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Gutenberg Times: Gutenberg Changelog #134 – Gutenberg 23.7, 23.8, WordPress 7.1 and more
In this 134th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog Podcast, Birgit Pauli-Haack hosts Jessica Lyschik , senior developer at Greyd, to discuss recent Gutenberg and WordPress developments. The conversation centers on the releases of Gutenberg 23.7, 23.8, and WordPress 7.1 (“Mary Lou”), highlighting user-facing enhancements and developer-oriented changes.
WordPress 7.1 introduced notable features, including new styling tools, updated media flow, notes functionality for collaboration, and improved support for AI-driven workflows. Jessica Lyschik emphasized the impactful addition of pseudo states (hover, focus, active) in buttons and navigation links, though global style options for navigation states are still being developed for 7.2. The new icon API was also discussed, which currently requires plugins for full editor integration.
Both speakers observed an ongoing shift: features first become available via theme.json for theme builders, then gradually get exposed in the UI for broader audiences. They also touched on the evolving approach to child themes, font management, and the need for clear style inheritance indicators. Specific enhancements in Gutenberg 23.7/23.8, like responsive editing toggles and improvements to dynamic galleries and block inspector controls, were covered alongside new opt-out mechanisms for block controls.
The episode closed with a look toward WordPress 7.2, highlighting efforts to address “block editor paper cuts” (small annoyances) and improved tracking of in-progress features. Birgit Pauli-Haack announced a three-month podcast hiatus for sabbatical, promising a return for the 7.2 release. Listeners were encouraged to follow GitHub tracking issues and stay current with upcoming Gutenberg releases.
- Editor: Sandy Reed
- Logo: Mark Uraine
- Production: Birgit Pauli-Haack
Show Notes
Special Guest: Jessica Lyschik
- https://x.com/jessicalyschik
- https://www.youtube.com/@jessicalyschik
- profiles.wordpress.org/luminuu
- Greyd Conversations, to be found on YouTube
- DACH Online WordPress Meetup
Announcements / Community contributions
- WordPress 7.2 Call for Volunteers
- WordPress Contributor Toolkit 1.0: A smoother workflow for your first Core contribution
WordPress 7.1
- WordPress 7.1 “Mary Lou”
- WordPress 7.1 Highlights Video
- WordPress 7.1 micro site
- WordPress 7.1 Field Guide
- WordPress 7.1 Release Notes
- Curated
- Podcasts
Gutenberg releases
What’s discussed or in the works
WordPress 7.2 Tracking issues
- Styling
- Editor
- Media
- Notes iteration for WordPress 7.2
- DataViews, DataViewsPicker, DataForm, Fields in WordPress 7.2
- Guidelines built on Knowledge in WordPress 7.2
Greyd Conversations
Greyd Conversations #19 – How Can Product Companies Grow in WordPress Right Now
Stay in Touch
- Did you like this episode? Please write us a review
- Ping us on X (formerly known as Twitter) or send DMs with questions. @gutenbergtimes and @bph.
- If you have questions or suggestions, or news you want us to include, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com.
- Please write us a review on iTunes! (Click here to learn how)
Transcript
The transcript is in the works.
Gutenberg Times: Icons, Tabs, and responsive styles: the community gets to work on WordPress 7.1 — Weekend Edition 374
Howdy,
It has been another evenful week for sure! WordCamp US came to an end and WordPress 7.1 was released.
Your WordPress profile now has a shortcut w.org/@[yourusername]. If you want to check out mine w.org/@bph (don’t forget the @ sign) . Mullenweg mentioned in his closing fire side chat that this could actually work without the redirect in the future. Now that would be cool, right?
Another cool and rather weird thing Mullenweg mentioned are Piplets. One self-contained PHP-file for your notes, no database, no hosting needed, for tinkerers who live in the Terminal window. If that’s you, grab the file from the GitHub repo and try it out. (64-bit PHP 8.1 or newer is required.) There will be 
. To be honest, it’s not my idea of simplicity, though. I am firm in the Obsidian camp.
Apropo WordCamp US: All Talks are already available in the Playlist on YouTube for your on-demand viewing pleasure. Or you organize a viewing party with your local WordPress Meetup. Just a thought. 
Have a great weekend!
Yours, 
Birgit
Nicholas Garofalo’s recap of WordCamp US 2026 in Phoenix covers four days, 1,100 attendees, 111°F, and a Contributor Day where 425 people formed 26 teams around goals they could finish by evening. You’ll get the Showcase Day migrations of The Ankler and Daily Kos, keynotes from Bo English-Wiczling and Loyal Pyczynski on judgment in the age of AI, and Matt Mullenweg’s closing pitch for simplicity, including Piplets, a single self-modifying PHP file with no database.
WordPress 7.1 is out!
WordPress 7.1 “Mary Lou”, names after Mary Lou Williams an American jazz pianist, arranger, and composer who recorded hundreds of records.
The release video is fabulous. WordPress 7.1 Highlights Video
The WordPress 7.1 micro site with the featurettes, tiny videos highlighting the main features is definitely a beauty! What a pleasure to read and experience the most important updates!
Release lead Anne McCarthy kept a WordPress 7.1 release lead decision log, and it reads like the other half of the release notes. You’ll see why real-time collaboration, React 19, inherited-style display, and the Classic block removal were punted, why responsive styling got an opt-out rather than a pause, and how she decided to publish the announcement when auto-updates had already reached 300K sites while Matt Mullenweg was on the WordCamp US stage. Each entry links to the thread where the call was made.
On the WordPress Developer Blog, Justin Tadlock goes hands-on with the WordPress 7.1 Icon Registration API and builds a restaurant icon collection from scratch. You’ll register a collection with wp_register_icon_collection(), add 13 food icons via wp_register_icon(), and see why he prefers a string-backed PHP enum over arrays for naming them. He also lists what 7.1 still strips: only svg, path, and polygon elements survive, and stroke attributes are removed, so stick with fill-based icons for now.
If Justin Tadlock’s walkthrough is more than you need right now, Ryan Welcher covers the same API in five minutes in his video on custom icons in WordPress 7.1. He registers a collection and a single icon in PHP, loads a folder of SVGs from disk the way core does, and renders one in a template with wp_get_icon(). The gotchas matter most: the sanitizer strips fill="currentColor", and a function_exists() check keeps 7.0 sites from fatal-erroring.
The block editor’s single biggest frustration is finally addressed, Jackson argues in his tour of the new features in WordPress 7.1, and he means responsive block styles. Over twenty minutes you’ll see thirteen features in action: hover and active states for buttons and navigation, the Tabs block, the Icon block with Aki Hamano’s custom icon plugin, the Playlist block’s waveform, the in-browser media editor, and a Query Loop checkbox that stops your related posts from recommending the post you’re reading.
Gutenberg 23.8 released
Selecting all blocks in a 1,000-paragraph post used to take 16.8 seconds; in Gutenberg 23.8 it takes 0.4. Release lead Jon Surrell’s post on what’s new in Gutenberg 23.8 covers that List View speed-up alongside the shareable revision URLs and in-editor code diff, and email notifications when someone @-mentions you in a note. You also get a real default block on the empty canvas, Audio-to-Playlist transforms, and, for developers, inner block templates declared in registerBlockType() and public Calendar components in @wordpress/ui.
For the Gutenberg Changelog 134 episode, Jessica Lyschik, senior developer at Greyd, joined me to discuss Gutenberg versions 23.7 and 23.8. We also chatted about WordPress 7.1 and what comes next for the December release of WordPress 7.2 As always the episode with its show notes will come to your favorite podcast app over the weekend.
The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #133 – Gutenberg 23.6 Release and WordPress 7.1 with special guest Faith Imokol, webdeveloper from Uganda.
Plugins and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
If you build with the Ollie block theme, Gina Lucia‘s WordPress 7.1 walkthrough shows where the new core features meet Ollie’s tools. Responsive styling now lives in core, so Ollie Pro’s Responsive Controls shift to handling column and grid stacking, while its Class Manager picks up where the new hover and focus states for Button and Navigation Link leave off. You’ll also see how the Tabs and Playlist blocks, gradient-over-image backgrounds, and the persistent admin bar fit your Ollie site.
Merging cells is still missing from the core Table block, and Aki Hamano‘s Flexible Table Block plugin fills that gap on 40,000+ sites. Version 3.9.0 adds WordPress 7.1 support and announces row and column selection to screen readers. You can merge and split cells, style the table, cells, and caption separately, and set your own breakpoint for horizontal scrolling or stacking cells on mobile. It also converts to and from the core Table block with rowspan and colspan intact. Aki Hamano is a major contributor to the Gutenberg project from Japan and co-tech lead for WordPress 7.1. There is a lot of crediblity attached to this plugin. And hat tip to Daniel Kossmann, editor of the Portuguese WordPress newsletter PainelWP 374.
The new Tabs block in WordPress 7.1 swaps panels abruptly, since the Interactivity API toggles the hidden attribute. Elliott Richmond‘s Tabs Animation plugin softens that with a fade or a slide from any of four directions, plus a duration up to 3000ms and five easing options under Settings → Tabs Animation. It’s one small inline stylesheet with no JavaScript and no theme changes, and it switches itself off for visitors who prefer reduced motion. One setting applies site-wide for now.
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Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.
On his livestream, Ryan Welcher got back on his son’s hockey team site with WordPress Studio Code, this time handing over the single post template. The first pass got close, then navigation broke, the header came in too tall, and the content width wouldn’t match the homepage, so you’ll watch him go several rounds with Annotate, clicking and describing what’s wrong. Two hours used 2.5 percent of his monthly limit. He also covers the 7.1 iframe change and a twenty-minute custom fields tangent.
WordPress Studio the agentic local development app is still in beta. Help make it perfect!
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Questions? Suggestions? Ideas?
Don’t hesitate to send them via email or
send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.
For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog,
send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com
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Matt: Homework from WordCamp
A few times during the WordCamp US keynote, I asked for a show of hands and got mostly blank stares back, especially on the AI questions. That’s not a criticism — it’s a reading list. If the future is going to be built on this stuff, the WordPress community should be fluent in it. Here’s the homework.
How models are actually trained
When I asked who knew about the reinforcement learning models go through, Robert looked out and said “I see no yeses.” Base models are trained to predict the next word across huge amounts of text; the friendly, helpful behavior comes after, in post-training, where human/AI feedback reinforces some responses over others. If you use these tools every day, understanding that pipeline changes how you prompt them and what you expect from them.
Start with Hugging Face’s Illustrating RLHF, a visual explainer. Chip Huyen’s RLHF deep dive is the best longer read, and Anthropic’s Constitutional AI paper shows where post-training went next. If you only have time for one thing, watch Andrej Karpathy’s Deep Dive into LLMs — pretraining, fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and why models behave the way they do, all in one sitting.
Uncensored models
Almost nobody had tried an OBLITERATED model. Since refusal behavior is added in post-training, researchers found it can also be removed — it turns out to be, roughly, a single direction inside the model that you can subtract out. Maxime Labonne’s Uncensor any LLM with abliteration explains the technique, and the paper behind it, Refusal in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single Direction, is short and genuinely fascinating. Whatever you think of the applications, it’s worth understanding that open weights mean the community can modify these models, the same way the GPL means you can modify WordPress.
The open-weight wave
Only a few hands went up for Qwen 3.8. The open-weight models coming out of Chinese labs — Qwen, DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM — are at or near the frontier at a fraction of the cost, and the smaller ones run on a laptop. I demoed one from this MacBook on stage. Token costs have dropped about 20x, and that curve isn’t slowing down.
The easiest way to feel this for yourself is to run one locally tonight: install Ollama or LM Studio, pull a small Qwen model, and talk to an intelligence that lives entirely on your own machine, no cloud required. For a community built on the four freedoms, that should feel familiar — and exciting.
Read one, watch one, run one. Then bring what you learned to your next meetup.
It is really important to me that WordPress community members ride this AI wave.
Errata: I said Automattic has 32 or 33 data centers; the actual number is 29, all co-located.