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

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

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

The dev note Breadcrumb block filters has the details. 

Icon Block ^[all]

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

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

Block Editor enhancements

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

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

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

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

Control viewport-based block visibility ^[all]

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

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

Anne McCarthy walks you through the feature:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Email notifications for Notes ^[all]

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

Block Attributions Groups in the sidebar ^[all]

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

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

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

Here’s an example of the implementation for Patterns:

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

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

Improved Blocks and Block handling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blocks that have been fixed are:

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

Universal Text Alignment ^[all]

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

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

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

Gallery Block 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paragraph ^[all]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Columns in Paragraph blocks ^[all]

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

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

Query Loop Enhancements ^[all]

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

Verse Block, renamed to Poetry ^[all]

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

Admin / Workflow updates 

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

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

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

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

Command Palette in Adminbar ^[all]

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

View Transitions  ^[all]

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

Improved screens across WP-Admin  ^[all]

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

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

Developer Goodies ^{[developer][enterprise]}

Client-side Abilities API

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

WP AI Client

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

PHP-only block registration

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

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

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

Pattern Overrides for custom blocks

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

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

DataViews, Data Form components and Fields API 

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

UI Primitives and Components

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

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

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