WordPress Planet

Gutenberg Times: Calls for Testing, Gutenberg 23.3, Block MCP and more — Weekend Edition 367

Birgit Pauli-Haack — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 23:14:00 +0000

Hi there,

This is the time of the year when publishing on the Gutenberg Times becomes less frequent. I will be on vacation and back at the beginning of July with the weekend edition, just in-time for Beta 1 of WordPress 7.1. Three more Gutenberg plugin releases will happen before that.

What also happened was that someone grabbed my instagram account in this AI hack at Meta. Although Meta reports this as resolved, I probably won’t get my account back. I am now actively looking for a better way to share my photos without the overlords that can’t keep things tight. It’s not that I didn’t know better. <sigh/> It’s a cautionary tale for what’s in store for all internet services handing over crucial business processes to a gulliable AI.

Don’t let the small stuff bring you down. Have a splendid weekend ahead. Until July!

Yours,
Birgit

I started watching WordCamp Europe LiveStreams on Friday and started with the keynote Two worlds collide: WordPress at CERN with Joachim Valdemar Yde and Francisco Borges Aurindo Barros. The Livestream are all routed to the WordPress YouTube account. The schedule is posted on the website.

Over the course of the weekend more recordings will be uploaded to WordPress TV > WordCamp Europe 2026.

On Saturday, Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic will close out WordCamp Europe 2026 with his keynote. Afterward, the organizers will reveal where WordCamp Europe 2027 will take place. Tune in around 2:15 UTC / 8:15 am EDT.

I had the great pleasure chatting with Abha Thakor on the OpenMakers through what WordPress 7.0 “Armstrong” means for you. First, the safety bit: test on a staging site or Playground before updating, and check your PHP. Then the good stuff. Visual revisions show edits in context with color coding. Notes keep feedback inside the editor. Patterns gain content-only editing, blocks can hide by device, and new AI connector APIs give developers a unified foundation. Real-time editing waits for a later release.

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

Arthur Chu walks you through what’s new in Gutenberg 23.3. The modal media editor is now the default for cropping. It pulls cropping, flip, rotation, and metadata into one place. The experimental customizable dashboard grows too, with five new widgets you can drag and resize. Responsive styles now reach individual blocks, so designs adapt per screen.

Rae Morey reports that Gutenberg 23.3 brings an experimental, customizable WordPress dashboard. It’s the admin’s biggest structural shakeup in years. You can drag, resize, and rearrange widgets like Welcome, Activity, and Site Health to fit how you actually work. It’s the first testable preview of a long-discussed overhaul. Enable it under Gutenberg > Experiments to try it.

Jarda Snajdr reports that the React 19 upgrade has been reverted in Gutenberg. Shortly after 23.3.0 shipped, many plugins built for React 18 started crashing. The APIs barely changed, but the runtimes clashed: React 19 rejects elements made by a bundled React 18 JSX helper. So 23.3.2 rolls back to React 18. The team still plans the upgrade for 7.1—this time with a feature flag and a compatibility layer.

Isabel Brison and I chatted extensively about the latest Gutenberg plugin releases 23.1 to 23.3 and discussed the responsive controls now available in the Gutenberg plugin for desktop, tablet and mobile view ports. The episode will drop in your favorite podcast app over the weekend.

The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #130 – WordPress 7.0, Gutenberg 22.9 and 23.0, WordCamp Europe, Block Themes and More with Tammie Lister, Chief Product Officer at Convesio

Rich Tabor shares a few “little big things” for WordPress editing. The idea is simple: complexity has piled up, and small fixes can clear it. His PRs make block locking a one-click job in List View. They keep you in place when editing synced patterns, instead of whisking you off to another view. And zooming out reuses the familiar Patterns Explorer. He’s not precious about them—contributors are warmly invited to take them over the line.

Dave Smith walks you through an interactive prototype reimagining the WordPress Site Editor around user goals rather than system architecture. Built during Automattic’s Radical Speed Month, it keeps the same blocks, templates, and data model intact while changing entry points, language, and defaults. It’s an experiment, not a roadmap.

Calls for Testing for WordPress 7.1

With WordPress 7.0 out the door, contributors shared a series of Calls for testing this week to prepare for WordPress 7.1. The schedule is tight with Beta 1 slated for July 15, 2026.

Ramon Dodd puts out a call for testing the new Media Editor Modal. Cropping in the block editor hasn’t changed much in years, and the old inline tool leans on a limited third-party library. This new standard way of Image edition inside the Block editor replaces it with a WordPress-native one. You get freeform and aspect-ratio cropping, flip, rotation, and metadata editing in one place. The quickest way to try it is a ready-made Playground link. Feedback is welcome via the comments or GitHub.

Anne McCarthy announced a collaborative editing outreach effort for WordPress 7.1. After real-time collaboration was pulled from 7.0, this gathers real-world early adopters across many hosting setups to find bugs faster. It lives in one Slack channel, #collaborative-editing-outreach. If you’d use collaborative editing regularly and run the latest Gutenberg, you’re invited—through the cycle, with a test team badge at the end.

Rae Morey has the skinny for you in Contributors Launch FSE-Style Outreach Program to Get Real-Time Collaboration Ready for WordPress 7.1

Adam Silverstein puts out a call for testing client-side media processing, now targeting WordPress 7.1. Here’s the idea: when you upload an image, your browser resizes and encodes every size locally using VIPS in WebAssembly, before anything reaches the server. That eases CPU and memory load on hosts and brings modern formats like AVIF, WebP, HEIC, and JPEG XL to every site. Browsers that can’t cope fall back quietly to server-side. Try it in Chromium with the latest Gutenberg.

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

Brian Coords invites you to a live panel on practical AI workflows for WordPress and WooCommerce on Tuesday, June 30, 2026, at 10am PDT. Hosted with Shani Banerjee and featuring Nik McLaughlin, Kyle Runner, and Suzanne Kolpakov, the conversation covers WooCommerce MCP, the WordPress Abilities API, Pressable MCP, and making your own plugins more agent-ready. You’ll come away with practical ideas for managing stores and guiding cautious clients, plus open Q&A. Can’t make it live? Register anyway for the recording.

Nathan Wrigley talks with plugin reviewer Luke Carbis about the future of WordPress plugins on the Jukebox podcast. Here’s the worry: plugin submissions have quadrupled in a year, largely AI-generated, so good plugins struggle to stand out. Carbis floats ideas you can test: logging into your site with your WordPress.org account, installing from your own Git repos, or a commercial marketplace funding contributors. They also weigh AI ethics, a generational backlash, and his proposed AI-disclosure header for the directory.

Wes Theron published a new training video and you can learn how to customize your site’s navigation menus with AI . Once your site is connected, you describe the change and the agent makes it. You’ll learn to add a page to your header, remove an outdated link, and reorder items. It also covers building dropdown menus under an unclickable parent, adding a footer menu, and linking to blog categories. The point: clear menus help visitors find what matters.

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

Ajit Bohra and the LUBUS team released Color Palette Block 2.0, a free plugin for building and sharing color palettes in the block editor. It grew out of their own client and internal documentation needs. It’s handy for brand kits, design systems, and style guides. You add swatches manually, pull from your theme, or generate random ones. Pick from four display styles—Square, Polaroid, Circle, or Droplet—and copy each color as HEX, RGB, HSL, or a CSS variable.

Justin Tadlock shares a playful tutorial on registering custom icons for WordPress 7.0’s new Icon block. Since the public registration API won’t land until 7.1, you’ll learn a clever workaround using PHP Reflection to reach the protected WP_Icons_Registry::register() method, bundling SVGs in your theme through an Icon enum and registrar class. Built on work by Ryan Welcher and Nick Diego, it’s educational fun—not for production, where Nick Diego’s Icon Block plugin still does the job properly.

“Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2025”
A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test, and Meta team from Jan. 2024 on. Updated by yours truly.

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

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.

Casey Burridge introduced Block MCP, GravityKit’s open-source WordPress MCP server. The problem it solves is familiar: existing MCPs treat a post as one HTML blob, so AI edits strip block markers and break your layout. Block MCP exposes each block as an addressable unit with a stable ID. Your agent can make surgical edits, batch up to 50 changes atomically, and undo any of them. In their tests across Claude models, only Block MCP worked reliably.

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

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

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

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

Featured Image:

Matt: WCEU

Matt — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 19:07:24 +0000

Cześć wszystkim, Kraków… I made the call not to fly to Poland for WordCamp Europe. I’m very sorry for the last-minute notice; I was really hoping to make it. I’m okay, but I want to stay close to loved ones going through difficult times.

Seeing the pictures from Contributor Day warms my heart.

Bardzo za Wami tęsknię. I miss you dearly.

The Protect The Shire post on W.org contains what I planned to talk about, and Mary Hubbard and Matías Ventura will lead the Q&A keynote at the end.

I’ll watch all the sessions so if any WordCamp speakers would like feedback on their talk, just fill out this form, and I’ll write something up and message it to you on the .org Slack.

WordPress.org blog: Protect The Shire

Matt Mullenweg — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 18:51:15 +0000

tl;dr: Temporary 24-hour cooldown period for plugin/theme releases before auto-updates. AI can give defenders an edge. We want to secure all 78K plugins and themes on WordPress.org.

One of the things we’ve always striven to do as the developers of WordPress is to work harder so you don’t have to; we take technology that’s complex or inaccessible and make it available to everyone, running in as many environments as possible. It’s the Open Source way.

Just last December there was a step-change in coding ability that rocked many developers, and since April’s reveal of Mythos, security activity has kicked into high gear. A few days ago, Chrome shipped a release with 429 security fixes! The threats and opportunities of these new capabilities inspired us to kick off an initiative we call Protect The Shire (hat tip J. R. R. Tolkien) with the aim of using our best minds and the infrastructure of WordPress.org to make all code in our directories and repositories as secure as possible.

Much of this work was and will remain behind the scenes, and we hope its success is defined mostly by what doesn’t happen. However, while we reckon with our newfound powers, we need to make space for review.

To Update or Not

WordPress core updates go through multiple people and layers of review before they go out, a process we’ve polished to a high art in the 18 years since we introduced one-click upgrades in 2.7 “Coltrane.”

Core is solid, and I’m so proud that over 50% of all WordPress sites have upgraded to 7.0 within two weeks! That’s the result of an unimaginable amount of work across thousands of hosts, developers, and teams across WordPress.org. We’ve pushed hard to make upgrades happen automagically, and as fast as possible.

We’re in a liminal period now, and I believe 2026 will be a year of tension between two approaches: updating as quickly as possible to stay secure, and holding back on updating to stay secure.

We’ve seen clever and dangerous supply chain attacks across the npm, PyPI, GitHub, and RubyGems ecosystems, and we even had our own mini-version with the Essential Plugins debacle, where good plugins were unknowingly sold to a new author who had malicious intent.

How to balance security updates and securing updates?

Mirkwood or the Wild West?

Everyone knows the fun of WordPress is in its 78k+ plugins and themes. We have a rigorous, human-powered review process for theme and plugin submissions, but once you’re published in the directory, you’re on your own. Our update system currently distributes every plugin and theme release as soon as a developer presses the button. That’s what keeps the directory as robust as WordPress itself. There were over 3,000 commits to the plugin repository yesterday!

For now, each new plugin release will wait up to 24 hours before being distributed through auto-updates. This will give everyone, including a new Wapuu we call Gandalf, a chance to review changes.

I expect 24 hours could be reduced to minutes as the process evolves, but we’ll err on the side of caution while AI models are advancing so rapidly.

Our plugin review team seems superhuman, but still needs to sleep. But bots don’t, and a depth of review that seemed unimaginable before is now a matter of time and tokens.

The security capabilities of AI are going to make the world weird and take a lot of our focus in the next few months, but there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.

Our Shire Is Special

There’s no shortage of ways to find, install, and update plugins and themes for WordPress. For those who choose WordPress.org, though, we want to make sure that it feels safe and secure. That means staying strict about some things—like guidelines and Open Source licenses—while also remaining flexible enough to allow solo hackers, community projects, and for-profit commercial plugins and themes to thrive in our ecosystem.

GitHub stars may get the hype, but if you add up all the numbers in our plugin directory, it’s over 400M installs. There are 69 plugins, many from solo devs, installed on over a million sites each! Now we need to learn from the best parts of GitHub and make that available to every developer on WordPress.org.

Just because WordPress plugins have a reputation for vulnerabilities is no reason not to aim for the same security and stability we’ve achieved in core. We’ve done the impossible a few times already in our journey from a b2/cafelog fork to where we are today.

Freedom and security are not zero-sum. With Open Source, we can show how security comes from transparency, not obscurity. Collaboration over competition. What we accomplish when we come together is nothing short of incredible. Success always attracts bad actors, but we grow stronger through every adversity.

The scale of WordPress can make some challenges seem too big to tackle, but given time, there is no problem that’s insurmountable. I’m reminded of the story behind the title of Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird:

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

More to come, stay tuned. I wish everyone in Kraków at WordCamp Europe the best and hope to see you soon!

Open Channels FM: Artificial Intelligence” Just a Fancy Way to Say “Fake”?

Bob Dunn — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 13:19:13 +0000

The light side of whether artificial intelligence is genuinely intelligent or merely advanced technology misrepresented as such.

Open Channels FM: Open Tabs: Lists Over Grids, AI-Assisted Content & A Global Tech Read

Bob Dunn — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 14:30:00 +0000

Bob Dunn launches "Open Tabs," sharing business insights while discussing his new design preferences, the importance of human touch in podcasting, efficient content repurposing with AI, and recommending restofworld.org.

WPTavern: #219 – Austin Ginder on How AI Is Exposing Hidden Threats in WordPress Plugin Updates

Nathan Wrigley — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 14:00:00 +0000

Transcript

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

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how AI is exposing hidden threats is WordPress plugin updates.

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

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

So on the podcast today we have Austin Ginder. Austin has been involved in the WordPress ecosystem since 2010, and since 2014 has run Anchor Hosting, a business that manages thousands of WordPress websites. While he’s a developer and automation enthusiast at heart, in recent months Austin has found himself at the forefront of a burgeoning crisis in WordPress, security supply chain attacks targeting plugins.

A chance discovery during a malware cleanup on a client’s site, propelled Austin into what would become a wider investigation of plugin vulnerabilities. What he uncovered is both alarming and timely. Bad actors aren’t just hacking sites directly, but are instead infiltrating the supply chain, either by purchasing plugin companies and weaponising them, or by hijacking plugins and pushing out malicious updates. These attacks are subtle, often shifting plugin update servers away from wordpress.org to rogue channels where malware can be distributed, leaving end users in the dark, and their sites at risk.

We trace Austin’s journey from accidental security investigator to creator of the WP Beacon Project, a resource aimed at tracking, documenting, and alerting the WordPress community to known supply chain attacks.

He shares how AI tools have radically changed what’s possible in threat detection and forensics, enabling individuals, and hopefully someday, the larger hosting providers to identify patterns and root causes behind widespread infections.

We get into case studies of specific plugins compromised in recent months, the challenges of auditing over 60,000 plugins in the wordpress.org repo, and the complexities of stopping these attacks once malicious code is in the wild. Austin also discusses his hopes for greater collaboration with hosts and security researchers aiming for better automated monitoring and response.

If you manage WordPress websites, create plugins, or just care about the future of open source security, this episode is for you.

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

And so without further delay, I bring you Austin Ginder.

I am joined on the podcast by Austin Ginder. Hello, Austin.

[00:03:40] Austin Ginder: Hey, good to meet you.

[00:03:41] Nathan Wrigley: Very nice to meet you too. I was put in Austin’s way by I think Courtney Robertson.

Thank you Courtney for that because, on a different podcast, which I do, we were talking about an item, which is very much in the news at the moment. It’s all to do with plugins and security. And whenever I say security, any of the people that I have on the podcast, I feel it’s pretty important that person gets a chance to stamp their credentials into the podcast about themselves. Because it’s one of those areas where a little bit of knowledge can go a long way. Tell us about your background, WordPress hosting, security, those kind of things.

[00:04:16] Austin Ginder: Sure. So I’m a developer, first off. I’ve been running a WordPress hosting service since 2014, and I’ve been working in the WordPress space since 2010. A long timer. I love automation. WPCLI commands, bash scripts. I’m in the weeds on a technical basis.

But in terms of security, I wouldn’t call myself a security expert, which is ironic for this conversation because of some of the things I’ve been finding over the last month or so. And it’s all thanks to AI. AI has been my friend. It’s just right place, right time, getting lucky and also just a mix of everything is changing right now in the world.

[00:04:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Thank you for that. So as you’re about to hear, we’re not gonna be talking at from the perspective of Austin demonstrates how to fix a particular challenge in WordPress. It’s much more of a general thing, and an alert really. It’s a bit of a call to action about a problem which has been systemic in the WordPress ecosystem, well, forever really, since I guess, plugins came along.

And this is all about really change of ownership of plugins, and I could do a job of trying to describe the scenario here, but do you want to just run through what you’ve discovered in the last few weeks, and the three or four incidents that you’ve uncovered and what they mean and how they’ve come about?

[00:05:37] Austin Ginder: Yeah. So in particular, we’re talking about supply chain attacks, and a supply chain attack is a different kind of attack. It’s not a direct, my site got infected with malware or something like that. It runs a little bit more deeper. It’s a scenario where either it can happen a couple different ways.

A hacker might get control over the plugin repo itself, maybe a credential breach, where they sign in and they are acting as the author, and they push out bad code. As a user, you just update your plugin and you don’t realise you’re updating to something that’s harmful for your website.

So that’s one scenario. The other scenario which is crazy to me, but like hackers literally buying companies and then weaponizing the plugins themselves and distributing them through the official channels. So that’s the big story that I was covering this last month. That is just what possesses someone to spend six figures to buy a suite of plugins and then weaponize them and try to get away with it? No, that can’t happen.

[00:06:42] Nathan Wrigley: Except, it does. So let me just reiterate what’s going on there. So if you’ve been to the wordpress.org repository, or indeed you’ve downloaded plugins from third party vendors, maybe a pro version of a plugin or what have you. Usually there is some aspect of the WordPress admin UI, which enables that plugin to be updated by clicking a link or perhaps automated, the update will happen.

Increasingly, I think people are being, have been encouraged to click enable automatic updates. So it just ticks over in the background. Perhaps while you’re asleep, it gets updated to the latest version. This in a universe occupied only by honest people would be absolutely fine. We’d have no problem that.

However, the scenario that you are describing is that kind of invisibly it’s entirely possible for somebody to sell their plugin or indeed maybe even have their plugin repo hijacked in some way. But let’s go with the sell their plugin scenario, because that’s the easiest one to get a hold of. Sell it to somebody.

Obviously, I would imagine in most cases, assuming that person is a good actor, is just going to carry on doing the nice things that the plugin does, updating the code, and doing security updates and what have you. However, there is zero guardrail to stop them putting whatever they want into the plugin.

And so overnight, a plugin which has been working for a decade or more, doing its job, now suddenly is masquerading. And it may be that the functionality of the plugin is also still there. It’s not like suddenly the plugin just stops working, or it’s really obvious what’s going on. It may be that just a few lines of code have been adapted, modified, there’s some backdoor smuggled in to the plugin. An end user would never know that this was going on. Have I summed that up? Is that about where we’re at?

[00:08:35] Austin Ginder: Yeah, these are bad actors trying to hide themselves. They’re sneaky. They don’t do things that are obvious. Like they’re not just uploading malware to WordPress plugin repo. What they’ll do instead is they might slip a third party updater, which is against the guidelines, clearly. But they can do it a little bit more sneaky.

So if they can get a third party uploader put into their plugin, then they can actually hijack the plugin. Meaning you download a plugin from wordpress.org, and you run auto updates, and it updates not from the wordpress.org version to the newest wordpress.org version. It offloads to their own compromised update channel.

And then once it’s on the update channel, wordpress.org has zero visibility, and you’re just running a hijacked plugin and you don’t even know it. Unless you go in and you run a verify command, from the command line or, you’re scanning for things like this. And then after they get the plugin hijacked, that’s when they compromise your site.

They could do SEO spam attacks, or display ads, or poison the search results from Google’s perspective. Many different things that they do to try to recoup their money in the investment.

[00:09:50] Nathan Wrigley: So let me just run that by you again. So just to make sure I’ve understood. So in this scenario, the plugin, it is like a one time thing in a way, but we’ll explore that as well in a moment. The plugin is acquired by somebody else and potentially some of the behaviour that you’ve seen is that the only part of the plugin that they modify is the location of the update server.

Now, typically that would’ve been over at wordpress.org, and every time you click the update button, you are receiving the repo version of it. However, this updated version will then offload to a third party server somewhere. And at that moment, wordpress.org loses all visibility of what’s going on. As far as they’re aware nothing has happened.

You are now just getting updates from elsewhere. You would never see anything. But obviously whatever payload they wish to put into that plugin is completely invisible to wordpress.org.

Now, I suppose the wordpress.org version, there’d be a telltale sign that this was happening because there would be new and modified code to indicate, oh, look, there’s a third party server in play here. But WordPress org has no visibility into what the malicious code being updated onto your website is. Again, is that about where we’re at?

[00:11:07] Austin Ginder: Yeah. Everything on wordpress.org is open source. Even the platform itself is open source, so you can see the full code, how everything operates there. And in addition to that, all of the plugin activity happens on SVN, which is like the raw pipeline.

So all of the data is there and available to anyone to go in and audit the data, but it’s, it’s an after the fact situation. Like after a situation happens, you can go back to the raw data and run a full audit to try to piece together all these missing pieces. And all these missing pieces would’ve been impossible to correlate together if it wouldn’t be for AI. Like now we have a superpower where we could just run AI through it all. If we feed it the right points, we can start to make the correlation after the fact as to what happened.

[00:11:59] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so essentially what you are saying, I think, is that the work of checking this, prior to AI, let’s go with that, it was just too humanly intensive. There were 60 plus thousand plugins on the wordpress.org repo, going back and having a human inspect every single update, every single file, every line of code is, as you can imagine, a completely unrealistic process.

However, now AI really its superpower is its capacity to take a giant corpus of data, and then do things with that data. It’s almost like it can capture the entirety of the internet in one hit. And so that’s what’s enabled you to weed out this sort of stuff.

I have to ask from a personal point of view, why are you doing this? And I don’t mean that the way it sounds, because obviously it’s philanthropic. I’m extremely grateful that you are doing this. But how did you end up taking this on as a, I don’t know, a hobby, a pet project, a sideline?

[00:12:59] Austin Ginder: This is completely accidental, right? The backstory is in February, I saw a huge shift at my own customers websites, where sites that have been secure for years and years, all of a sudden was getting malware. The short version of it is while I was doing some malware cleanup for a customer, I uncovered one of these big back doors, and it was just like going through the process.

So malware cleanup before AI was always a little bit of a dicey thing. You can check all the boxes, make sure everything looks good, but you never had the certainty that it was all a hundred percent clean. Did I miss something? But with AI it’s very easy to do a thorough, in depth, investigation.

How did this happen? Where did it come from? Is my site actually clean now? It just crawls over all the files with Claude Code and other tools, and it gives you a nice report. When I had some recent, my own customers that got malware, and I ran through the forensics level style that AI can give, it uncovered some things that made me question, maybe I should look upstream, maybe I should look at wordpress.org. And I started to feed that into the AI and sure enough, there was something there and it was story worthy.

[00:14:13] Nathan Wrigley: So presumably that was then bound to a particular plugin. So your customer, something went wrong, you pointed the AI at it, it gave you a report, pointed you to the wordpress.org repo. And that in theory could have been the end of that. You clean up your client website and move on.

But it sounds like this became much more than that, because over the intervening days and weeks, you found that this was alarmingly, not just a one-off. This was a pattern. And I think the last time I was reading about this, I think you’d found four. I don’t know if four plugins is now up into some other figure or not, but certainly at the time I was reading you’d found four plugins with exactly the same strategy. I don’t know if they were from the same vendor or what have you. Just tell us where you’re at in the middle of May 2026.

[00:15:07] Austin Ginder: Yeah, so I’ve now published four more or less in depth research. Now, I wasn’t the sole finder of all these, but I was the one who actually pointed the AI at it, and got to the root of it. And it uncovered some other things that previous folks hadn’t found. So the crazy thing is all four situations are completely different, and that’s the wild thing.

So the one was, the source was the WordPress Plugin Team. So they saw there was some bad activity happening, with a set of the Essential Plugins package. So that’s like a 30 plus plugins. So they closed down all the plugins. They issued an alert, Hey, your site might be compromised. And they actually put code in the patch of the plugins that would check the wp-config file, was it tampered with by the plugin authors themselves?

So one of my customers saw the notice flagged me. I scanned it, saw it was compromised, and then that’s when I uncovered how big of a deal it was, the Essential Plugins. It was actually a purchase of a company. That was just one of them.

The other three situations, again it’s all kind of part, it stems back to me overhauling my security system for my clients. The other one was flagged by a new security feature I was implementing where I check all of my customers JavaScript embeds.

I’m basically scanning changes over time, hoping to catch like a credit card skimmer, or something else like that for my own customers. Well one of them came back. Something’s weird. It was a widget logic plugin that was embedding some weird sports JavaScript code for one of my sites. And I kept digging and digging into it, and sure enough, it was another supply chain attack on that particular plugin.

So, in all these instances, the WordPress Plugin Team has been fantastic. Very responsive and closing down the plugin, and applying patches, and getting the out there. Yeah, it’s weird. I had no plans to building something like this. I just stumbled upon it and every situation was a different story.

The last one I’ll share is, I was messing around with this idea that, I wonder if I could use AI to hunt through my own customer’s plugins to detect plugins that are running different versions of the code base. You might have Jetpack installed with the latest version, but maybe there’s a variant version Jetpack’s running. That’s the core idea, or the core concept.

So I built this tool with AI to scan my own customers, and it found a variant version of the Quick Redirection Plugin installed. I’m like, what’s going on here? So I dig into it and I had 12 sites running a version of the plugin that wasn’t on wordpress.org. So then I threw it through AI. It told me the difference. And sure enough, like you had to keep digging to get actually get to the answer what happened.

But that was a situation where many, the plugin author themselves offloaded most of their customers to a hijacked version. And my own customers years later were running a hijacked version. So I wasn’t directly searching for this stuff, it just came up, and then I’m like, after you get three of them, it’s alright, now I just wanna see if I can find one.

So I built the scanner and while I was scanning the top 2000 WordPress sites, I found one, and it was active. It was active, meaning the plugin, it’s called Scroll To Top. It was wired in to 20,000 sites, but it wasn’t active. So a lot of these bad actors, they will take their time, get a plugin that’s compromised in a lot of people’s sites, and then when the moment’s right, pull a trigger. And then at that point they can start to flow in bad content or SEO and actually do the compromise.

The one that I actually found was a compromise scenario, from what I can tell, the bad actor hadn’t actually pulled the trigger yet. So it was a success story.

[00:19:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that is really, kind of makes it more alarming in a sense, doesn’t it? Because once I suppose there’s an active exploit, and people are beginning to report what’s going on here? There’s some strange behaviour on a website, I presume at that point eyeballs will fall on what’s going on and work will be done.

However, as you’ve just described maybe months, weeks, possibly years, a plugin can have incredible functionality. It might gain widespread adoption, because it’s doing this one thing particularly well. Just with this dormant code sitting there waiting for the moment that’s opportune. Maybe there’s some scenario in the real world in which it will become a timely thing to be able to deploy that.

That’s really alarming, isn’t it? Because who knows how many websites are currently sitting there with as yet undiscovered, back doors, or problems that we simply don’t know about because they haven’t been triggered? Yeah, that one is really alarming.

Austin, I’m going to give you a little opportunity because you keep saying my clients, and I don’t think we painted the context of that. Just tell us a little bit about what you do and how that aligns you to have, have an eyeball on so many websites. I think currently, when you say my clients, I think it’s true to say that you’ve got something in the order of 3000 websites that you manage. Now, if you were building those as client websites, that’s a lot of clients. Just tell us what it is that you do, and that might widen the debate a little bit.

[00:20:39] Austin Ginder: No, I don’t do consulting work anymore. So back in 2014, I transitioned into web hosting full-time. I run Anchor Hosting, and my business is, it’s a pretty simple business model. I resell other managed WordPress hosting services, and provide all of the support and maintenance on top of it.

So I primarily use web hosts like Kinsta and Rocket.net. They are larger companies. They have a lot more eyeballs on it. I like to layer as many layers between me and the web host infrastructure as I can, so that I can actually solve what I want to solve. And that’s the WordPress maintenance part.

So I have a little bit more visibility than some. So that is more unique position than most. And I actually would say if there’s any takeaway from this conversation, the takeaway is any hosting company out there that has more data than me, they are sitting on a gold mine and they don’t know it.

Because any site that gets malware, that is the gold. If you can point AI at every malware situation or attack, you can sometimes back channel it to figure out where it actually happened, and start to paint a bigger picture. I would love to get my hands on like a web host that has millions of sites and run some scans, because that’s how you’re going to discover it, weed it out.

[00:21:59] Nathan Wrigley: And there’s maybe patterns going on. I don’t suppose every hacker of WordPress plugins is some kind of evil genius. They might just be, I think what’s often called script kiddies. The idea being that they are taking templates and copying and pasting these ideas far and wide.

And therefore I suppose patterns would emerge and maybe as you said, some of these larger hosts would be able to spot that pattern, and get out in front of these different problems which have, as yet, been undetected.

Okay, so you’ve then taken an additional step. You’ve got yourself a URL, wpbeacon.io. Dear listener, as is always the case, anything that we mention today, so the links to the articles which Austin has written, I will put those in the show notes, but also I’ll link to wpbeacon.io. Just tell us a little bit about that and that, how that’s helping the community.

[00:22:52] Austin Ginder: So WP Beacon was again, an idea I threw together last month. Not a whole lot of planning. But it was just like, okay, I’ve got three of these now. These are basically in depth investigations. Where do you put it? Because this is different than a typical vulnerability database. Like a vulnerability database is really good about endeavour to find bad code.

This is not bad code, this is bad actors. They’re two completely different problems. So I built WP Beacon as like my place to put all these findings. And the idea is actually have it be a legitimate feed for other folks, like another metric or another vulnerability database, but for supply chain attacks in particular.

[00:23:39] Nathan Wrigley: And so I suppose the idea being that people who are, I mean obviously if you’ve got one WordPress website, it’s fairly unlikely that you’ll come across WP Beacon, because you’re not in the business of being in the community or what have you. But if you are somebody that’s, I don’t know, managing multiple clients, half a dozen or what have you’re in the WordPress space, this is the kind of thing you might want to know about.

I suppose you are then hoping to be some sort of gatekeeper of knowledge around whether a supply chain attack has occurred. So let’s say for example, I’m considering putting a new plugin in. I find something on the wordpress.org repo, and it looks fine. Everything about it is screaming, yes, install me. I would go over to WP Beacon. I see that you’ve got a search on the homepage. There’s a list of the number of installations that have been covered, authors, tracked plugins that are being watched and what have you. I would be able to, in some way, interact with that website and gain an understanding of, yep, we’ve got nothing on them. Everything looks fine, or no, hold on, have a second thought. This thing happened last month. Is that again? Is that kind of what’s going on there?

[00:24:45] Austin Ginder: I think end users might find value in it, but I think the better target audience is, this is missing security research that security people don’t have. I see it as that. It’s like when I do a report and I put it up on WP Beacon, those identifiers of these bad actors can then be, action can be taken on that by real legitimate security people.

So I have a friend, his name’s Sal. He used to work at Kinsta. So when I was dealing with one of these cleanups, I was messaging him privately. I’m like, hey, Sal, look what I found. And he is oh, gimme a second. I’m going take their compromise server offline. I’m like, what do you mean? So he whips it out and he gets their domain suspended, website taken offline. And this is like the crucial gap, right?

The research person wants to make people’s site safe. So if you’re out there and you’ve got a hijacked plugin installed and you don’t know about it, you need a research person, and a security person, to take care of the issue for you. And that is like taking down their infrastructure, taking down the bad actors infrastructure.

[00:25:51] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that is interesting, yeah.

[00:25:53] Austin Ginder: My goal of WP Beacon is just like, this stuff needs to be more visible. We need to be drafting and documenting this is how the supply chain attack happened in this case. And here is all of the identifiers for the security firms to go for, and take down their infrastructure. To give some sort of incentive that like this kind of behaviour isn’t going to be tolerated or a signal to the bad actors like, we’re coming for you. We’re going to find you, we’re going to weed you out.

[00:26:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so that’s interesting. So connections with hosting companies would certainly be beneficial, wouldn’t it? Because let’s say a bunch of hosting companies are pointing their staff at the WP Beacon data, then you could probably satisfy, I don’t know, 60, 70, 80% of WordPress instal by communicating with the bigger hosts. Because I imagine that’s where the majority of WordPress websites occur. I presume another angle would be the .org repo itself. The team over there, the Plugin Review Team and the Security Team and what have you.

One ray of light, I suppose is that if you fix this, then you have fixed it. Whereas a lot of security problems keep coming back. Well, no, that’s not entirely true, is it? Having said all of that, I was fairly confidently thinking if you can, if you can get the plugin turned off so that it can’t be installed anymore, that’s one thing. If you can switch off the supply chain server, that’s another thing. But there’s going to be loads of different scenarios. It might be that they don’t have a supply chain server. It might be that they’re just defacing your website. And how do we disable that that particular functionality and the plugin?

I believe that wordpress.org has in rare situations deployed the, we will overwrite your plugin. I don’t know how to describe that, but I have a memory that in the past, something so catastrophic had happened inside of a wordpress.org repo, that there is the capacity for WordPress to say, okay, we’re taking command here, and we’re going to rewrite your plugins. I don’t think that’s very common, but I think that is something that can be done.

[00:27:59] Austin Ginder: In these situations, that’s exactly what they did. They reverted a patch, closed down the repos, and their patch is what stands.

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

[00:28:09] Austin Ginder: So I think a lot of what my, what I’m trying to do is complimentary to what everyone else is doing. And I think it’s a little bit more, it’s an unexplored area, what WP Beacon is exploring. We have all this data, let’s see what we can get out of it.

But I do share your optimism, and also I would love this to just be a solved problem, and six months later we shut down WP Beacon, like it’s not even needed. But that’s just not how the world works, right? What I do hope will come from this is the bad actors that have been operating for years, 10 plus years, we make it harder for them to operate. I think that would be a more realistic success story of this project.

One of the bigger findings I found this past week, in the last few days, is this bad operator he’s been operating for the last 13 years. And what happens is his accounts get shut down, his plugins get shut down, and he just tries again. He opens up new accounts, new plugins, and he just keeps trying. We’ve got to make it a little bit harder for them.

[00:29:09] Nathan Wrigley: And also what’s really interesting there is that this is not, for you at least anyway, this doesn’t feel like a finished story. This kind of feels like, for you, now that you’ve put yourself in this seat, if you like, it feels each week possibly something new will be coming along, something that you’ve explored? Is that the case? I would like for you to say no at this point, no, there’s nothing new happening, but I the feeling that there’s quite a lot that you are uncovering on a daily, weekly, monthly basis.

[00:29:37] Austin Ginder: I do think it’s going to be harder and harder to find interesting things based on the raw data, using my technique of just going through and auditing things? That’s a good thing, right? If it’s harder to uncover these problems, that’s a positive indication that something’s happening.

So I think I’ve been extremely lucky by reverse engineering a problem. Like, how does the malware get here? Oh, okay. So then figuring out that there’s a bigger issue at hand. And I also think it’s one of those scenarios that we all think people are searching through the data, but they aren’t. I’ve got a $200 month Claude Code subscription, and I can search through the data with that. It’s actually feasible for individuals to start auditing the data and to get more eyeballs on this in a way that would never been possible before.

Yeah, I would encourage people to think bigger. If you’re an individual, you can take your site, download a backup and run it through Claude Code and do a file by file audit. It might take a few, Claude doesn’t like to do this, but it might take a few wranglings. No, look every line of code and tell me what you see. Do you see vulnerabilities? Do you see malware? Do you see any harmful things there? And an individual can do this, and they can get a very high level detailed report unique for their site.

[00:30:55] Nathan Wrigley: That’s interesting advice. Maybe in the future, some of the pain that you’ve been through with Claude trying to get it to behave in the way that you expect, maybe that be interesting data to put out? What are the prompts which you’ve seen that work and so on?

One thing which dawns on me, and I don’t really have the answer to this, because the wordpress.org repo, for good reason, has been wide open. What I mean by that is, lots of people can submit code. You don’t necessarily have to have a certain type of credential, or be a certain type of business and so on.

However, if you look out there in the broader tech landscape, things like, I don’t know, the Mac App Store or the iOS App Store or Google’s Play Store. I wonder what their approach is to firstly the onboarding of new plugin developers. But then what the inspection is for updates. When code comes through and it’s purporting to make a minor change to a particular app on your phone, what is being done there?

And I’m guessing that in the WordPress space, the fact that it’s run often by volunteers means that those kind of things are just going to be different. And perhaps those things need to be looked at. There needs to be potentially some more friction that’s added, or some more steps. And I know that a lot of work has been done by the Plugin Review Team to automate as much of that as possible, and to put some steps in place to make it so that those submissions get inspected in a more timely way. But I don’t have an answer. I’m certainly no expert. But it would be curious to see if there’s any lessons to be learned from the broader tech community.

[00:32:30] Austin Ginder: Obviously the openness of WordPress is its power. App Store versus Android, right, kind of comparison? We’re more open source. You could just do what you want. There’s pros and cons, right? So how do we make what we have more safe? And I think the answer to that is everything needs a hundred percent code audited.

How do we get there as quick as possible? That’s a token question. Like, how many tokens can we spend to audit everything? I have fairly good coverage now for my own customer base. What I do is whatever leftover usage I have, I’m auditing all of my plugins. And I do it in a way that’s efficient, meaning I only audit this one plugin version once. That gets assigned to a hash, a unique hash. Then I know, oh, okay, so all of my sites using that same variant are covered.

So a hundred percent code coverage is what we need to do now. And then long term, also in concurrently, we need to start auditing any changes that come over the wire. It’s a lot, right? Like wordpress.org is very popular. There’s a lot of code, but I do think it’s in a realm of realistic. If you are able to shave out a lot of the noise, we don’t have to audit everything. We don’t have to see every CSS file you’re changing, or image you’re changing. But we do have to look over every PHP line, every JavaScript line, that there’s nothing harmful in there. And then eventually we’ll start to catch things.

And I don’t think it’s necessarily a one off thing. We don’t have to wait around for Automattic to come up with a solution. The data is out there. Anyone with a laptop and a subscription could just create a mirror and see, what changed over the last, day, and then start auditing that. I think people think it’s too impossible.

[00:34:18] Nathan Wrigley: It feels like a large cliff that you’re staring at, at the beginning of this. And certainly in the past before AI, that cliff was, I imagine, more or less impenetrable But now the way that you’ve described, perhaps AI can be co-opted to do a lot of this work for us?

I wonder what you’ve got, if you’ve got any thoughts on the sort of permissions system. So I know that other, let’s say CMSs and certainly devices like Android devices and iOS devices, they come with permissions based systems. So for example, this code, it’s allowed access to the root file structure. Or it’s allowed access to the camera, or whatever it may be.

And I know that there’s been debate in the WordPress ecosystem recently about whether something like that would be a good idea. At the moment, plugins, all bets are off. If you put a plugin in, it’s more or less got access to anything on your WordPress website.

That’s an absolute strength of WordPress because it enables anybody to do anything. But I suppose given that it can enable any anybody to do anything, it also prevents a very large threat surface as well. I don’t really have the answer to that. I just think that’s a curious thing to raise and see if you’ve got any thoughts.

[00:35:29] Austin Ginder: I guess my initial thought is I don’t necessarily want my WordPress site to feel like my laptop, where I’m constantly clicking things.

[00:35:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Grant permission for this.

[00:35:38] Austin Ginder: I don’t know what the solution is either. I think some of those ideas are great when you’re thinking about making something from scratch, but they are not as relevant when you’ve already have an existing ecosystem. Like you can’t, I would think it’d be very hard to bring some of those concepts into WordPress at this point. We’re already past that.

[00:35:59] Nathan Wrigley: That ship has definitely sailed.

[00:36:00] Austin Ginder: I want to be in the Wild West. I want to be able to code and do what I want to do. And especially with AI. If I got an idea, I just want AI to go to town, write me up the plugin to my spec, and not have to deal with some of those extra safeguards.

It’d be great if we could find some way to make things more secure from an architectural standpoint, but that’s an architecture problem probably best suited for a new project.

[00:36:22] Nathan Wrigley: The truth is that this will never, ever be solved. I mean security problems online. There will be a no point in the future at which everything is always safe, because humans are ingenious, and there are really credible, credible is the wrong word. There are ways to make money, or to make it worthwhile for the bad actors to be doing the bad things. And so long as those incentives exist, there will be people trying to hijack websites, undermine the security of your computer or phone or whatever it may be. But this is certainly an interesting one.

And it’s such a shame because with the benefit of hindsight, this was so obvious, and yet it hasn’t been a news story. Maybe it has in the past, I’ve certainly not come across it. But this whole supply chain thing is fairly new to me, and fairly alarming in the simplicity of deployment.

You literally purchase, or somehow get hold of, a popular plugin, not necessarily even a popular plugin, a plugin. And then instantaneously every one of those websites is up for grabs in whichever way you would like to grab it. Definitely something that the WordPress community’s going to have to wrangle with.

Okay. I think we’ve hit the sweet spot in terms of time Austin. If it’s all right with you, we will wrap it up there. However, before we go, do you just want to drop a few little bits about where people could contact you? I am more or less certain that somebody listening to this podcast will have thoughts for you about getting in touch, helping out, or what have you. So tell us where you can be found.

[00:37:55] Austin Ginder: You can find me just by searching for my name, Austin Ginder. There’s not many Ginders. I’m on X, that’s my main feed. And you can also read along on anchor.host. I do blog posts there pretty regularly.

[00:38:09] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. In which case I will just point everybody to the wptavern.com website. If you go and use the search feature, search for Austin Ginder. Austin, spelled in the usual way. Ginder, G-I-N-D-E-R. You’ll find the episode and anything that has been mentioned, any links or what have you, we will link to there.

So thank you for chatting to me today about what I wish didn’t exist, but it does exist. Austin, thank you so much.

[00:38:34] Austin Ginder: Thank you. This was a pleasure.

On the podcast today we have Austin Ginder.

Austin has been involved in the WordPress ecosystem since 2010, and since 2014 has run Anchor Hosting, a business that manages thousands of WordPress websites. While he’s a developer and automation enthusiast at heart, in recent months Austin has found himself at the forefront of a burgeoning crisis in WordPress security, supply chain attacks targeting plugins.

A chance discovery during a malware cleanup on a client’s site propelled Austin into what would become a wider investigation of plugin vulnerabilities. What he uncovered is both alarming and timely, bad actors aren’t just hacking sites directly, but are instead infiltrating the supply chain, either by purchasing plugin companies and weaponising them, or by hijacking plugins and pushing out malicious updates. These attacks are subtle, often shifting plugin update servers away from WordPress.org to rogue channels where malware can be quietly distributed, leaving end users in the dark and their sites at risk.

We trace Austin’s journey from accidental security investigator to creator of the WP Beacon project, a resource aimed at tracking, documenting, and alerting the WordPress community to known supply chain attacks. He shares how AI tools have radically changed what’s possible in threat detection and forensics, enabling individuals, and hopefully, someday, the larger hosting providers, to identify patterns and root causes behind widespread infections.

We get into case studies of specific plugins compromised in recent months, the challenges of auditing over 60,000 plugins on the WordPress.org repo, and the complexities of stopping these attacks once malicious code is in the wild. Austin also discusses his hopes for greater collaboration with hosts and security researchers, aiming for better automated monitoring and response.

If you manage WordPress websites, create plugins, or just care about the future of open source security, this episode is for you.

Useful links

wordpress.org plugin repository

Claude Code

WordPress Plugin Review Team Handbook

Anchor Hosting

WP Beacon website

Austin on X

Open Channels FM: BackTalk on Decentralized Interoperability, Data Sovereignty, and the Power of Local Community

Bob Dunn — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 10:13:00 +0000

The challenges of decentralized networks, data sovereignty complexities in hosting, and the importance of local connections within the tech community to foster collaboration and growth.

Open Channels FM: How to Make Your Case Studies Stand Out: The Power of Storytelling

Bob Dunn — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 12:42:00 +0000

Effective case studies focus on storytelling, positioning the customer as the hero. They highlight challenges, solutions, and outcomes, blending engaging narratives with measurable results to build trust.

Matt: Bee Champion

Matt — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 18:44:51 +0000

Spelling bees have gotten a lot more intense. How many of these do you know?

torrone, enthymeme, iguape, Denebola, fais-dodo, cywyddau, pohutukawa, monadnock, émeute, nannofossil, tongkang, Natchitoches, flaith, semele, rusell, sawder, campernelle, Nicol, Zamenis, Tharparkar, tlachtli, madoqua, retiarius, balintawak, tessaraconter, taurokathapsia, rapakivi, uayeb, paroemia, melengket, teraglin, homelyn, chikungunya, bromocriptine (cashaw)

Check out the first 90 seconds of this video where Shrey Parikh gets 32 out of 34 correct to become the 2026 champion. That speed round is called a “spell-off,” and so many of the kids are getting all the words right that they use it to break ties. Lots of words to press.

Akismet: Introducing the official Akismet Drupal module

Derek Springer — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 13:00:00 +0000

The official module is here!

For two decades, Akismet has done one thing exceptionally well: keep spam out of WordPress. Now we’re bringing that protection to Drupal. The official module is here, built by the team behind Akismet as a native Drupal module. It guards your site with the same spam-fighting service that keeps comments, contact forms, and signups clean across millions of sites.

Protection where spammers actually go

Spam doesn’t stop at comments, so neither does the module. Once it’s set up, Akismet checks the forms spammers target most:

Comments
Contact forms
Webform submissions
User registrations

It runs every submission through Akismet in the background and quietly filters the spam out, so you see less of it and your visitors never notice it’s there.

Built for Drupal, the Drupal way

We wanted this to feel like a first-class part of your site, not a bolt-on. The module follows modern Drupal conventions, and plays nicely with other anti-spam tools like Honeypot and CAPTCHA if you already use them. It also adds invisible bot-detection signals that catch automated junk before it ever reaches the API.

Tools for moderators

For the spam worth a second look, there’s a dedicated review queue and one-click actions on every comment. Each correction goes back to Akismet, so the filter keeps getting smarter about your site. An admin dashboard shows your stats at a glance, and built-in GDPR export and erasure tools make honoring data requests straightforward.

Getting started

You’ll need an Akismet API key. Grab one at akismet.com, then install the module with Composer:

composer require drupal/akismet_antispam

Enable it, add your key on the settings page, pick which forms to protect, and you’re done. The module needs Drupal 10.3+ and PHP 8.1+, and it’s released under the GPL. You’ll find the docs and issue queue on the Drupal.org project page.

We’re excited to bring Akismet to the Drupal community. Give it a try and tell us what you think.

Matt: Maybe

Matt — Sun, 31 May 2026 04:49:08 +0000

I think I heard this parable somewhere in the 14 hours of Alan Watts lectures someone recommended to me in 2017, but here’s a beautiful 2-minute version I’d love to share for everyone going through something.

I really appreciate the love and support I received after the WP23 post, and I do want to tell people I’m okay, the post was part catharsis and part giving voice to what I see and hear privately from people who aren’t public figures.

On weekends, I like to look back on the week and find a silver lining or learning from things that were challenging. It helps reframe things. After it was reported that I had 21 hours of depositions over 3 days, people were like “wow that must have been terrible,” but actually, while the prep and process were intense, I found it energizing and I learned a ton. Will post more about that later. You never know where things will lead.

Greg Ziółkowski: Research: The Workspace Boundary for Agent Memory

Greg Ziółkowski — Sat, 30 May 2026 13:18:27 +0000

A clear pattern is emerging in how major AI and workspace platforms handle long-term agent memory. The core idea is simple: store memory in the smallest durable workspace that users already recognize, such as a project, repository, document, workspace, namespace, or site. Then, rely on the platform’s existing permission system to decide who can access […]

Open Channels FM: The Human Touch in a Podcast

Bob Dunn — Fri, 29 May 2026 09:21:21 +0000

In this commentary Bob emphasizes the importance of blending human creativity with AI tools in content creation, advocating for authentic, human-driven commentary in their work.

Open Channels FM: Solving the Identity Challenge in Decentralized Social Networks

Bob Dunn — Fri, 29 May 2026 09:07:33 +0000

Decentralized social networks face challenges in identity resolution, complicating user interactions across platforms. Ensuring seamless experiences without centralization is the key to mainstream adoption.

WordPress Foundation: Open Horizons in Action: What Our First Cohort Has Been Up To

Harmony Romo — Thu, 28 May 2026 20:12:35 +0000

Important note: Programs like Open Horizons are made possible by the WordPress Foundation. Ongoing legal action by WP Engine threatens the Foundation’s ability to continue supporting scholarships, education programs, and community initiatives like this one.

A scholarship is supposed to do more than cover a flight. Here’s what the first round of Open Horizons recipients have done since they came home from WordCamp US 2025.

When we launched the Open Horizons Scholarship in May 2025, the goal was simple: help WordPress contributors get to the events that would otherwise be out of reach..

Six recipients made it to WordCamp US 2025 in Portland – coming from Malaysia, Guatemala, India, Costa Rica, and across the United States. Several months later, we took a look at what they’ve been contributing to the WordPress project since the conference.

The short version: a lot.

Here’s the long version.

Mainul Kabir Aion

Organizer · @aion11

Mainul has stayed remarkably busy since WCUS. He’s been mentoring organizers at WordCamp Barishal in Bangladesh, wrote a post for the WordCamp Asia 2026 site, kept up with users in the plugin support forums, and shipped multiple plugin releases through the WordPress SVN repository. (He commits regularly enough that “regularly” probably undersells it.)

Frank Calderon

Volunteer · @fgcalderon

Frank came back from WCUS and went all-in on the Central American WordPress community. He organized and spoke at WordCamp Guatemala 2025, attended WordCamp San José 2025, was confirmed as a speaker for WordPress Developer Day 2026 San José, and joined the organizing team for Women WordPress Day Guatemala 2026.

If you’re keeping score: that’s four events Frank has shown up for, in the year since one event helped him show up.

Bigul Malayi

Volunteer · @mbigul

Bigul has contributed across just about every WordPress project that takes contributions. He joined the Photos team at WordCamp Asia 2026 Contributor Day, has been steady on translate.wordpress.org (dozens of strings translated and reviewed in recent weeks), and has uploaded 3,187 photos to the WordPress Photo Directory.

Yes, three thousand one hundred and eighty-seven. We checked twice.

Kinjal Dalwadi

Volunteer · @kinjaldalwadi

Kinjal has kept up consistent translation work on translate.wordpress.org in the months since WCUS; suggesting, translating, and reviewing strings on an ongoing basis, with her most recent activity just days before we wrote this post.

It’s the kind of quiet, steady contribution that makes WordPress usable in dozens of languages, and it’s exactly the long-term commitment we hoped to see.

Kelly Choyce-Dwan

Organizer · @ryelle

Kelly’s contributions span Core, Gutenberg, and community infrastructure all at once. Since WCUS, she has authored the Call for Organizers post for WordCamp US 2026 in Phoenix, merged pull requests into both Gutenberg and the wporg-repo-tools repo, contributed to the WordPress 6.9 About page, and closed related Core Trac tickets along the way.

In other words, the kind of contributor whose name you see in a lot of changelogs.

Elineth Morera Campos

Speaker · @emorera

Elineth has been turning her WCUS experience into a pipeline for new WordPress contributors. She completed the WordPress Credits Mentor’s Course on learn.wordpress.org, made WordPress contribution a required module in her curriculum at Fidélitas University, mentors students through the work, organized WordPress Campus Connect San José 2025, and contributed photos to the WordPress Photo Directory.

She effectively built a feeder system for the next wave of WordPress contributors.

What this tells us

A few things stand out.

Recipients keep contributing. Every WCUS 2025 recipient is still actively involved in the WordPress project, not as a thank-you, but because contributing is what they enjoy doing. The scholarship just removed the barrier to one specific event.

Impact compounds. Almost every recipient has helped other people contribute since WCUS; by mentoring, organizing local events, teaching students, supporting forum users, or making contribution easier through tooling. The dollars don’t stop with one trip.

Geography matters. Recipients came from countries you don’t always see well-represented at flagships, and the work they’re doing now is grounded in their local communities. That’s the whole point.

The first cohort isn’t the only cohort

We’ve also funded recipients for WordCamp Asia 2026 and WordCamp Europe 2026, and we’ll share their post-event contributions in future updates.

In the meantime: if you’re an active WordPress contributor with a confirmed role at an upcoming flagship WordCamp as an organizer or speaker, we’d love to read your application.

Learn more and apply: https://wordpressfoundation.org/open-horizons-scholarship/

Open Channels FM: Navigating Neurodiversity in Tech: Why Sharing Strategies Matters

Bob Dunn — Thu, 28 May 2026 14:18:00 +0000

The tech industry is filled with diverse minds, and more people are discovering that neurodivergent perspectives, such as autism and ADHD are not just common in this field, but bring valuable strengths. Yet, many professionals grew up without a diagnosis or language to describe their differences. This can leave individuals navigating challenges without clear strategies, […]

Open Channels FM: The Value of Small WordPress Events in a Changing Tech Landscape

Bob Dunn — Thu, 28 May 2026 13:20:41 +0000

In this epiosde, Adam Weeks interviews Joe Simpson about reviving local WordCamps, emphasizing their unique value in fostering in-person connections, empowering new voices, and adapting to technological changes like AI in the WordPress community.

WordPress.org blog: WP23

Matt Mullenweg — Wed, 27 May 2026 17:40:10 +0000

WordPress at 23 is simultaneously both the strongest and most precarious it’s ever been.

Last week, we shipped WordPress 7 to the world. In seven days, 46% of all WordPresses, tens of millions across countless different hosting environments, are already on 7.0, auto-updated with no breakage. From a Raspberry Pi to the most secure sites in the world, like WhiteHouse.gov. Sit with that for a minute when you think of all the resources and all the projects that have had security problems in the past few weeks. No supply chain attacks, no security problems, just a stable, secure infrastructure doing its job invisibly to power a huge portion of the open internet.

I’m really proud of the capability and security of WordPress, and we should celebrate that. That accomplishment represents the work of thousands and thousands of people coming together to make the web a better place. Also, an iceberg of what is going on behind the scenes.

However, the release was not what I hoped it would be because so much time from key people was taken away by WP Engine’s attacks.

Silver Lake, in its immense 100B+ power, summoned a shoggoth in Quinn Emanuel that has been paperclip-maximizing legal torture that is not just going after Automattic and WordPress.org and me personally, but this Golem Jagannath is now trying to dissolve the WordPress Foundation itself, a non-profit with no employees or payroll that supports WordCamps and Open Source education around the world.

If you know anyone at Silver Lake, Quinn Emanuel, or WP Engine in that order, please beg, plead with them to stop the violence. End this internecine warfare that is threatening to destroy one of the last stalwarts of the Open Web.

It’s not fun and games anymore, not just business. This is having a real impact on people’s lives.

It took every ounce of will in my body, and I am grateful to thousands of hours of meditation, to not explode in rage when asked about pineapple on pizza and debating the meaning of Jean Baudrillard and “bastardized simalcra” when miles away, my closest friend is in a hospital bed waiting for a heart transplant.

I have colleagues LITERALLY DYING I can’t be with because Silver Lake / Quinn Emanuel / WP Engine shoggoth is trying to make it seem like I am hiding or destroying evidence because we rotate logs on wordpress.org or I have disappearing chats on Signal with romantic partners. I don’t curse, but this is so f-ed up I don’t know what to say.

If you don’t know anyone at these entities, please pray, meditate, and call on whatever forces or divine interventions you can to bring this to an end.

I reached out multiple times to resolve this with open arms; I’ve extended every olive branch; and I’ve even said positive things about Silver Lake and WP Engine in the press, trying to bring this to a close. Heather Brunner would not even come into the same room with me.

All of this from a stupid presentation I gave at WordCamp US 2024 about how private equity can hollow out high-trust-based Open Source communities that in the past 19 months has only gotten 16k views on YouTube.

Silver Lake, you have already extracted all your pounds of flesh. I missed my Mom’s knee surgery. If you wanted me to suffer for my sins, I have, and probably deeper than you will ever know. WordPress and WordPress.org, and yes, even my flawed leadership, are at the heart of what has made WP Engine successful so far. You have so much money and power, you just got TikTok, the Trump administration loves you, you don’t need to control and take over WordPress, too. If you win, you destroy it, and then what? Please have mercy and stop trying to ruin people’s lives. Let’s move on.

WPTavern: #218 – Luke Carbis on the Future of WordPress Plugins: AI, Ethics, and New Directory Standards

Nathan Wrigley — Wed, 27 May 2026 14:00:00 +0000

Transcript

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

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, the future of WordPress plugins, AI, ethics, and new directory standards.

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

So on the podcast today we have Luke Carbis. Luke has been immersed in the WordPress world for our round 20 years with experience touching upon many strands of the ecosystem. He started his own businesses, worked in agencies as a developer and product lead, contributed to WordPress Core, helped organise WordCamps, and is now a member of the Plugin Review Team. He also co-hosts the Crossword podcast.

Recently Luke delivered a talk at WordCamp Asia titled, beyond the guidelines, it’s time to evolve our standards for a safer plugin ecosystem. And today he’s here to share some of those ideas with us.

We start by talking about how WordPress.org’s plugin directory is facing a wave of new submissions driven largely by the rise of AI generated plugins. This has made it harder, both for quality plugins to stand out, and for users to find what they need, despite backend improvements and shorter review wait times.

Luke discusses how the current discovery and ranking systems can be games, how active installs play a key role, and why there’s room for improvement in surfacing the best plugins.

We also get into Luke’s suggestions for making the plugin ecosystem better, including ways to connect wordpress.org accounts with sites, streamlining discoverability and installation of both custom and premium plugins, and the idea of officially supporting a commercial plugin marketplace with proceeds potentially supporting Core contributors and community events.

A thread throughout this conversation, is how WordPress should respond to AI, not just as a technology, but as an agent of change in the community. We look at the ethical implications, generational divides in attitude towards AI, and the importance of strong leadership as WordPress faces a period of challenge and uncertainty.

If you’re interested in the future of the WordPress plugin directory, the role of commercial offerings, and how AI is reshaping open source communities, this episode is for you.

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

And so without further delay, I bring you Luke Carbis.

I am joined on the podcast by Luke Carbis. Hello, Luke.

[00:03:38] Luke Carbis: Hey Nathan, how are you doing? I heard you had a great time in India.

[00:03:41] Nathan Wrigley: I had a great time in India. I think you had a great time in India as well. Is that true?

[00:03:46] Luke Carbis: Yes, I love India. There’s just something really special about it.

[00:03:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. I came away with an enormously favourable opinion of my time in India. I kind of wish that that episode had not come to an end.

We are back from WordCamp Asia, which is where I spent some time with you. You did a talk, presentation, over there, and it was entitled beyond the guidelines, it’s time to evolve our standards for a safer plugin ecosystem. Let’s get into that in a minute.

Before then, can you just give us your little potted bio? I know it’s a bit of a pedestrian question, but can you just tell us a small amount about yourself, probably related to WordPress, I guess?

[00:04:25] Luke Carbis: So I’ve been using WordPress for 20 years and also, you know, roughly there. And in that time I have done everything really from like starting my own small businesses, to working for agencies in developer roles, in product roles. Worked for hosts. I’ve worked for products and plugins, and I’ve started my own plugin businesses and sold them too. And now, after contributing here and there across a variety of different teams, I’m now part of the plugin team. So I’m spending a lot of time reviewing plugins.

[00:05:02] Nathan Wrigley: So you are very much aligned with the mission of today’s episode. So I’m going to read the blurb that was included in your presentation, just to give some context to that.

[00:05:11] Luke Carbis: I’ll tell you that I give this blurb to everybody who has to introduce me before a talk, and I get varying degrees of success in terms of their ability to reproduce the words written on the page. I’m eager to hear your rendition, Nathan.

[00:05:28] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Here we go. I’m going to try it. I’m going to give myself one chance to get it right. It’s time to have a conversation about ethics in plugin and product design. We’ll learn that recognising and rejecting dark patterns isn’t about stricter rules, it’s about building trust through transparent, user centred design. How did I do?

[00:05:46] Luke Carbis: Oh, you did good. That wasn’t the one I was talking about actually. I thought were going to read my bio.

[00:05:52] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, well I’ll read your bio. Let’s move to there then.

[00:05:54] Luke Carbis: I put so much effort into that.

[00:05:55] Nathan Wrigley: This I’m definitely doing as a first pass. Here we go. Luke Cabris is a self deputised open source emissary and vigilante plenipotentiary for WordPress proletariat affairs. He’s one of the hosts of Crossword, and has been a part of the community as a plugin developer, Core contributor, release lead, WordCamp organiser, and member of the plugin review team. How did I do?

[00:06:18] Luke Carbis: Amazing actually. And I think like a big part of that, you know, speaking about the silly words I’ve chosen to put in there around proletariat and so forth, that does come from a genuine place and why I got into plugin review in the first place. And maybe we’ll get into some of that in this interview.

[00:06:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, definitely. Okay, so there’s obviously an identified undercurrent of, dissatisfaction is maybe the wrong word, but you’ve clearly got some kind of estimation that things are not all going well in the plugin space. Because your talk, as I said, was talking about evolving standards for us safer plugin ecosystem. And the word safer there, I presume, implies that things could be improved.

So I guess I’m just going to ask you to lay out what it is that you believe the plugin landscape has a problem with, what’s going wrong? And then we can get into the remediation steps a bit later.

[00:07:10] Luke Carbis: Yeah, so when I was laying this out, I was thinking about, a lot about what I would do with the plugin directory if I could, if I could come in and change a bunch of things. And I realised that a lot of my bigger ideas are just not realistic.

So I would love to see maybe a plugin directory that was commercialised where plugins, you know, premium plugins could sell. But I think Matt’s been pretty clear that he’s not interested in doing anything like that, although maybe more recently had a change of heart on a bunch of things. So who knows?

I tried to stick to the basics and really, the changes that I proposed in this talk, I feel like they can get done. In fact, I can probably do them myself with a little bit of community support. And that’s the purpose of the talk.

And they’re really, mostly about this problem we’ve got with the directory at the moment where we’re just being inundated with loads and loads of new plugins. It’s becoming really hard to be able to stand out from the crowd as a product designer, and as a user, just figure out which plugin that I want to use. And of course, a lot of that is due to AI.

Nathan, we’ve seen, in the last 12 months, something like four times the amount of plugin submissions than 12 months ago. Isn’t that nuts?

[00:08:39] Nathan Wrigley: So I guess what I would say from there is, if I was to rewind the clock, I don’t know, let’s say three years, something like that, we had the same problem in that there was a deluge of things which needed to be approved from the plugin review team. A few bits and pieces were put in train, which actually appeared for a while to really get rid of that problem. You know, I think we got down to almost zero things in the queue for the plugin review team. And then coinciding almost perfectly, dovetailing into that came AI. The ubiquity of AI, the capacity of AI to create plugins and what have you. And that then presumably just turned that whole wheel back around.

And now we’re at the point where it sounds like the majority of the things which are in the queue are supposed to be AI plugins. You know, the idea that you may be able to rattle off 10 plugins in half an hour. On the face of it, that sounds like a great idea. Look, we’ve democratised plugin development and what have you.

But we have processes on wordpress.org which need to be satisfied and fulfilled so that they are measured, so that they are inspected, so that they pass the requisite number of tests and what have you. And we’re facing a problem just of numbers. There’s just numerically too many things happening all at once for the actual humans to take care of it. Does that sort of sum it up, or have I missed bits of that out?

[00:10:03] Luke Carbis: I would make a slight change to what you said actually, because the humans are actually taking care of it. We have been adding new people to the team, we have been improving our tools, and we’ve been using a bit of AI ourselves to be able to stay on top of the queue. And right now we’ve got about a week wait time before your plugin is reviewed. Now that’s always, like if you look historically, that’s a pretty good number.

Where you could be mistaken is if you look at the number of plugins waiting for review, right? You might see a lot, you might see 800, and that is much higher than it was two years ago, but we are getting through them a lot faster now.

So I think the metric to keep in mind is the wait time before review. Obviously we want to keep that at zero. Our team, we go into a critical mode. We say, oh, things are really bad if it’s two weeks. And so at the moment we’re one week, we’re pretty happy with that, trying to reduce it, of course.

The burden, there is a lot of burden on the Plugin Review team, but to me, that’s not the primary issue. The primary issue is if you create a product, if you create a plugin, then how do you stand out on the plugin directory amongst a thousand other plugins that do exactly the same thing? And if you are a user using WordPress, how do you find the right plugin for you? Or do you just give up on the plugin directory entirely and vibe code your own solution?

[00:11:30] Nathan Wrigley: Do you believe that is in fact the case? Do you think that possible submissions, the developers of, let’s say, I don’t know, countless plugins out there have just decided to do exactly that? Because they feel that, you know, they get through the week wait, the two week wait, the five day wait, whatever it is, their plugin is finally authorised, it’s on the wordpress.org repo, but then just crickets because of the way that the repo is structured, the way it surfaces things, the way it, I’m doing air quotes here, favours certain things. Is that the gripe really, that really it’s an unfair playing field? It’s sort of stacked in favour of some players as opposed to others.

[00:12:05] Luke Carbis: That’s been a long running gripe of the WordPress directory. That’s not a new gripe. That’s been around for a while. And in fact, we’ve really made some good progress towards changing up the featured plugins, for example. More the issue is the number of plugins. The number of plugins on the directory is growing just incredibly. And so it’s because of that it’s harder to stand out in the crowd.

[00:12:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, the UI, I’ve always wondered how Google, for example, obviously billions of dollars spent fine tuning that algorithm. The anticipation, certainly when I’m using things like Google, is that it’s doing a credible job. But the truth is, I have no insight into whether or not it really is doing an incredible job, or whether I’m just missing out on a dozen things that would actually be superior given the search, and given the proclivities of Google to surface things based upon sponsorship or whatever it may be.

What does the wordpress.org, and again, I’m using air quotes, what does the algorithm actually do at present, to present what is on the page in the repository when I first arrive for the first time, or subsequently with search?

[00:13:15] Luke Carbis: One of the biggest differences between Google and WordPress search is that the, air quotes, algorithm is open source. And you can actually go on to GitHub now and have a look and examine exactly what it is. And it’s a whole range of things. I probably couldn’t do a good job of summarising it, but it takes into account recent reviews. It takes into account the plugin author’s ability to respond to support on the forums. And of course it takes into account keyword matching in the title and description and things like that.

There is a cutoff, if I recall, on the length of the description that is included in the search thing to prevent people keyword stuffing. And that’s something we look carefully at during plugin review. There’s a whole heap of things, of course.

[00:14:01] Nathan Wrigley: Are you satisfied that those whole heap of things that make up the search, or the display for whatever it is that you’re searching for, or the default when you first arrive at the page, do you believe that there’s room for improvement there or, yeah?

[00:14:16] Luke Carbis: Oh yeah. Have you ever used the WordPress plugin search?

[00:14:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I really have. But curiously, given my background, I’m not the best candidate for doing searches because what I’m usually searching for is the name of the thing that I’m searching for. For me, because I’ve been in the WordPress space for such a long time and frequent all these different groups and learn from other individuals at WordCamps and things, I’m usually looking for the name of a product. Or certainly searching for this very specific, tight set of words around which I know it will surface. And then I find it. And use it.

However, if I was just, let’s go for example, with one of everybody’s favourites, SEO, if I just type in SEO and hit the button, I do not know what that would give me, and whether or not it would be a credible match for what I want.

And one of the things that I would add into that is Google’s algorithm being closed source. Whilst we, as an open source community, we don’t like the idea of that. There is something slightly ungameable about it. You know, there’s a big barrier between gaming the SEO on Google which WordPress doesn’t have, because once the algorithm is open sourced, it becomes, oh look, this is what we need to do to achieve rankings and so on.

[00:15:26] Luke Carbis: And there is a lot of attempts at gaming the algorithm. But one thing it’s really, really hard to game is active installs. And that is one of the big, big ranking factors. So if you have a plugin, if your plugin has risen to the top, then, yeah, it’s going to rank better. And that kind of makes sense from my perspective.

But then again, if you know what you’re looking for and you search specifically for the exact word and it comes up second or third or tenth in the search results, because it doesn’t have very many active installs, that’s a hard problem to solve.

[00:16:02] Nathan Wrigley: So what would be some of the remediation steps? It’s a bit of blue sky thinking this, and obviously everything that is about to come out of your mouth, caveat emptor, it might not happen, or it might be an idea which, you know, upon further reflection a year from now, you think, no, that wouldn’t have been a good idea anyway. But do you have some intuitions as to what you would like to try on the .org repo? You know, experiments to run for a short period of time to see what works and what doesn’t.

[00:16:26] Luke Carbis: I do have one experiment in particular I would love to run, but I have to set it up with you, Nathan. There’s a first step and a second step.

So the first step is, I want to be able to connect my wordpress.org account with my WordPress in install. So we’ve got this new Connectors API coming in WordPress 7, where we can connect our Open AI or our Anthropic accounts with API keys or whatever it is. I’d love to be able to log in with wordpress.org. I think that would be really cool. Now, have you ever tried going into the plugins, add new, and click favourites? What happens when do that?

[00:17:04] Nathan Wrigley: I have not, no.

[00:17:05] Luke Carbis: Okay. Well, I’ll tell you. Do you think it comes up with your favourites?

[00:17:08] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I see. Yeah, okay. Yeah.

[00:17:11] Luke Carbis: You’ve just done it. It asks you to type in your username from wordpress.org. And that’s not a great user experience. And so if we were able to sort of connect up our wordpress.org account to our various installs, then at least we could have our favourites come up in our plugins. So that would be a step one.

And then a step two is I would love to be able to store a list of GitHub repos, doesn’t have to be GitHub, just Git, Git repos, where I have my own set of custom plugins. Or maybe even authenticated via token, premium plugins. And add that into my wordpress.org profile so that whenever I’m creating a new WordPress site, I can go plugins, add new, click on my, I don’t know, we could call it like untrusted sources, that’s what some other app stores call it. And then see a list from wordpress.org of GitHub repositories or whatever, repositories on various different systems where I can just download the zip into my WordPress site just as though I’d uploaded, you know, I’d gone, upload zip via that menu.

Why not? I think that would be a really cool experiment to run. That would allow people to run their own sort of alternative marketplaces in a sense. If they could get onto that untrusted sources list. And it also wouldn’t take away that control that wordpress.org really wants over the plugin directory, for good reasons. Because if there was an untrusted source that was nefarious or malicious, then we could just remove that from everybody’s profile also.

[00:18:50] Nathan Wrigley: So there’s a couple of things there. The first one was, it felt like something akin, now I have an Android phone. I don’t have experience with the iOS app store on a phone, but the Google Play Store I have familiarity with. And because it knows things about me from my past and the things that I’ve done in the past, it begins to have some sort of idea of, okay, here’s the kind of things that you like.

Now I’m not suggesting anything quite like that, but it feels as if there’s a step slightly towards that. In other words, given that your 10 sites that you’ve connected to wordpress.org, they all seem to have an SEO plugin in them, they’ve all got a forms plugin, they’ve all got some sort of caching solution. Those kind of heuristics might then say, okay, we know that you like those kind of things, here’s a bunch of stuff that’s around that. Did I get that right or have I sort of overstated what you were thinking?

[00:19:42] Luke Carbis: Yeah. No, that’s good. And incidentally, it’s also the first sort of required step if we were to ever go ahead and make the wordpress.org plugin directory commercial, and allow plugins to sell, or sell subscriptions. That login with WordPress would be a necessary step.

[00:20:02] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And the next thing that you mentioned then was kind of like this idea of untrusted sources, or at least the capacity for you to say, I trust these things. And obviously, you know, we don’t want it to be that everybody ought to trust these things, so there needs to be a sort of volunteering in, or some sort of connection which you approve or something.

How many people are these days going out to places like GitHub? I’m imagining newbies to WordPress, probably no. But I’m imagining experienced people in WordPress, developers and what have you are certainly doing that. You know, they’re finding plugins over on GitHub and downloading them and doing all of that unnecessary work.

That is an interesting idea, isn’t it? Being able to bind it so that essentially it appears in the UI, you click a button, it just does all the things that you need to do. Yeah, that’s really interesting as well. And Git, you know, ubiquitously Git.

[00:20:48] Luke Carbis: Yes. And it’s not just other people’s plugins that people are trying to access. It’s a lot of your own plugins. And talking to plugin developers, talking to people submitting their plugins to the directory, a lot of the time people would be actually just happy if they could easily install their own plugins on their various websites and on their clients’ websites. That’s a part of them pushing it into wordpress.org, into the plugin repo is just to have it there accessible. They don’t really expect a lot of users. They’re not really going for some big product launch. They just want it there and available for when they build their website.

[00:21:29] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And then let’s move on to what I think was the third of your points there, which was the more commercial side of things. The idea of putting premium plugins, let’s call them that. Essentially a plugin where there’s a fee in exchange for getting access to that code base.

Do you think that breaks some kind of promise that the community over 20 years has opted into? I suppose the argument from the more open source side, if you like, let’s call it that, would be that it’s going to, in its train, bring all sorts of unexpected consequences. You know, the pressure to, I don’t know, raise a 3% fee for wordpress.org, which people would say, okay, where’s that going to? You know, on the Apple iOS store and on the Google Play Store. I think it’s around 30%. But, you know, I was just taking Stripe as an example. Something like a 3% fee, but it could be anywhere, right?

And then of course you get into the whole argument of, okay, if there’s a fee attached to that and somebody’s getting paid for that, is there going to be a commercial pressure to promote only the ones where the fee is the highest, or the percentage that’s been agreed for that thing is the highest? You can see how it gets muddy basically fairly quickly.

[00:22:32] Luke Carbis: Yeah. It does get muddy and it does get messy, and I think it’s a necessary evil. Now, let me just start by saying I’m not really proposing this because the first step towards anything like this happening would be that wordpress.org must be transferred to the Foundation. That would have to be the first step.

And then the second step is, yeah, you’d have to charge developers a fee. I think actually 8% would be the right amount, okay? So we have 3% for payment processing and then Five for the Future. That’s always been the thing, right? So let’s stick with that. So let’s stick with 5% goes to the Foundation.

And what happens with that money? Well, we’ve got a problem in WordPress, don’t we? We have this problem that people aren’t contributing enough, and people don’t pay their due. And some of that is big plugins.

So what if we just put that into the foundation and use it to pay for WordCamps. Use it to pay for contributors. Use it to pay for the plugin review team. I’m not complaining. I’m a full-time sponsored contributor. But not all of the plugin review team are. So maybe use it to pay for some of those volunteer hours. I think that could be a really useful and helpful thing, especially if the Foundation has proper governance and proper oversight.

[00:23:53] Nathan Wrigley: I have literally no idea what the WordPress plugin ecosystem is, and again, I’m doing air quotes, worth. And so what I’m meaning by that is, I don’t know how many dollars move around on planet Earth each year in order to get access to pro plugins. I’m imagining it’s not a tiny amount.

[00:24:15] Luke Carbis: Not as much as WordPress hosting, but probably a lot more than people think.

[00:24:20] Nathan Wrigley: Right. Because we are in a, an ecosystem now where $97 per annum for this thing, and $47 for this thing, or $399 for this other thing. These are not numbers which kind of shock anybody. And 8% of $399 a thousand times over, a million times over adds up to quite a lot.

And so, again, I have no back of the napkin calculation there, but it does seem that that would be quite a considerable amount of money. The way that you’ve channelled it there, maybe that would be enough to satisfy people who don’t want there to be any commercial pressure inside of wordpress.org. I don’t know if you’ve had conversations with people who have a very different opinion, you know, you’re polls apart on this, and whether or not you’ve managed to persuade them with that argument or not.

[00:25:07] Luke Carbis: Yeah, look, Matt Mullenweg himself is polls apart from me on this last time I checked, and that’s okay. I get that perspective too. Introducing money into WordPress will have some big effect on the project. Maybe it’s the shock the project needs. But I personally am a fan of an expanding ecosystem. I love the idea that someone can make a living off WordPress. That’s what I’ve done for my whole career.

And if this goes another step towards enabling that for people, especially in the current climate where a lot of plugin authors and product companies and WordPress are experiencing a downward trends in terms of sales and conversions, then I think this could be a good sort of step in the right direction. Most importantly, it would give the confidence back into the market.

So I’ve been sitting, actually, Nathan, I’ve been sitting on a plugin that I probably would launch commercially as well. I’ve had it ready to go for 12 months or more with a friend of mine. We’ve launched successful plugins before. And we just haven’t launched it because we feel the timing isn’t right. We feel the WordPress plugin, the ecosystem isn’t an exciting place to be. People aren’t really interested in new products in this space, especially if it has nothing to do with AI. It feels like there’s a lack of momentum, a lack of movement in the WordPress product space, especially when it comes to the new launches, right? The last big launch I can think of was Event Koi. Maybe you’re more in touch than I am.

[00:26:45] Nathan Wrigley: No, that was a big moment for me as well, that did garner a lot of interest, yeah.

[00:26:50] Luke Carbis: And it seems like there’s a general sort of crickets when it comes to product launches in WordPress. Maybe this could be something to generate a bit more excitement again.

[00:27:00] Nathan Wrigley: I don’t quite know if it’s fatigue or what have you, but there’s definitely been a sort of slowing down of, maybe it’s because of, I don’t know, maybe people just more broadly are not kind of quite so into Facebook groups in the way that they were before, or maybe they’ve been used to unsubscribing.

[00:27:17] Luke Carbis: Could be AI. Could be a ton of different things.

[00:27:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think all of those pieces play into it. But I do think you’re right. I think WordPress has got a bit of a fight on its hands in the future, trying to maintain its interest in what, for the younger generation coming up, will probably be a bit of an AI first world.

I would imagine for developers, the idea of being able to gain revenue directly at the source, and being able to be discovered directly at the source is quite an appealing thing. You don’t necessarily have to have the most incredible website. You don’t have to have an incredible marketing team to be discovered out in Google if you’ve got fighting chance to be discovered inside the repo, which is serving up the plugins to everybody. I imagine that’s quite an exciting prospect.

[00:28:05] Luke Carbis: Oh yeah. When was the last time, if you had to install an app for your phone, you went to a website? I don’t know what it’s like on Android.

[00:28:10] Nathan Wrigley: Not ever.

[00:28:11] Luke Carbis: No, you find it on the App Store. And not only that, but also if we did something like this, we’d have built into WordPress ways for developers to update their plugin. Right now, premium plugins have to ship their own updater, even though WordPress comes with one, right? Ways for WordPress to be able to handle a licence, or maybe not a licence key, but validate a purchase, right?

Right now, every premium plugin has to do that validation step. Where did you get the plugin from? Do you have a valid purchase? So it makes a world of difference for product teams when they don’t have to distribute, when they don’t have to do quite as much marketing. And discoverability is much easier when they don’t have to worry about how they’re going to handle updates.

Even just thinking through something like, am I going to have a premium plugin and a separate, a free plugin, or am I going to have a system where I have the free plugin and then my pro plugin extends that with actions, and so we have to have both active at the same time. Or am I just going to ship premium only and not have any free, and then I’m not discoverable on the directory anymore.

Like all of that it’s sort of solved in one step. It just makes launching a product for WordPress so much easier. But I just, I’m sitting here talking about how good it is, but I just don’t actually think it’s a realistic prospect.

[00:29:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, because I suppose what I’m imagining as you’re saying these words, all of it, the wall that you are constructing, all of the bricks that you are laying out kind of makes sense. It all adds up. It seems completely credible. But then in the back of my mind, I’m kind of imagining there’s quite a lot of people shouting at their podcast player at the moment. Luke, no. This is pure, you know, this is the antithesis of what we want in an open source project. Money should never be bound to it. It should be free at the point of use. And you can see how all of that goes.

And those people, their message is clear. Their message is powerful. They’re very persuasive. They’ve equally got their wall that they’ve constructed, which is probably just as persuasive. I don’t know how you get these two sides to meet, because there’s no middle ground, right? You can’t have half of a paid for plugin ecosystem. Maybe you could, but that seems like destined to fail. It’s a bit of binary, isn’t it? It’s either, yep, we’re going to do it, or no, we’re not. And I can see that bifurcating the community in the way that almost nothing has in the past.

[00:30:38] Luke Carbis: Nathan, I’ve been reflecting on Matt’s, let’s say, reintroduction back into the project. After WordCamp Asia, he suddenly has become super active, as I’m sure you saw on Slack, and he’s writing all of these like paragraphs and paragraphs of like to do items, and change this and update that. And not always in that careful, accessible language that we’ve cultivated on the WordPress project.

But it’s been very clear. This is not good enough, this is what I want to have changed. And at first when I saw this, my reaction was frustration and even a little bit of anger. I don’t agree with your opinion. And after giving it a bit of time, what I’ve begun to realise is WordPress, I think it’s safe to say that WordPress has seen a little peril in the last little while, right?

We’ve been coasting along, but there’s no guarantee that we are going to remain relevant in the discussion of, what am I going to use to create my new website, a few years from now? In fact, the answer to that question, it very well may not include WordPress, a few years from now. That is a realistic possibility. Something needs to change. And the only thing that can cause us, that can pull us unstuck from where we are right now is a strong leader, who has a strong direction.

Now, that leader might take us in the wrong direction. That leader might come in with a strong opinion and we might just go off the deep end and the whole thing might just come crashing around down by our feet.

But also, if we don’t do anything, I think that’s just as likely to end up in tears. On reflection, I’ve decided mentally to recast Matt in my mind from being this Elon Muskian figure, to being someone more akin to Steve Jobs, or DHH, or these figures that are known to be a little rough around the edges, you could say, but also visionary in terms of their product thinking.

And so that’s the change in mindset that I’m intentionally taking now into the project, to keep me sort of a bit more motivated and to reframe just like the direction. What do we need as a project? And that’s what I think we need. We need clear, direct, active leadership.

[00:33:14] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of curious because the more recent past has seen an absolutely logarithmic growth in WordPress. I don’t mean in the last year or two, but let’s go over the last 15 years or something like that. And particularly over the last, let’s say eight years or something like that, it’s just grown and grown and grown. And I think it’s fair to say, maybe exactly as you characterised it, we have rested on our laurels.

And I think we could point the finger largely at AI, not entirely at AI. There’s a whole load of other things, history, politics, what have you, inside the WordPress space, which will have contributed. But there is definitely this inflexion point at the moment where a lot of people, I think, are questioning what is it that I need? What are the tools that I need to build a website? And so, like you said, there is this moment where there’s a precipice and that precipice seems to be getting a little bit closer.

And it has been curious watching Matt’s reaction. I’m just reading the same things that you’ve been reading. The appetite that has been displayed there, and the expression of, you kind of need somebody to take the helm, and we need to make decisions. And it was all born out of this frustration at something, which on the face of it really ought never to have happened. You know, this capacity to commit a certain thing, which was not able to be committed because.

[00:34:32] Luke Carbis: You talking about a Akismet?

[00:34:34] Nathan Wrigley: Well, yeah, a whole committee needed to decide on whether this, that or the other thing. Again, it’ll be really interesting, in the way that we discussed earlier about the plugin repo becoming commercial. It’ll be interesting to see how the community reacts to that.

I don’t know if you’ve got a, obviously you are leaning into that and thinking, okay, better to have a dictator that’s got a direction than just slowly withering away, the community dying over time and the project failing. It’ll be interesting see if everybody has that same reaction, or whether people regard that as something that they can’t tolerate. And whether or not indeed that itself will haemorrhage the community, you know, create another fork in the road if you like.

[00:35:14] Luke Carbis: Let’s talk about that. Like, let’s talk about, is the direction, we agree I think that we need a direction, right? We need clear, strong leadership. What about the direction though? How do you feel about this focus in on AI? I’ll give you a hint. For me, it’s hard to bet against AI, but the core, if you had to boil WordPress’ sort of spirit down to three words, for me, those words would be, code is poetry. And I don’t see that reflected in the AI focus. What do you think?

[00:35:51] Nathan Wrigley: My supposition is that when I got into any of the open source projects that I was ever into, there was this philanthropic bit of me which definitely got engaged by that. And so I loved that. I loved the kind of community side. I think it’s part of me as a human being. I’ve often, rebelled is too strong a word, but I’ve always managed to find my way away from situations where there was somebody telling me what to do. I’ve always enjoyed that capacity to do things on your own, or at least as a community to decide how things are going to be.

However, the world really doesn’t seem to work in that way. You know, the world that we occupy is led by companies which have a strong direction. Governments which have a strong intuition on what their citizens want, and so on and so forth.

And so I’m kind of drawn into the argument that you’ve just made. I think it’s worth a punt. I do not know what AI is going to do to our community. It may be that AI is going to upend everything so severely and so dramatically that no retrofitting of a CMS will be capable of stopping the inexorable rise of it, and we’ll all be using AI for everything from now on.

But it does feel like the framework has been built to allow AI to be an integral part of a CMS, which people are familiar with and willing to use over and over again in the decades to come.

But in terms of the leadership thing, I think it’s worth a punt. We know how in open source there can be atrophy. Things can just feel like you’re walking through molasses because the committee hasn’t decided the thing, and what have you.

That’s been okay. The history of WordPress demonstrates that that has actually worked. We’ve been able to get through it in that manner. But I’m not sure that facing a fairly, apocalyptic is the wrong word, let’s go with seismic, a seismic thing like AI, we’re up against a bit of a different animal now. And maybe we need to adapt our strategy.

And maybe it’s a temporary thing, you know, maybe that’s a way of dealing with it. I think, I could be wrong, memory could prove me wrong here. I’m pretty sure that in Matt’s Slack commentary that you’ve been referring to, I think it was a, it was a period of time, wasn’t, it? Wasn’t the proposal that I, you know, give me the reigns for a year, or something along those lines. I can’t remember. If I’m misrepresenting that, I’m sorry. But maybe it’s worth a punt. It certainly sounds like it’s convinced you anyway.

[00:38:15] Luke Carbis: Yeah. And then when we come to like AI strategy, there’s really two different aspects of that, right? We’ve got, how is AI integrated into WordPress? And I’ve been actually really, really happy with the direction that like the AI plugin has been going in. Because it’s all built around this principle of it being an add-on, being optional, I don’t have to use AI in my WordPress if I don’t want.

What worries me more is that there seems to be a real push from Matt and project leadership to be using more AI in our contributions, right? Using AI to create new pages on wordpress.org, using AI to create new plugins, right? Using AI to create pull requests and various other things.

And so that part I’m a little bit more cautious about. And I’m especially cautious from the perspective of like the generational change that WordPress needs right now. We need more young people involved in the project. And every time I speak to someone from Gen Z, they are not interested in using any kind of AI whatsoever. I don’t know if you’ve noticed the same. But Gen Z seems to have this huge anti AI thing about them.

I’m worried about pushing those people away, and also just anybody else who doesn’t want to use AI. So I do use AI, right? I use AI a lot. But there are real ethical concerns when it comes to AI. And to me, WordPress has always been this really welcoming, open, considerate, accessible community.

I can go to a WordCamp and get a kosher meal. That’s pretty special. You can go to a WordCamp and you can get the audio translated into your language on your phone from the talk that you’re going to. All of these like accessibility concerns have always been forefront. And I feel like if I want to opt out of AI, I don’t have that option if I also want to be a WordPress contributor.

[00:40:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s really interesting. I think the words to some, well, singular word to sum up my relationship with AI is confusion. I’m really conflicted by it because I can see the productivity gains on the one hand, and then on the other hand, I can see how potentially dehumanising it could be. And I slightly worry that we’re going to paint ourselves into a future in which the dehumanising wins out. And that concerns me.

I suppose the best analogy, and I’m just coming up with this on the fly, is it feels as if the aliens just landed and they’re now amongst us and there’s millions of them. And they’re just on our high street, and they’re walking around, and they’re in the supermarket, and there they all are.

And last year they weren’t there and life was just a bunch of humans and the animals that, you know, evolved on Earth. And suddenly we’re trying to figure out, okay, what do we do with these characters who are now part of our lives? But they’re way quicker than us at a million tasks, and they’re way faster than us, and way more productive than us. But also they are not us. Confusion is what I’ve got.

[00:41:19] Luke Carbis: I don’t think you’re alone. I think that’s a common feeling. The question I keep asking myself, keep coming back to is, are my children going to thank me for my AI contributions? Am I going to be like how I think of the, I don’t know, baby boomers? I look at the baby boomers and think, I’m a millennial, right? So I look at the baby boomers and think, oh, look, you wrecked the world with your corporate greed and pollution. Are our kids going to look at us the same way? Oh, you wrecked the world with your AI.

[00:41:49] Nathan Wrigley: That is definitely an outcome which has a non-zero chance of being true. And curiously, I have multiple children, to my knowledge, none of them use AI in any way, shape, or form. Now, that definitely maps to the kind of things that they’re interested in, but I do worry sometimes that the tech bubble that I’m in leads me to have this conception that AI will actually eat everything.

Whereas, AI is not going to get me to the swimming pool. It’s not going to get me to enjoy the view off the mountain nearby anymore than I enjoy already. You know, all these million things that it simply can’t do. But because I’m dwelling in a community which obsesses about it, and seems to portray the future as AI or broke, maybe I think about it too hard and maybe the breaks will come on because the next generation just won’t allow it, as you’ve described.

[00:42:42] Luke Carbis: I kind of hope so. Is that bad to say that? I don’t know. I enjoy using AI.

[00:42:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you end up where you are. You haven’t gone anywhere new. So it’d be, I suppose it’d be a bit like having an iPhone four forever. Is that bad? No, because everybody’s got an iPhone four forever.

[00:42:59] Luke Carbis: We just end up somewhere different though. We wouldn’t end up in the same place.

Can I tell you an anecdote which really sort of informs a lot of my thinking around this? I was in a classroom, it was a media arts classroom of 15 year olds. And we were talking about referencing. And I suggested to these 15-year-old students, why don’t you just send ChatGPT all of your sources and get it to output everything in Harvard style so then you don’t have to do anything. Just paste that into your reference list.

And a full half of the class stood up out of their seats and said, no sir, we do not use AI. That is bad for the environment. We’re going to get dumb if we use it. We refuse. I was shocked. And it was such a strong response.

Now that’s an anecdote, right? Might not be universal, although the Verge published this article just recently talking about how such a high percentage of Gen Z feel really terrible about the direction that AI is going in. So that’s, I think it’s worth consideration. And I’m not saying let’s not use AI in the project. All I’m saying is I think we need to hedge a little bit more than we are.

[00:44:14] Nathan Wrigley: What an interesting conversation. We started out with plugins and the plugin repository, and then we’ve smuggled in the conversation of our time, AI.

[00:44:22] Luke Carbis: I can bring it all together for you. Let’s bookend it. One of the suggestions in my talk is I would love to see, and I’d love to get your feedback on, and listener feedback on AI disclosure, an AI disclosure on the plugin repo.

So if you create a plugin, you can voluntarily opt in without anybody telling you that you’re lying or whatever. Let the market sort out whether people are going to try to game it or not, without any validation. You can just specify in your plugin headers that you used a certain level of AI. And it’s not AI, or no AI, because there’s a whole range, right? Might just use AI just for idea generation or auto complete. Or I might use AI somewhere in between. I might use AI just to vibe code the whole thing and never even look at the code.

So I’ve defined these five sort of different levels. They align with more like academic literature around AI disclosure. And I’m suggesting that what we do is we provide just a simple plugin header for people to be able to specify their level of AI use in their plugin, and have that surfaced on the plugin directory, alongside user reviews and last time you updated the plugin and things like that, just as a little bit of extra metadata.

It would do a couple of things. One is it would let us gather some data, first of all, about how many plugins use AI and how well they do. Maybe we find that plugins that use AI get frequent updates, and high reviews. And maybe we find the opposite. But we don’t have any way of knowing right now. We have no way of telling whether a plugin is using AI or not. So that’s the proposal.

[00:46:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. No, it’s a really interesting idea because I know that in the podcasting space, which I’m familiar with as well as WordPress, that we have these 2.0 tags and one of them is this sort of declaration of whether or not AI has been used. But it’s not a sliding scale, it’s just sort of binary. I think there’s three choices. Yes, some, and the whole thing, or something along those lines. So it’d be interesting to see.

I think that’s a really credible idea. I suppose my only concern is, in much the same way that when I visited the person on the corner of my street who sells eggs on the street and there’s an honesty box, and we go and buy the eggs and we pop the money into the little honesty box. I am well aware that most of those eggs go missing. Nobody puts money into the honesty box. It’ll be interesting to see how that in itself would get gamed. In other words, if the intuition was, okay, people now love the declaration of, there’s no AI.

Let’s imagine a scenario where that turns out to be the popular thing, it would be an honesty box decision, wouldn’t it? Okay, I definitely built my entire plugin entirely with AI, but it’s going to promote much more effectively if I say that there was no AI used with that. You can see how the human in the loop is the weakest link there.

Okay, I think we’ll knock it on the head. Luke, what an absolutely fascinating and broad ranging discussion. Just before we go away, do you want to tell us a little bit about what it is that you do with your Crossword podcast just so that we can maybe get some earbuds listening to that as well?

[00:47:31] Luke Carbis: Yeah, absolutely. Jonathan Wold and I have been recording Crossword. It’s a WordPress podcast. We’ve been going for years and years, over a hundred episodes. We’re into season 11 now of Crossword, and love it if you would join us there and subscribe in wherever you get your podcasts.

[00:47:50] Nathan Wrigley: What’s the URL for the website?

[00:47:51] Luke Carbis: You can find us at crossword.fm.

[00:47:54] Nathan Wrigley: Perfect. Well, Luke, what a fascinating discussion. I really appreciate it.

Dear listener, we’ve been battling with the hail in Australia. We must have pressed pause a dozen times, and Luke’s had to repeat sentences over and over again. By the time this goes out, I’ll maybe have edited all of that away, but I appreciate your sticking power in what has proved to be a fairly fraught recording process. Thank you, Luke, for chatting to me today.

[00:48:17] Luke Carbis: Thank you, Nathan. See you later.

On the podcast today we have Luke Carbis.

Luke has been immersed in the WordPress world for around 20 years, with experience touching upon many strands of the ecosystem. He’s started his own businesses, worked in agencies as a developer and product lead, contributed to WordPress Core, helped organise WordCamps, and is now a member of the plugin review team. He also co-hosts the Crossword podcast.

Recently, Luke delivered a talk at WordCamp Asia titled ‘Beyond the Guidelines: It’s Time to Evolve Our Standards for a Safer Plugin Ecosystem’ and today he’s here to share some of those ideas with us.

We start by talking about how WordPress.org’s plugin directory is facing a wave of new submissions, driven largely by the rise of AI-generated plugins. This has made it harder both for quality plugins to stand out and for users to find what they need, despite backend improvements and shorter review wait times. Luke discusses how the current discovery and ranking systems can be gamed, how active installs play a key role, and why there’s room for improvement in surfacing the best plugins.

We also get into Luke’s suggestions for making the plugin ecosystem better, including ways to connect WordPress.org accounts with sites, streamlining discoverability and installation of both custom and premium plugins, and the idea of officially supporting a commercial plugin marketplace, with proceeds potentially supporting core contributors and community events.

A thread throughout this conversation is how WordPress should respond to AI, not just as a technology but as an agent of change in the community. We look at the ethical implications, generational divides in attitude towards AI, and the importance of strong leadership as WordPress faces a period of challenge and uncertainty.

If you’re interested in the future of the WordPress plugin directory, the role of commercial offerings, and how AI is reshaping open source communities, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Crossword podcast

Introducing the Connectors API in WordPress 7.0

Event Koi plugin

WordCamp Central: Happy Birthday, WordPress

Moses Cursor Ssebunya — Wed, 27 May 2026 12:40:37 +0000

Twenty-three years ago, a team of 2 friends released something into the world that they probably couldn’t have fully imagined the consequences of. Not just a publishing tool, though it became that for hundreds of millions of people but a reason to find each other.

WordPress just turned 23. And if you’re not yet part of this community, I want to tell you what you’re missing. It starts, usually, with a problem you need to solve. A website. A blog. A business that needs a home on the internet. You find WordPress, and it works, and you move on with your life. That’s how most stories begin here.

But then something else happens.

You find a forum thread where someone spent three hours helping a stranger debug a plugin for free. You find a WordCamp in your city and you show up mostly for the tote bag and the discount codes. You end up in a conversation over coffee with someone who has been building on WordPress since 2007, and they treat your questions like they’re worth answering. Because to them, they are.

That’s when the story changes.

WordCamps are where this community becomes visible in a way that’s hard to describe to someone who hasn’t been. The person who wrote the code that quietly runs your website is sitting two seats away from someone who published their very first post this morning. A developer who has contributed thousands of hours to core is sharing a lunch table with a grandmother in Uganda who just launched her first online store.

No hierarchy. No velvet ropes. Just people who showed up.

You stay because someone grabs your arm at the end of a session and says, your plugin changed my business, and they mean it in a way that lands somewhere deep. You stay because the late nights and the loud rooms and the occasional quiet moment in a hallway conversation turn into something you didn’t expect: friendship. Partnership. For some of us, something that feels a lot like family.

This is what open source looks like when it actually works.

Not obligation. Not corporate mandate. Gratitude. People giving back because something was given to them first, freely, without condition, by people they may never meet. The whole thing runs on a kind of trust that shouldn’t work as well as it does, and yet here we are. Twenty-three years in. Still going.

On this birthday, I want to name some of the people and organizations who make this community what it is, who show up, contribute, advocate, and remind the rest of us why we’re here.

People wishing WordPress a happy birthday:

@thehopemonger, @stephendumba1, @noelinenandago, @adityakane, @ssebuwufumoses, @kiviiri, @unintended8 among others

And the companies whose work brings so many of us to WordPress in the first place:

Jetpack, WordPress.com, Woo, Hostinger, Bluehost, WooCommerce, Akismet, Gravatar, Automattic, Forth Focus, miniOrange, Elementor, Green Geeks among others

This list is not complete. It never could be.

The next WordCamp is coming. The late nights and the loud rooms and the quiet hallway moments are all waiting for you.

Don’t miss it.

Happy Birthday, WordPress. Let’s keep going—together.

#WordPressBirthday #WordPress #WordCamp #OpenSource #Community #Gratitude #Mukono #Kampala

Open Channels FM: Blackwall Sponsors Open Channels FM Founder for WordCamp Europe 2026

Bob Dunn — Wed, 27 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000

We are excited to announce that our founder Bob Dunn will be attending WordCamp Europe 2026 thanks to the support of Blackwall.

Open Channels FM: Get Ready for Open Channels FM Live, Our Upcoming Short Form Stream

Bob Dunn — Wed, 27 May 2026 09:01:00 +0000

Bob Dunn announces the July launch of Open Channels FM Live, a short-form live stream focusing on the intersection of open source and the open web.

Open Channels FM: BackTalk on Federated Packages, AI’s Uncharted Consequences, and WordPress Troubleshooting

Bob Dunn — Wed, 27 May 2026 08:33:00 +0000

Conversations on OpenChannels FM highlight a federated approach to package distribution, concerns over AI consequences, and utilizing Site Health tools for effective WordPress troubleshooting.

Matt: RIP Sonny Rollins

Matt — Wed, 27 May 2026 01:21:17 +0000

Sonny Rollins, the Saxophone Colossus, has passed. He is probably my favorite saxophonist, and while the aforementioned album is one of the five I would take to a deserted island, he has so many other good ones like The Cutting Edge which also has bagpipes, or Sonny Side Up with Sonny Stitt and Dizzy Gillespie.

WordPress 6.7 in November 2024 was named in honor of Rollins.

We rarely choose a living musician for a release so the team actually prepared a gift we sent to him with the names of all the contributors.

Mr. Rollins,
Your immense contributions to music are a source of deep inspiration to the thousands of open source contributors to WordPress. We like to say ‘Code is poetry’, and we’re honored to pay tribute to you and your legacy of creativity and innovation by naming the 6.7 release of WordPress to you.

It was sent to his publicist, so not sure if he got a chance to see it, but I hope it at least gave him a chuckle to have a random Open Source project celebrating him.

He was the last surviving jazzer in the Great Day in Harlem photo.

WordPress.org blog: Looking Ahead to WordCamp Europe 2026

Brett McSherry — Tue, 26 May 2026 12:52:13 +0000

June 4-6, 2026 | ICE Kraków Congress Centre, Kraków, Poland

WordCamp Europe 2026 will bring the WordPress community together in Kraków, Poland, from June 4–6 for Contributor Day, two conference days, and a program shaped by the ideas, tools, and people moving WordPress forward. This year’s schedule includes two official keynotes, hands-on workshops, panels, and sessions across development, accessibility, artificial intelligence, content, search, business, education, security, and community.

The program offers a broad view of how WordPress is used today: as publishing software, a framework for building at scale, a tool for business growth, and a global open source project shaped by contributors around the world. Whether you build with WordPress, write for the web, support clients, teach new learners, or contribute to the project, WordCamp Europe offers a chance to learn from practical examples and connect them to the platform’s future.

Get Your Tickets

WCEU Schedule

About WCEU 2026

Keynotes at WordCamp Europe 2026

The keynote sessions at WordCamp Europe 2026 will give attendees two ways to look at WordPress today: through a large-scale institutional adoption story and through a broader closing reflection on where the project is headed. These sessions anchor the program while connecting many of the themes that appear throughout the conference, from infrastructure and governance to contribution, innovation, and the future of the web.

Joachim Valdemar Yde and Francisco Borges Aurindo Barros will share how CERN is adopting WordPress as its future content management system. Their keynote will explore the governance, infrastructure, and migration work behind moving more than 800 websites onto a customized WordPress Service, offering a look at WordPress on an institutional scale.

Ma.tt Mullenweg will close WordCamp Europe 2026 with a broader look at WordPress, the open web, and the ideas shaping what comes next. As the event’s final keynote, this session will bring together many of the conversations happening across Contributor Day, sessions, workshops, and community gatherings throughout the week.

Program Themes to Watch at WCEU 2026

The rest of the WCEU themes are organized around topics that reflect the breadth of the WordPress ecosystem. These themes give attendees a way to follow the sessions most relevant to their work, from building better sites and improving content discovery to growing sustainable businesses, strengthening security, expanding access, and supporting the people and communities behind the project.

Search, Visibility, and Discovery

Search continues to change, but helping people find the right information remains central to the web. WCEU’s search and SEO sessions look at how AI-generated answers, generative engine optimization, shifting user habits, and new discovery platforms are changing visibility for publishers, businesses, and builders. Sessions include Panel: The Future of SEO, with Kacper Bartoszak, Pam Aungst Cronin, Alex Moss, David Cuesta, and Jovana Smoljanovic Tucakov, as well as Emma Young’s AI Search: Why Your Whole Company Should Care, which looks at why AI-native discovery now affects content, development, partnerships, and business strategy.

AI and the Future of Building

Artificial intelligence has a dedicated presence at WordCamp Europe 2026, with sessions that move beyond general discussion and into practical use cases for marketing, product work, development, and site management. Vito Peleg’s Agentic AI & WordPress: From Prompts to Tools & Systems will explore how teams can move from simple prompts to AI workflows that execute tasks, while Monika Dimitrova’s AI Won’t Save Your Marketing (but it might save your time and money) focuses on how small businesses can use AI without losing the strategy and identity that make their work effective.

Development and Technical Practice

Development sessions at WCEU will focus on how WordPress sites, tools, and workflows are built for long-term use. The program includes a Panel: Inside WordPress 7.0, with contributors discussing the release, its features, and the process behind it, along with sessions such as Anukasha Singh’s Smarter Plugin Permissions with the Abilities API, Ariel Ramos’s Headless WordPress API Security in 10 Minutes, and Dejan Rudić Vranić’s hands-on workshop Build Your Developer Portfolio: A Hands-on Guide to FSE.

Accessibility and Inclusive Design

Accessibility is part of building a better web for everyone, and WCEU’s accessibility sessions give attendees practical ways to make digital experiences more usable, inclusive, and sustainable. This theme connects directly to WordPress’s project values, from how content is structured to how themes, plugins, and interfaces are designed. For designers, developers, content creators, and project leads, these sessions offer a chance to make accessibility part of everyday decisions rather than a final step at the end of a project.

Content, Writing, and Communication

Content and writing sessions at WCEU will focus on how clearer communication helps users find what they need, teams share what they know, and communities make information easier to understand. Pooja Sanwal’s Why Writing Still Matters in a Video-First Internet looks at the role of written content as video continues to dominate online traffic, Fernando Tellado’s Do You Really Need an SEO/GEO Pugin for WordPress? explores what WordPress can already do for visibility, and Birgit Olzem’s Documentation as a Love Language for the Future You looks at how simple documentation practices can help teams and communities preserve knowledge.

Security and Trust

Security remains central to maintaining websites people can rely on. WCEU’s security-focused sessions look beyond basic reminders and into the risks, systems, and decisions that shape safer WordPress experiences. The broader program includes talks on AI-assisted spam and bot detection, plugin permissions, and secure headless WordPress architectures, giving attendees practical ways to think about resilience, trust, and responsible site management.

Business and Sustainable Growth

The business sessions at WCEU will explore how WordPress professionals turn ideas, services, and products into sustainable work. Debbie Levitt’s Three Levels of Atomic Product-Market Fit looks at how teams can understand product-market fit beyond a single metric, Irfani Silviana’s WordPress ROI Map: Engineering Business Value with BMC connects technical decisions to business outcomes, and Liza Bogatyrev’s Stop Positioning Into Obscurity to Unlock Growth focuses on how clearer positioning can support revenue and adoption.

Education, Contribution, and Community

WordPress grows when people can learn, participate, and find a place to contribute. WCEU’s education and community sessions include Panel: Rethinking Learning in WordPress, featuring Mary Hubbard, Rade Jekic, Klaus Harris, Natalia Basiura, and Benjamin Zekavica, along with Daniel Grzonka’s The New Engineer: Psychology, Systems, and Open Source, Ivana Ćirković’s What It (Really) Means To Be a Part of the WP Credits Program?, and Jörg Pareigis’s Sovereign University AI Tutors Powered by WordPress. Together, these sessions connect contributor onboarding, academic partnerships, open source learning, and the future skills people need to work with WordPress.

Get Your Tickets Today

Explore the Full Program

WordCamp Europe 2026 will bring together many parts of the WordPress ecosystem in one place: software, publishing, business, design, education, and community. The keynotes and theme-based sessions offer a broad look at how WordPress is being used today and how contributors, builders, and users are preparing for what comes next.

Explore the full WordCamp Europe 2026 schedule and choose the sessions that match how you use, build, teach, support, or contribute to WordPress. Tickets are available now for attendees joining the community in Kraków. All sessions will be live streamed. Keep checking back for updates.

Kraków is calling. See you at WordCamp Europe 2026!

Open Channels FM: New Tools and Updates in WordPress 7.0 for Developers and Content Managers

Bob Dunn — Tue, 26 May 2026 09:00:00 +0000

WordPress 7.0 "Armstrong" introduces significant updates including visual revisions, responsive block visibility, and enhanced workflow features, promoting collaboration among users and developers while emphasizing safe updating practices.

Open Channels FM: Why Structured Content Matters for Large-Scale Websites

Bob Dunn — Mon, 25 May 2026 09:47:00 +0000

Content management systems are constantly evolving to meet the growing needs of organizations with vast amounts of information to share. One topic that’s often overlooked until it becomes a problem is how structured data impacts editorial efficiency and long-term website success. When a site has hundreds, or even thousands of individual pages, keeping everything organized […]

Gutenberg Times: WordPress 7.0 released, 7.1 in planning, Block Bits and WordCamp Europe coming up — Weekend Edition 366

Birgit Pauli-Haack — Sat, 23 May 2026 13:08:14 +0000

Hi there,

It’s good to be home again. It was an unusually long break, but I appreciate the series of official bank holidays that morph into long weekends away from the computer.

And of course, the catch-up is overwhelming. The creativity inside the WordPress community around content creation, development and design is highly energizing.

And it’s WordPress 7.0 release week! It’s finally here!

So don’t let me keep you any longer. Enjoy!

If you want to stop long enough to send me a note, I’d be delighted to hear from you.

Yours,
Birgit

WordCamp Europe is coming up fast. It’ll take place Jun 4 to 6, 2026. The schedule just was posted. If you still are on the fence about getting your ticket. Here are another 49 reasons to head to Krakow. The schedule lists 34 Talks, 3 Panels, 10 Workshops and 2 Keynotes.

For armchair WordCampers, like myself, there will be a livestream. After the WordCamp recordings will be uploaded to YouTube and WordPressTV.

A first selection of what I might watch:

Keynote: Two worlds collide: WordPress at CERN
HTML API practicum: a deep dive with Dennis Snell
Human in the loop means something with Tammie Lister
Beyond hamburgers: latest Navigation block changes with Sarah Norris
WordPress for scientists: building engineering websites at CERN (regular talk) with Akanksha Chatterjee
Build your developer portfolio: a hands-on guide to FSE with Dejan Rudic Vranic
Closing Keynote with Matt Mullenweg on Saturday June 6, 2026.

if you rather stay in North America, WordCamp US just opened up the online ticket booth. It’ll take place from August 16 to August 19, 2026, in Phoenix, AZ. The calls for sponsors and speakers are also available now. The deadline for speaker submissions is next week Friday May 29, 2026.

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

WordPress 7.0 “Armstrong”

After the decision to remove Real-time Collaboration from the release because it needs more time in the oven, so to speak, the release squad was really busy to produced RC 3 – 5 before the final release on Wednesday May 20, 2026.

Read more via the WordPress 7.0 “Armstrong” release post.

The release squad also published the Field Guide with all the developer notes and salient details.
Here on Gutenberg Times you can browse through WordPress 7.0 Source of Truth.
For German-speaking WordPress users, I discussed the release with Simon Kraft on the Presswerk episode.
Abha Thakor and I talked through a few features for the OpenChannels.fm episode to come out on Tuesday, May 26, 2026.

Justin Nealey product manager at GoDaddy breaks down why WordPress 7.0’s three new APIs matter far more than the headline features for plugin developers. The Connectors API means site owners manage their own AI provider keys centrally; WP AI Client gives you a single provider-agnostic call to invoke any model; and the Abilities API turns your plugin into something the site’s AI agent can reach for autonomously. Together, Nealey argues, your plugin stops being a destination users visit and becomes a verb the agent performs.

Ronak Vanpariya, web developer on Gujarat, India digs into why Real-Time Collaboration was pulled from WordPress 7.0 with a five-point technical post-mortem. You’ll learn how RTC had to work across every corner of the Site Editor, how simultaneous edits triggered race conditions corrupting block data, and how the feature’s reliance on persistent server connections would have overwhelmed shared hosting environments. Memory bloat on older devices and recurring block-tree breakage uncovered by fuzz testing sealed the decision. The feature lives on in the Gutenberg plugin.

Mike McAlister, creator of Ollie, released a video walkthrough of WordPress 7.0 covering the features he sees as most impactful for site builders. He walks through the new AI infrastructure — WP AI Client and the Connectors API — content-only pattern editing, customizable mobile menu overlays, block visibility controls for responsive design, per-block custom CSS, visual revisions, the new Icon and Breadcrumbs blocks, an upgraded Font Library screen, and a command palette shortcut.

In other WordPress Core news:

Immediately after the release of WordPress 7.0, Jeff Paul published the WordPress 7.1 Call for Volunteers. Work has already started since the firsty 7.0 Beta in February. The first beta for WordPress 7.1 is roughly eight weeks out and scheduled for July 15, 2026, and the final release for August 19, 2026 aimed at the last day of WordCamp US.

In addition to the punted Real-time collaboration feature, I discovered a few tracking issue for WordPress 7.1 already:

#76525: Block Supports and Design Tools in WordPress 7.1 Opened by Aaron Robertshaw, this tracks new and enhanced block supports for 7.1, carrying over items descoped from 7.0. A living issue is updated as supports are added or dropped from the release scope.
#75707: Block Visibility: Configurable Breakpoints and theme.json Integration The follow-up to 7.0’s block visibility work. The goal is to let themes define custom breakpoints via theme.json and make visibility extensible for future responsive features — laying a solid foundation before more viewport-aware tools arrive.
#76045: DataViews, DataForm, et al. in WordPress 7.1 Tracks continued iteration on DataViews, DataViewsPicker, DataForm, and the Field API. Key work includes migrating @wordpress/dataviews to the new Design System primitives and extending DataForm to PHP-only blocks.
#77199: Block Bindings in WordPress 7.1 Narrowed in scope to match contributor availability. The headline goal is integrating the Block Bindings UI into Block Fields and removing the previous Block Bindings UI, plus adding Block Bindings support for the Cover block.

First-time release lead Paulo Trentin brought us the latest version for the Gutenberg plugin, 23.2. In his release post What’s new in Gutenberg 23.2? (21 May he highlighted: You can now style blocks differently for tablets and phones right from Global Styles, so your designs adapt to each screen. Pop-up dialogs slide up from the bottom on mobile, making them easier to tap one-handed, and animations across the editor now share a consistent feel. You’ll also see smoother Content Types management, friendlier Shortcode handling, clearer Revisions diff markers for better accessibility, and steadier real-time collaboration when teammates edit together.

Justin Tadlock rounds up what’s new for WordPress developers in May 2026, with WordPress 7.0 landing on May 20. You’ll find early details on the Content Types experiment for managing custom post types and taxonomies in Core, a new @wordpress/grid package for building grid-based editor UIs, revisions support extended to templates and patterns, and a wave of block fixes covering the Tabs block, Image alignment, Search block styling, and Global Styles rendering.

If you are interested in learning more about this, the Content Types tracking issue outlines the experiment to bring custom taxonomy and post type management into the WordPress editor. The initial focus is on simple use cases — complex ones stay in plugin territory — with open tasks including a dedicated creation page, richer fields, a quick-edit versus full-edit distinction, and deeper DataViews integration. It’s a living issue and community input is welcome.

The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #130 – WordPress 7.0, Gutenberg 22.9 and 23.0, WordCamp Europe, Block Themes and More with Tammie Lister, Chief Product Officer at Convesio

John Blackbourn clarified WordPress’s PHP support stance in a post that’s worth flagging for developers and hosts. The “beta” label for PHP 8.x support has been retired and removed retroactively from all WordPress versions. It was discouraging hosts and developers from upgrading. In short:

The minimum recommended version remains PHP 8.3;
the minimum supported version is PHP 7.4.

Versions 6.9 and 7.0 now officially fully support PHP 8.5,
Versions 6.8 and later fully support PHP 8.4, and
Versions 6.4 and later fully support PHP 8.3.

Jeffrey Paul recaps what’s new in the WordPress AI canonical plugin 1.0.0, a milestone release landing alongside WordPress 7.0. Two new governance experiments stand out:

Request Logging gives administrators visibility into every AI request fired across Core, plugins, and themes;
Connector Approvals lets admins control which plugins can access configured AI providers.

Beyond governance, you’ll find comment moderation upgrades with sentiment and toxicity sorting right in the dashboard, AI alt text generation baked into the media editor workflow, and editorial workflow terminology tidied up. Looking ahead to 1.1.0, the team is exploring type-ahead suggestions, focus-aware crop suggestions, an AI Playground, and C2PA content provenance tracking for both text and images.

Rae Morey, editor of The Repository, took a deeper dive into this release: WordPress AI Plugin Hits 1.0 Milestone With New Request Logging and Connector Approvals Experiments

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

Jay Walsh, Director of Communications at Woo, announced that WooCommerce stores can now sell directly on YouTube via the Google for WooCommerce extension. You connect your store, tag products from your catalog in videos and Shorts, and they surface as shoppable cards while viewers watch — and also appear in your Channel Shopping tab. The same Merchant Center product feed that powers Google Shopping and Performance Max campaigns keeps everything in sync automatically, with AI-generated ad creative variations across formats included in version 3.6.

Milind More, Senior WordPress engineer at rtCamp introduces three new connectors for the WordPress AI plugin:

OpenRouter for routing across hundreds of models with cost optimization,
LM Studio for fully local inference suited to GDPR-sensitive workflows, and a
Universal OpenAI connector for any OpenAI-compatible endpoint including Ollama, Groq, and Mistral.

All three are built on the same PHP AI Client SDK heading into WordPress Core 7.0, so your setup today carries forward without code changes after the upgrade.

Artur Piszek explains how he uses WordPress as a sync backend for Obsidian with PushMD. This plugin was created with Adam Zielinski, the maker of Playground. It allows you to treat your WordPress site as a git remote using the REST API. You can git clone your blog as plain .md files. Write in Obsidian and push updates to sync. This setup turns your site into a repository without needing an external service. It is also compatible with the upcoming Guidelines/Artifacts system in WordPress Core, which lets you store private notes and configurations there too.

Seth Rubenstein at Pew Research Center shared a preview of PRC Block Bits, now open-sourced on GitHub. Block Bits solves a specific gap between block bindings and RichText: where bindings replace an entire block’s content with dynamic data, a “bit” lets you embed small dynamic pieces — an inline icon, a copyright year, live text — right in the middle of a paragraph or heading. You register bits via a PHP and JS API, choose between a pure-PHP callback or Interactivity API strategy, and an editor toolbar dropdown handles insertion. Built-in bits for icons and copyright ship out of the box.

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

Damir Tahiri of Rareview has open-sourced the WordPress starter theme that underpins every one of the agency’s builds. It’s Gutenberg-ready, ships with global style variables, includes a one-command Figma sync, and runs an interactive setup that renames and configures everything automatically. You can grab it on GitHub and use it as the foundation for your own projects.

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

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.

On the WordPress Developer blog, Róbert Mészáros shows you how to get started writing WordPress E2E tests with Playwright, using a book review site built on Block Bindings as the test subject. You’ll set up wp-env and Playwright, write your first test against the admin dashboard, then progress to inserting block variations, verifying patterns with aria snapshots, and testing front-end output by creating posts via the REST API.

Also on the WordPress Developer Blog, Felix Arntz, Senior Software Engineer at Vercel, walks you through building a provider-agnostic image generation plugin using WordPress 7.0’s built-in AI Client. You’ll see how a single wp_ai_client_prompt() call handles provider routing, how support checks gate your UI gracefully when no image-capable provider is configured, and how the REST API and Media Library integration come together. The full source code is on GitHub at wptrainingteam/ai-client-imagegen.

Sérgio Santos, Lead Engineer at 10up/Fueled, diagnoses three specific bugs you hit when using RichText outside a block — in InspectorControls or a Modal. The format toolbar fills route to the wrong slot, the inline toolbar is opt-in via inlineToolbar, and isSelected never turns true outside a block context. Each problem gets a targeted fix, and the pattern has since been packaged as a reusable component in 10up Block Components.

Eric Karkovack walks you through using my.WordPress.net as a safe AI sandbox — no production site at risk. You install WordPress in your browser in two steps, add the AI Assistant app from the apps menu, connect it to Anthropic, OpenAI, or a local Ollama model, and start prompting. It’s a low-stakes way to explore what AI can do inside WordPress before committing it to a live environment, though API costs from OpenAI or Anthropic still apply.

Fresh from last week’s WordCamp Portugal:

Imran Sayed presented The Fastest Way to Build Gutenberg Blocks: Modern Tools, Scripts, and AI at WordCamp Portugal 2026. The talk cuts through the complexity of custom block development by focusing on practical, immediately usable workflows built around modern WordPress tools and scripts.
Milana Cap presented WordPress Gems for Devs: Accessibility with Interactivity API and makes the case that it’s one of the most exciting APIs to land in WordPress in recent releases, with positive implications not just for developer experience but for performance and user experience too.
Jorge Costa presented AI is in WordPress Core. Here’s How to Use It . The talk digs into the AI building blocks already shipped in WordPress Core — the WP AI Client, the Abilities API, and the MCP adapter, and shows you exactly how to bring AI-powered features into your own plugins, themes, and sites.
JuanMa Garrido presented WordPress Development and Management with Claude Code. The talk treats Claude Code as a command center for WordPress work, generating block themes from HTML designs, querying a production site in natural language, installing plugins, and reading error logs, all from the terminal. Three concepts are at the core: Skills, MCP, and the Abilities API.

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

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

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

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

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Open Channels FM: BackTalk on Digital Patience, the Power of Story, Platform Longevity, and What Your Brand Says When You’re Not in the Room

Bob Dunn — Thu, 21 May 2026 13:27:00 +0000

BackTalk on topics like website wait times, storytelling in case studies, platform longevity, and brand positioning in today's digital landscape.

Open Channels FM: Artificial [fill in the blank]

Bob Dunn — Thu, 21 May 2026 09:30:00 +0000

AI: super-smart guesser or just a robot with a flair for the dramatic? Join our hosts as they grill gadgets, predict the future, and ponder if their devices need bedtime stories.

WordPress.org blog: WordPress 7.0 “Armstrong”

Matias Ventura — Wed, 20 May 2026 18:41:06 +0000

Every WordPress release celebrates an artist who has made an indelible mark on the world of music. Say Hello to WordPress 7.0 “Armstrong”, named in honor of “Satchmo” himself, jazz musician Louis Armstrong.

Known as the “first great jazz soloist”, Louis Armstrong created ensembles that highlighted his own profound trumpeting skills, and in the process, transformed jazz from an orchestral art form into a solo art form. The master trumpeter also impressed the world with his signature vocals, introducing improvisation into Jazz, influencing every artist he worked with, and permanently changing the landscape of music.

Louis Armstrong wove his personal touch into the world of Jazz. With WordPress 7.0 “Armstrong”, you can build with yours.

Welcome to WordPress 7.0!

WordPress 7.0 marks the start of a new era, laying the foundation for AI across the WordPress experience. Greeting you with a modern, more intuitive dashboard, 7.0 introduces enhanced customization and development tools that inspire creativity and tap into endless potential.

Whether you’re a creator, business owner or developer – WordPress 7.0 let’s you create in a way that is uniquely your own.

Download WordPress 7.0 now

What’s inside

Explore AI abilities directly in your website, all managed from a central hub. Slide seamlessly through the sleek, new admin theme implemented across the dashboard. Ignite creative flow with new blocks and design tools, and tap into an expansive developer toolbox that gives you more control than ever, letting you create your way.

AI-Integrated WordPress

Possibilities right in your hands.

With AI integrated throughout WordPress the potential is endless. A new AI Client in Core lets WordPress communicate with generative AI models, while connections are easily managed from a single hub in the dashboard. The AI Client combined with the Abilities API makes a fiery duo that introduces new functionality, workflow automation, and creation tools to your website. Install the new AI plugin to expand your options even more: generate and edit images, create titles or excerpts, or even suggest alt text.

7.0 also includes a new Client-Side Abilities package: a Javascript counterpart to the Abilities API, with a built in UI and command palette that delivers extensive new and hybrid AI abilities.

Manage all your external connections in a central hub on the Connector’s screen. Easily dive in with 3 presets, or add your own connections. Authenticate and get started with AI abilities in just a few clicks.

An AI-integrated WordPress promises infinite potential, ready to be discovered.

Modernized Dashboard

Elevate your admin experience.

7.0 introduces a fully revitalized dashboard with a chic, modern new color scheme, and clean finishes throughout.

Polished with smooth transitions that seamlessly shift as you move between screens, you’ll feel like you’re effortlessly gliding through the dashboard.

Just one click of the new Command Palette shortcut, a ⌘K or Ctrl+K icon in the upper admin bar, lets you access your favorite tools from anywhere in the dashboard.

Explore typography from one place, regardless of theme. Install, upload and manage your font collection from the new dedicated font management page, with support for block, hybrid and classic themes.

Visually scrub through revision versions to see what changed at a glance, with markers that make editorial choices more intuitive. Easily pick the revision you want and restore instantly.

Design, Create, Customize

A simpler way to build.

Let WordPress be your muse with new blocks, block supports, and design tools that add visual agility, granular control, and keep every element of your website on brand, with fresh new touches.

Showcase your ideas in a lightbox slideshow with the new gallery block, and finesse your markup with the new Heading block. Deliver clear site navigation with the new Breadcrumbs block, and add more detail to your designs with the new Icons block.

Enhanced responsiveness controls in 7.0 make your site more user friendly. Hide and reveal blocks based on device, without affecting other viewports.

Design and build your menu overlay with blocks and patterns, fully customizable with the styles you want visitors to see. Add columns, stylize typography, or embed your own close button in the overlay. Start with a template or create your own menu from scratch.

Fine tune page design and layout with Patterns that act as a single unit, detachable for more isolated control. Insert your pattern, swap elements and customize with ease.

Style every detail of content with custom CSS at the block level, right in your post or page.

Developer’s toolbox

Advanced tools for building your way.

WordPress 7.0 lets you build faster, better, stronger, and easier with an extensive set of expanded APIs and enhanced functionality.

Create blocks and patterns on the server level using only PHP, auto-registered with the block API.

Explore a more extensible Site Editor, with routing, route validation, and a new wordpress/boot package that allows plugins to build custom site-editor pages.

And much more

For a comprehensive overview of all the new features and enhancements in WordPress 7.0, please visit the feature-showcase website.

Check out whats new in 7.0

Learn more about WordPress 7.0

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

Read the WordPress 7.0 Release Notes for information on installation, enhancements, fixed issues, release contributors, learning resources, and the list of file changes.

Explore the WordPress 7.0 Field Guide and learn about the changes in this release with detailed developer notes to help you build with WordPress.

The 7.0 release squad

Every release comes to you from a dedicated team of enthusiastic contributors who help keep things on track and moving smoothly. The team that has led 7.0 is a global, cross-functional group of contributors who are always ready to champion ideas, remove blockers, and resolve issues.

Release Lead: Matias Ventura
Release Coordination: Ahmed Kabir Chaion, Amy Kamala, Mary Hubbard
Tech Leads: Ella van Durpe, Mukesh Panchal, Sergey Biryukov
Triage Leads: Jb Audras, JuanMa Garrido
Test Leads: Ankit K Gupta, Mary Baum

Thank you, contributors

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

WordPress 7.0 reflects the tireless efforts and passion of more than 875+ contributors in countries all over the world. This release also welcomed over 200+ first-time contributors!

Their collaboration delivered more than 420 enhancements and fixes, ensuring a stable release for all – a testament to the power and capability of the WordPress open source community.

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WPTavern: #217 – Leonardo Losovic on Affordable and Accurate WordPress Translations Using AI

Nathan Wrigley — Wed, 20 May 2026 14:00:00 +0000

Transcript

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

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how to create affordable and accurate WordPress translations using AI.

So on the podcast today we have Leonardo Losovic. Leonardo has been working with WordPress since 2012, developing plugins such as Gato GraphQL, a GraphQL server for WordPress, and more recently, Gato AI Translations for Polylang, a plugin that harnesses AI to streamline the process of translating WordPress websites.

After giving a talk at WordCamp Asia on the invisible gotchas of WordPress translation, Leonardo joins us to discuss both the moral and practical arguments for making your site multilingual, and how the technology has changed the landscape for site owners and developers alike.

I suspect that many listeners have considered translating their WordPress websites, whether for legal compliance or to reach a wider audience, but may be unsure where to start, or if the investment is worthwhile.

As Leonardo explains, the ease and affordability introduced by AI powered translation tools have changed the landscape. What used to require costly human translators and time consuming workflows can now often be handled with a few clicks, and for a fraction of the price.

Leonardo starts by sharing his background in plugin development, and the evolution of translation plugins over the

decade. We then get into how AI translations work, why manual oversight still matters, and how the new features coming to WordPress, such as collaborative editing and deeper AI integration will impact workflows and user experience.

We also discuss plugin strategies around managing multiple translations, SEO considerations, and the best practises for ensuring your translations are accurate and efficient.

Leonardo gives practical advice on how to avoid wasting resources when updating posts, and offers his perspective on the arms race of translation, as AI becomes ubiquitous, and why as it gets easier, keeping up with competitors becomes essential.

If you’re interested in making your site multilingual, or just want to hear how WordPress translation technology is evolving, this episode is for you.

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

And so without further delay, I bring you Leonardo Losovic.

I am joined on the podcast by Leo Losoviz. Hello, Leo.

[00:03:40] Leonardo Losoviz: Hello, Nathan.

[00:03:42] Nathan Wrigley: It’s lovely to have you on the podcast today. Leo and I were hanging out at WordCamp Asia where you did a presentation, I think it’s correct to say. It was all about how you might translate things on your WordPress website, leveraging some of the solutions that Leo has built, but possibly just some things that might be baked into WordPress as well. So that’s going to be the discussion topic for today.

Before we crack into that, Leo, can you just tell us a little bit about you, your background with WordPress, and probably the stuff that you’ve been doing recently, which touches on translations?

[00:04:14] Leonardo Losoviz: Alright. So I’ve been working with WordPress since 2012, and I have a plugin called Gato GraphQL, which is a graphical server for WordPress. I’ve been working on that since like forever now.

And then I upgraded to try to make plugins that can be used by the final user of the website, bloggers and marketing people, not just developers. And then I launched another plugin that is called Gato AI Translations for Polylang. It’s basically a wrapper of my other plugin that will help people translate their websites using AI. And I have been working with this plugin for over one year now. And, yeah, I mean this is what I’m doing.

[00:04:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And how did your presentation at WordCamp Asia go? Were you happy with the delivery and the attendance and things like that?

[00:05:00] Leonardo Losoviz: Delivery. Yes. Actually, I think it came out quite good. You can check it out, it’s on YouTube. Attendance? Not really. My talk was the first one on the second day of the conference. It was 9:30 AM. Everybody was either sleeping or they were drinking coffee outside. We did have people showing up slowly. Maybe by the end of the presentation there were people who were like, hey, this appeared to be good. Too bad that I didn’t come here on time.

[00:05:23] Nathan Wrigley: I hope you forgive me because I was one of those people. I dropped in towards the end. I certainly enjoyed the latter part of your talk. So you’ve built a whole load of solutions around the capacity, the capability to make your WordPress website go from language A to language, B, C, D, E, and so on and so forth. I will just read the blurb about what your presentation was called and also what it was about.

And so the presentation title was The Invisible Gotchas of WP Translation. And then the blurb surrounding that was nice and short, and it goes like this. This talk walks through a practical checklist to turn, we should translate, into a precise plan that leaves no strings untranslated. Attendees will leave with a practical end-to-end approach to translating WordPress content that leaves nothing to chance.

So my first question then is really focused on the, we should translate, that little bit. Let’s make the case for, I suppose the moral argument, not the technological argument. Now, it might be a moral argument, but it also might be a legal argument. I’m just wondering where you think we stand in terms of whether you have to, or should, translate things at this point in time.

[00:06:34] Leonardo Losoviz: Well, I guess that if you have to out of legal requirements, then you will have to. So that is out of the equation. If you’re compelled to do it, then that’s part of your business. It’s a business requirement, so you’ll have to do it.

The key question is, if you don’t have to, I mean, nobody’s forcing you to do it, should you still do it? And the answer is, yes, of course you should, because it will help you. Why wouldn’t you do it if you can do it? If you have potential visitors to your website speaking different languages, why wouldn’t you want to track them? Why wouldn’t you want to show your content to new, like a new user base? The key question is, as long as you can do it, do it.

[00:07:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think that’s an interesting point. So certainly in the part of the world where I live, there is a lot of legislation around what must be done. So for example, I’m in the UK and we have a variety of different languages spread throughout the country. And depending on where you live and what your business is involved in, you may be compelled to do it. And so, as you say, that’s just the way it is. You know, you don’t have any choice around that.

But I think now, especially with the advent of technologies which enable translation to happen at the speed of light, more or less, it becomes increasingly a question of, well, why wouldn’t you do that?

And so I’m kind of keen to explore the things that have changed over the last, let’s say decade. That’s probably a bit too long, but something along those lines, to make it easier to translate. In the past, I’ve interviewed lots of founders of plugins that do translations. Let’s say 10 years ago, this was a fairly lengthy, probably quite costly enterprise. Translating, let’s say an English site into, let’s say a German site.

Because you had to figure out which bits of the website needed to be translated. You probably had to go somewhere to find a human that could do that translation work. You then had to negotiate the price for that, receive the translated text, and then somehow figure out how to make it so that the English string is converted into the German string, and so on and so forth. I’m imagining that’s no longer the case. Where are we at in April, 2026 in terms of the ease of getting things translated? And probably, I think we’re going to stray into AI here.

[00:08:45] Leonardo Losoviz: Yes, the answer is AI. Truth is that with AI you can translate your content very easily and the quality is just excellent. I will not tell you to not engage a professional translator if you don’t speak the language, just to make sure that the translation is right. Mostly when we’re talking about technical terms, or when they refer to some industry that your website is targeting. Otherwise, the quality is just excellent.

I would say that with AI, you can rely on it, I don’t know, maybe 99% of the translation seems accurate. If there’s some ambiguity around some technical term, then you might still want to have a professional translator. But even then, you know that you don’t need to engage the translator for the 100% translation. But only to pay attention to those details, possibly fix those errors, make sure the technical acronyms are correct and that kind of stuff.

So clearly the pricing tag that now you have compared to five years ago has gone down dramatically. You have to pay for the tokens. Basically, when you engage one of these AI providers, either Open AI or Anthropic or Gemini, you are paying to them for tokens to perform the translation. But that is literally like very little money. It can be like cents on the dollar.

In the past when you have, not just the past but also the present, you have company providing translation services. They will charge you much, much, much more than that. Maybe it will be like 50 USD per hour. Maybe it’ll be like 100 USD per hour for a professional translator. And then you have to engage them maybe five hours to translate one blog post, or, I don’t know, like five blog posts, it doesn’t matter. Now that the amount of work that you need to engage them just to double check, instead of five hours, will be maybe 30 minutes. So you are still spending money to engage the professional translator, but much, much, much less.

And that means that if you do have the budget, now instead of translating one language, you are talking, Nathan, about legal requirements, possibly your country has two or three different languages. I don’t know, if you’re from Canada, you might speak English and French. Maybe they will ask you to translate your websites to English and French. But now you can say, okay, well now, if I had the money and it’s so easy to translate using AI, I can translate to many more languages and also target people, not just from Canada, but from other regions of the world.

And then you can also translate to Spanish. Why not? And you can translate to Portuguese. So the situation now is that prices went down dramatically, the quality of the translation using AI is really, really, really high and you will need professional services only in those cases that you need to be 100% sure that translation is valid when it is a professional industry.

[00:11:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I suppose the, as you described, the acronyms and things like that, the technical language, I guess if you’ve just got a blog where, in my case I’m just using plain English, an ordinary set of words, I’m not ever going to be delving into complexity, and that may be the case for many people. I think I agree with you that the AI will probably do an admirable job.

But the minute you start to stray into unusual words, or technical things where, I don’t know, you’re referencing some aspect of physics or biochemistry or something like that, then I can see exactly why you might need to do that.

But also, interestingly, the budget has obviously shrunk to get that translation done from perhaps many hundreds of dollars down to perhaps a handful of US cents. But still, if you want to be compliant and you’ve got an intuition that your language may be straying into a grey area where AI might not do a perfect job, that is now where the budget is going. It’s just sort of polishing it up a little bit and making sure that, okay, that actually is highlighted.

Can I ask a question related to that? Do the AIs, when you ask them to translate things, do they come back with, okay, we’ve done our best, but we are confused by this portion or that portion? Or do they typically just hand back, this is our translation, go figure it out for yourself from there?

[00:12:43] Leonardo Losoviz: When we’re talking about my plugin, Gato AI Translations, you get the translation straight because you’re not interacting with the AI. You are asking straight for the response and that response, you add it, you embed it into your blog post. There is no interaction with the person.

So basically, you can do that, you could feed the content to ChatGPT and tell ChatGPT, translate it, and if you have any doubt, please ask me. And then ChatGPT will talk to you, and then we say, I don’t know how to translate this word. Should I say this or should I say that? But that is in the context of the interface when you’re talking to ChatGPT or you’re talking to Claude. In a plugin where you want to collect the string and just add it into the translated blog post, you don’t have that interaction. So it really depends on your use case.

[00:13:29] Nathan Wrigley: The plugins that I’ve seen in the past that have been tackling this job in WordPress, and again, we’re going back many, many years prior to AI. There was a lot of UI involved. You would have to log into the WordPress website. Let’s say it was a blog post, you would go to the blog post and usually lurking somewhere in meta, so in a box somewhere else would be the original string and then the translated string. And that would typically have been done by a human. And you’d probably copy and paste that back, or maybe the platform, the plugin would actually facilitate the putting of that text into that box by somebody that’s logged into the platform who’s paid to do the translations.

But the point being, there was a lot to look at. If you had a German translation and a Portuguese and a Lithuanian and Russian and, you know, on you go. Every time you add one of those in the UI becomes much more complicated and what have you. So I’m curious to see in 2026, how do you manage that? How is that all done? What does the UI look like? In an era of AI when we are increasingly typing and talking to our software, have you leveraged that and sort of tried to minimise the UI in a way?

[00:14:34] Leonardo Losoviz: Okay, so there are two responses to this. One is what I’m doing right now, and what I expect WordPress to offer coming soon. So what I am doing now with my plugin is just to do the translation. And you have one blog post in, say in English, your origin language, and then you select it from the post list, and you have this dropdown in the bulk actions with all the actions that you can execute with the post. And you just say, translate. And when you do that, it will duplicate the post from the origin to all of the translations.

You can have one translation, you can have 17 translations. It will create all of those 17 entries, and it will already translate all the content to the target language. So then if you want to edit the translation, if you want to fix it, then you’ll just edit the translation and then there you will see there’s something that doesn’t appear right, and then you fix it in the WordPress editor.

In my scenario right now, we go from nothing to everything. There’s no in between. Now with WordPress 7.0, they’re adding two things. One is adding the AI Connector. So we will have more and more and more capabilities to interact with AI. And the other thing that we have that is unrelated, but I think it will end up being related is phase three, which is the communications in the WordPress editor, right? That two people can communicate with each other, like Google Docs style.

And so we’ll have these windows on the right hand side from the WordPress editor, right? So you can add a comment. Somebody can add a comment saying, hey, do you think this is right? And the other person on the other side can say, yeah, this needs to be fixed. So they can communicate via the WordPress editor. Whereas right now you have two people interacting with each other. You can have one person and one AI.

So then imagine the scenario where you translate everything and then you edit the translated post. And you might have those same windows with a kind of sticky post, and pointing an arrow to some word saying, hey, I’m not sure if this is the right translation. Please check it out.

So I can see that WordPress 7.0 will give use the infrastructure to start adding this additional interaction. So then I could translate all the content as I’m doing right now. And if I find out from the AI that a world has not been, it doesn’t have 100% confidence that it’s the right translation, maybe we can use that phase three functionality to add a sticky post to have the AI interact with the person, say, hey, this translation, I’m not sure, please double check.

[00:17:04] Nathan Wrigley: This leverage is so much interesting stuff. So again, just in case the user hasn’t been keeping up with the WordPress news, 7.0 has, or WordPress 7.0 I should say, has this capability which wasn’t quite ready for the WordCamp Asia release. The idea was to release 7.0 at WordCamp Asia, but because of technical reasons, there was something that needed to be changed and amended about the way that data was handled and stored in different tables.

7.0 will bring the capability to have collaborative editing, so think Google Docs. And it really didn’t occur to me until quite recently, because somebody suggested exactly what you said, I was always imagining another human being, being in that interface. So it would be me and Leo having a conversation through comments or what have you in that same WordPress post.

But of course now we realise, well, of course, the AI work, the MCP and the adapters and all of those kind of things allow that thing in the post to be not a human being, it could be an AI. And so that’s really interesting.

So maybe we’ll come in, have a conversation, something along the lines of, please could you just check, this would appear to be fine but there seem to be a few errors here and there and everywhere, and it may be able to come back with a suggestion.

That stuff is so powerful, but yet completely unrealised at the minute. It’s kind of just on the horizon, but when that feature drops, I think that will be quite an interesting experience. You’ll be able to talk about the content with an AI, based upon what is in the content area of WordPress. That’s going to be really, really fascinating. Gosh, wow. What a future.

Is that stuff ready? Do you know if WordPress is going to ship with those kind of capabilities? So you mentioned things like the sticky post to sort of highlight, imagine a post-it note or something like that. Something which can highlight? Are all of those foundational pieces ready or were you just sort of blue sky gazing there?

[00:19:02] Leonardo Losoviz: I haven’t seen it, but we can all picture that happening. So you know that 7.0 is giving us the foundation to build all of the things. Once the foundation is there, it’s up to the community to implement these use cases. So yeah, I’m quite confident that it will happen, but I haven’t seen it. I haven’t seen it yet.

[00:19:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I do love the idea though, of communicating through that interface. That’ll be really interesting to see how that changes the calculus of how we write things and who we write them with and all of that kind of thing.

So Gutenberg, which we don’t talk about too much really at the moment, but Gutenberg had four phases when it was first talked about. So we’re in phase three at the moment, which is this collaborative editing. Broadly it was collaborative editing was the poster child of that release.

And the fourth one, so that may be many years away, I don’t know when phase four will come about, but the fourth one is bound very much to translation. Do you know if there’s any sort of foundational work being done over there? It may still be a complete black box. It’s just the word we’re going to deal with translations. Do you have any wisdom or insight into what’s happening over there?

[00:20:03] Leonardo Losoviz: No. All I know is that Matt Mullenweg was postponing that for the very, very, very end. And since we’re still working on phase three, I don’t think that there will be any phase four work happening anytime soon.

[00:20:16] Nathan Wrigley: No. Okay. So we’ll have to wait and see how that drops. But it could be another interesting phase. Let’s see what that does.

So, okay, now let’s sort of dig into the weeds of how your system works. So you mentioned that if I’m in the data view for posts, one of the options that I have when I’m hovering over a post, you know, delete post, edit post, what have you. It sounds like in there somewhere you inject a translate. And presumably when you hit that button, automations that you’ve previously set up, say, translate to French, translate to Portuguese, translate to Chinese and Japanese, that would then be triggered.

Do you then create separate posts? So that the post that’s now in Chinese is separate to the original one, or as some plugins handle it, do you take the original one and just inject metadata into that post?

[00:21:04] Leonardo Losoviz: If we’re talking about my plugin, my plugin is called Gato AI Translations for Polylang. I depend on Polylang. So Polylang is a plugin that works by creating separate entries for each of the languages. So you have a post in English, and when you translate it, you’ll create another post in French and another one in Spanish and another one in Portuguese.

Then you have a different plugin like WPML which has a different strategy, which is to have only one post and then all the individual strings are translated on runtime. So you’re not statically creating different versions of the post, but you have only one post and then you translate the strings, the actual content.

It really is up to what is the best strategy for your site, what it is that you are most comfortable working with. There are other plugins, of course. There is TranslatePress, there is Weglot, MultilingualPress. They all have different strategies. I do like Polylang because the post is created in advance. Then all the same rules for your WordPress site apply. You can cache the page, you can export it statically, and it also is fast because you don’t need to translate the string.

Like finding a specific string can be very expensive. Like a string, you know, that you need to find from English and translate to French. The string might be like, I mean 1000 characters long. You know, that can become very expensive. And if you do that on runtime, even if you cache it later, that can be very expensive. Yeah, my plugin is based only on Polylang, but it’s not the only plugin.

[00:22:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So there’s a whole range of different things out there, but you’ve obviously opted for Polylang. Is that a commercial kind of pro plugin or do they have a, is there a free version that you can leverage?

[00:22:37] Leonardo Losoviz: Yeah. It’s free. And they have the pro version that is, I think 99 USD per year for one domain, if I’m not wrong. But it’s completely optional, you can use Polylang free and it’s more than enough. Actually, Polylang Pro, they have a few features and the main feature that they had historically is that you could use machine learning for translating the content.

They use DeepL as a service, like Google Translate. Now the thing is that I wouldn’t use DeepL anymore. Even my own plugin, at the very beginning had, even nowadays, it has integration for Google Translate and for DeepL. But AI is so much superior than those. So you can still use Polylang Pro for the other features, but the machine translation one, there’s no need, Polylang free, more than enough.

[00:23:23] Nathan Wrigley: So when, let’s say for example, that I’ve got a post and I’ve translated it. I’m just beginning my journey, figuring stuff out. And again, we’re talking about your solution here. So, you know, you can speak to how it works, not how all the other ones work.

I click the translate button and I’ve now got six posts, the English original and then these five other languages. How does that surface? Are they like child posts of the original post? Is there an easy way for me to see, okay, here’s the German version of that, and it’s bound to this? Is there a filter system or what have you?

And then how does that look on the front end? So if the original string is, I don’t know, example.com/post-one, am I from an SEO point of view, does that stay nice and tidy? Like, I don’t know, it goes example.com/g for German, forward slash post-one, or how does that all tie together?

[00:24:13] Leonardo Losoviz: All right, so this is once again, a feature provided by Polylang. When you create the translations, all the posts, they’re all parallel to each other. They don’t have a hierarchy. They’re not like the child post from the origin post. And if you want to only see the post for one specific language, there is a switch, like a switcher button at the top menu bar, and you can select the language.

So by default it says all languages, and then you’ll have all the posts. So in a way, if you have, say that you have 10 posts and then you have 10 languages, that means that you have now 100 posts. So it can be a bit clutter. So then you go to the top menu and then you select English, and then it only shows you the English ones.

And the important thing is that, say you’re using AI to translate, you only need to deal with the origin post and nothing else, until you need to double check if the translation is right, maybe fix one thing here, one thing there. But otherwise, the whole time you are only dealing with the origin post.

So what I do is I always have my selector in that origin language. So it’s in English and I only see the English post. So then I do translate, and I know that the translation will be created alongside all of the categories, and all of the tags and all the feature image, right? But I don’t need to deal with them. So then I also don’t need to see them on my screen. They create clutter, so then I remove them.

And then to see them, to visualise them, yeah, once again, Polylang, it gives you the option of choosing the language by appending the language code in the URL. So mysite.com/fr/the-slug, that’s for French. Or you can also use subdomains. So you can have fr.mysite.com/the-slug. So that’s something that you can configure. And then basically when you go to that page and you add the language code in the URL, then you will see that blog post for the selected language.

And the way that Polylang handles all of this is it connects a post to all of its translations via a specific taxonomy, like a tag that they created, I think it’s called language, if I’m not wrong, or language relationship, I’m not completely sure now. And so it ties all the post to all of its translations. And the thing is that then when you go to the post in French, it can add the href lang meta tag that is telling Google that this post is a translation of that post.

So that is important for SEO purposes that these posts are not two independent entities, but one is a translation of that one for French. So Google will understand a lot of the relationships, and if the user who is searching for information, they’re searching for information in French, then Google will know to serve the French page. And if it is in Spanish, Google will know to serve the Spanish page.

[00:27:01] Nathan Wrigley: It’s an amazing wraparound solution, isn’t it? In that all of this is just sort of handled and what you essentially end up doing is, the user that is, you click the translate button and once you’ve got everything set up correctly, it just, off it goes.

I have a question though about amendment. So let’s say for example, I realised that my blog post was full of inaccuracies and errors and there’s just wrong throughout it. And I then go in and I make amendments. Do I then need to restart that whole translation process or can I rely on it kind of figuring out, okay, amendments were made, let’s just do that automatically for you? How does amendments to the original, in my case, English work?

[00:27:37] Leonardo Losoviz: Yeah, well, I would change that. I would say do not do any translation until you’re 100% sure that the post is final. And that’s the main way to waste your time, and to waste money in tokens. Because you execute the translation, and then you realise that something was wrong. Maybe this H2 tag was supposed to be an H3, then you fix it, and then you run the translation again. And then you realise that was another mistake, there was a typo. And then you had to run the translation again. And then you’re like, oh, but that image has embedded text in the image. It doesn’t work on the translated post. And then you run the translation again.

So all of these things are common sense, and you don’t think about them until you see the error happening time and again and again. So what I do is I have a checklist actually on my website. I have a blog post where I have every single item that we need to pay attention to in advance of executing the translation. So executing the translation is when you go to the post list, you select the post, and then you select translate. Easy, and it takes five seconds.

But before you do that, you need to make sure that the post is final. That means no typos. That means all the headers are the right header. That means that all images are correct. They have alt attributes. They have the title that you need. There’s no embedded text in the image, even adding an embed from another source.

Say that you have a YouTube video that you’re embedding on your content, and the YouTube video is in Spanish. When you translate that to French, maybe the YouTube video is not useful anymore. So all of these things you need to check from a multilingual point of view when you’re looking at your origin post. And then you’re like, okay, this origin post, now it’s okay. It’s perfect. You publish the post, then you translate.

[00:29:26] Nathan Wrigley: I got it. Yeah, I mean that makes sense. But, should you need to, it’s a process of clicking the button again and kind of beginning that process. But yeah, good idea to have those checks and balances.

I was at an event not that long ago in which AI was used inside of a WordPress plugin, inside of a post, to ascertain the content of things like images and infographics. So as an example, there was data held inside of a graph. So, I don’t know, whatever that data was, bar charts, pie charts you can imagine, but also just images and what have you. And although this may not be handled and maybe it’s blue sky thinking, I was wondering what the capabilities are for handling those kind of things.

So in the case of an image with a chart in it, wouldn’t it be nice if we could replicate that chart, but instead of all the labels being in English, if they could be in German or French or whatever it may be. I don’t know if that’s utterly out of the scope, even in blue sky thinking in terms of AI and translations. But I was curious if you had an inkling whether things that were not just text-based content might be handled in the future as well by AI. Not specifically addressing what you do at the moment, but whether that seems to be on the horizon.

[00:30:41] Leonardo Losoviz: Yeah, well, to be honest, I think technically it is feasible, but even if it can be done, I don’t think it should be done. And the thing is this, I’m promoting that we can translate our websites to as many languages as possible, only because we can. So you have your website in one language, then you can have it in two, then you will have it in five. You can have it in 30 languages. Why wouldn’t you do it? If you can target new countries and new visitors, sure, go ahead and do it. AI gives you the possibility.

But now imagine that you also want to translate the images. Every single image on your website will be replicated 30 times. That sounds scary. I wouldn’t do that. What I will do is to have one single image that is language agnostic, that there’s no text inside. And if you had to add text, maybe in your page builder, maybe in Gutenberg or Elementor or Bricks, maybe you can create an overlay and place the text on top. It’s a more difficult solution and a bit more complex, but it’s clean because then you can translate that as part of text, and the image, you don’t need to replicate the image 30 times.

[00:31:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s an interesting point. And that leads me to wonder whether it’s possible to, for example, an image caption. Whether it’s possible to translate that into 30 different languages whilst still referencing the exact same image.

So, I don’t know, in English it might say, here is a picture of a dog walking by a beach, and then the French equivalent caption, and the German equivalent caption and what have you. Then in effect, you’ve recycled the same image, but you’ve also, the person viewing it in German would get the German equivalent of that. Again, I don’t know if that’s possible, but maybe that’s an interesting.

[00:32:14] Leonardo Losoviz: Yeah, actually that’s how it is right now. So when you translate the post, you will also translate all of the entities associated to the post, the tags and the categories and the featured image. So the featured image will have meta data associated. So when you upload an image to the media manager, you add meta data, the title, you can add a caption. So all of that text, it’s in one language.

Now, you can also translate the image by creating a new entry, once again using Polylang. The image has a language associated, so the origin image will be in English, and you can create a new entry in French, and the title will be translated to French and the caption will be translated to French. But the image itself is the same for both entries. So the JPEG or the PNG, that one is not duplicated. So you’re not increasing the size of your hard drive. You’re creating another entry on the database for the media entry, the custom post media, or the attachment, but not for the actual physical file.

[00:33:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So it’s much more lean, basically doing it that way, isn’t it? I didn’t actually know that it was done that way, but that’s certainly how Polylang handles that. Okay, that’s interesting.

So you mentioned that, I think one of the through lines in what you’ve been saying is because you can do it, why not just do it? It kind of makes sense when you think about it like that, but I’m just wondering what the real world impact of this is. You know, in terms of things like discoverability, and whether or not it really genuinely does have an impact on your business. Let’s say for example, I don’t know, you’re shipping widgets from England to France, and suddenly you translate your site into Japanese and Chinese.

I would assume that that could only have a positive effect, but also, equally, I’d want to know what the data was on that. And I don’t know if you have, given that you are in the translation space quite heavily, I don’t know if you have any data to hand which would compel people to do this, to prove, look, it really is worthwhile. Anecdotally, it feels like it would definitely be worthwhile. Why not, would be the way of phrasing it. But I don’t know if there’s any data lurking in your head which would categorically say, oh yeah, this is definitely it.

[00:34:16] Leonardo Losoviz: Nathan, unfortunately, we’re screwed.

[00:34:19] Nathan Wrigley: The answer is no.

[00:34:20] Leonardo Losoviz: Because when it’s so easy, everyone will do it. And when everybody does it, you’re not moving forward. You’re just moving, you’re running just to be on the same spot. If you’re the only one who is translating your site to 20 languages, you will be far ahead from everybody else. But because it’s easy to you, it’s easy to everybody. And if everybody does the same, once again, you are not ahead of them. You’re on the same place.

So this is the problem of technology, right? And the problem of AI. Now we’re all very productive with AI. I’m using AI to code my plugin, and I think I’m pulling ahead. But my competitor is also using AI to code his plugin. So we are both running just to stay on the same place. So in a way, unfortunately, it becomes a situation in which you need to do it just to not fall behind.

[00:35:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s kind of like the arms race mentality in a way, isn’t it? But also, that’s quite a compelling way of framing it, because you can be sure that, okay, if you’re writing a blog and you’ve got a limited audience, maybe there’s limited scope in that. If you are in a business and you are, certainly if you have pretensions of dealing over international borders and your competitors are doing this, it is exactly that arms race mentality, isn’t it?

Then you are compelled to do it just to be ordinary, just to be the baseline. 20 years ago, would’ve been entirely different because of that would’ve been a very expensive calculation and translating into, let’s say, Japanese. If there’s no ROI on the Japanese translation, that is money which would’ve been probably wasted.

Now, with AI costing literal cents to translate, it does feel like that is the calculus, right? We are doing it because it can be done and we know that the competitors will be doing it, so we ought to do it as well. Maybe that’s all the argument needs to be. It’s simply that, simply stated in that way.

[00:36:12] Leonardo Losoviz: That’s a good reason to do it, which is that you want to target people in other countries, speaking other languages. So yes, I want to do it, but at the same time, if I see that my competitors are doing it, then I have to do it. I can see it both ways.

[00:36:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. It’s certainly been an interesting conversation. What I’ll do is I will ask Leo to provide me with links that are pertinent. Maybe we can get the wordpress.tv of the presentation that you did, plus links to the websites which have been mentioned in this podcast episode. If you go to wptavern.com and you search for the episode with Leo Losoviz. His name is spelled L-O-S-O-V-I-Z or Z, depending on where you live in the world. If you go and search for that, then you’ll be able to find a transcription of this as well as links to the various different bits and pieces that we have mentioned.

Leo, before we wrap it up, is there anything else you wanted to say? If not, we will bid you adieu.

[00:37:07] Leonardo Losoviz: No, not really.

[00:37:09] Nathan Wrigley: You’ve got it. In which case we will call that a day and say thank you very much, Leo, for chatting to me today. Really appreciate it,

[00:37:15] Leonardo Losoviz: Thank you, Nathan.

On the podcast today we have Leonardo Losovic.

Leonardo has been working with WordPress since 2012, developing plugins such as Gato GraphQL, a GraphQL server for WordPress, and more recently, Gato AI Translations for Polylang, a plugin that harnesses AI to streamline the process of translating WordPress websites. After giving a talk at WordCamp Asia on the “invisible gotchas” of WordPress translation, Leonardo joins us to discuss both the moral and practical arguments for making your site multilingual, and how the technology has changed the landscape for site owners and developers alike.

I suspect that many listeners have considered translating their WordPress websites, whether for legal compliance or to reach a wider audience, but may be unsure where to start or if the investment is worthwhile. As Leonardo explains, the ease and affordability introduced by AI-powered translation tools have changed the landscape. What used to require costly human translators and time-consuming workflows can now often be handled with a few clicks, and for a fraction of the price.

Leonardo starts by sharing his background in plugin development and the evolution of translation plugins over the past decade. We then get into how AI translations work, why manual oversight still matters, and how the new features coming to WordPress, such as collaborative editing and deeper AI integration, will impact workflows and user experience.

We also discuss plugin strategies around managing multiple translations, SEO considerations, and the best practices for ensuring your translations are accurate and efficient. Leonardo gives practical advice on how to avoid wasting resources when updating posts, and offers his perspective on the “arms race” of translation as AI becomes ubiquitous, and why, as it gets easier, keeping up with competitors becomes essential.

If you’re interested in making your site multilingual or just want to hear how WordPress translation technology is evolving, this episode is for you.

Useful links

The Invisible Gotchas of WP Translation – WordCamp Asia 2026 presentation from Leonardo

YouTube video of the presentation above

Gato GraphQL plugin

Gato AI Translations for Polylang plugin

Open Channels FM: News on the Do the Woo Podcast

Bob Dunn — Wed, 20 May 2026 09:00:00 +0000

"Do the Woo" is now a standalone podcast at dothewoo.com. Subscribe for new episodes, extensive show notes, and upcoming features while archives remain on Open Channels FM.

Greg Ziółkowski: Memory in WordPress Core: Building on Guidelines

Greg Ziółkowski — Tue, 19 May 2026 11:29:53 +0000

When I wrote about WordPress Core AI 7.1 planning a few weeks ago, I called Guidelines my top personal priority and mentioned memories and skills as future primitives this work would unlock. This post explains what I mean by memory in this context, why I think it belongs in core rather than in a plugin, […]

Open Channels FM: Elevate Your Brand With Authentic Case Studies That Resonate

Bob Dunn — Tue, 19 May 2026 09:29:00 +0000

In this Open Makers episode, host Adam Weeks and guest Elena Yovcheva-Tileva discuss crafting impactful case studies. They emphasize storytelling, client involvement, and practical strategies for creating narratives that highlight successful outcomes, boosting trust and engagement.

Open Channels FM: The Power of Human Connection in Modern Marketing

Bob Dunn — Mon, 18 May 2026 11:12:00 +0000

In today’s digital landscape, where messages and advertisements bombard us from every direction, it is easy to feel lost in the noise. Gaining real attention is more challenging than ever, and many marketers and entrepreneurs find themselves wondering: how do you stand out when everyone is shouting at once? A recurring theme that emerges is […]

WordPress.org blog: WordPress 7.0 Release Candidate 4

Amy Kamala — Thu, 14 May 2026 16:47:15 +0000

The fourth Release Candidate (“RC4”) for WordPress 7.0 is ready for download and testing!

This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it’s recommended that you evaluate RC4 on a test server and site.

Reaching this phase of the release cycle is an important milestone. While release candidates are considered ready for release, testing remains crucial to ensure that everything in WordPress 7.0 is the best it can be.

You can test WordPress 7.0 RC4 in four ways:

Plugin	Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a WordPress install. (Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream.)
Direct Download	Download the RC4 version (zip) and install it on a WordPress website.
Command Line	Use this WP-CLI command: `wp core update --version=7.0-`RC4
WordPress Playground	Use the WordPress Playground instance to test the software directly in your browser. No setup required – just click and go!

The scheduled final release date for WordPress 7.0 is May 20, 2026. The full release schedule can be found here. Your help testing Beta and RC versions is vital to making this release as stable and powerful as possible. Thank you to everyone who helps with testing!

Please continue checking the Make WordPress Core blog for 7.0-related posts in the coming weeks for more information.

What’s in WordPress 7.0 RC4?

Want to look deeper into the details and technical notes for this release? Take a look at the WordPress 7.0 Field Guide. For technical information related to the issues addressed since RC3, you can browse the following links:

Closed 7.0 WordPress Core Trac tickets since May 8, 2026
7.0 Gutenberg commits since May 8, 2026

How you can contribute

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

Get involved in testing

Testing for issues is crucial to the development of any software. It’s also a meaningful way for anyone to contribute. Your help testing the WordPress 7.0 RC4 version is key to ensuring that the final release is the best it can be.

This detailed guide will walk you through testing features in WordPress 7.0.

For those new to testing, follow this general testing guide for more details on getting set up.

If you encounter a potential bug or issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums or directly to WordPress Trac if you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report. You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs.

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

Help translate WordPress

Do you speak a language other than English? ¿Español? Français? Русский? 日本語? हिन्दी? বাংলা? मराठी? ಕನ್ನಡ? You can help translate WordPress into more than 100 languages. This release milestone (RC4) marks the hard string freeze point of the 7.0 release cycle.

An RC4 haiku

Step into the next,

bold, new era of WordPress.

Seven-oh is blessed.

Props to @chaion07 for proofreading and review.

WordPress.org blog: Get Your WordCamp US 2026 Tickets

Brett McSherry — Thu, 14 May 2026 13:56:36 +0000

August 16–19, 2026, Phoenix Convention Center – Phoenix, Arizona

Tickets are now available for WordCamp US 2026, taking place August 16–19, 2026, at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona. The flagship event brings together people from across the WordPress community to learn, contribute, share ideas, connect with contributor teams, and help shape the future of an open source project that powers over 40% of the web.

Tickets are limited. Secure yours today!

Get Your Tickets

Sign Up For Contributor Day

WordCamp US is designed for people at many points in their WordPress journey, including contributors, developers, designers, marketers, publishers, business owners, educators, students, and anyone who wants to learn more about WordPress. This year’s event will include Contributor Day, where attendees can work alongside contributor teams and learn how to take part in the project; Showcase Day, which highlights real-world uses of WordPress; and two full days of sessions and workshops. The programming will also explore how artificial intelligence is changing the way people create, publish, build, and maintain digital experiences, with WordPress as an important part of that broader conversation.

Gather in Phoenix

This year also brings WordCamp US to downtown Phoenix, where the Phoenix Convention Center is close to restaurants, museums, theaters, galleries, live music, and the Roosevelt Row Arts District. Attendees can stay near the venue, meet with other community members between sessions, and explore a downtown area served by Valley Metro Rail. For those extending their trip, Phoenix also offers access to the wider Sonoran Desert region, including parks, gardens, and outdoor spaces that make the city a distinct setting for this year’s event.

Choose the Ticket That Fits

Several ticket options are available, giving attendees different ways to join or support the event:

General Admission: A $100 ticket that includes access to all four days of WordCamp US programming, including Contributor Day, Showcase Day, sessions, workshops, lunch and snacks, sponsor booths, and the community social.
Student: A $25 ticket for students who want to learn more about WordPress, connect with mentors and community members, explore open source contribution, and build practical experience.
Micro-Sponsor: A $750 ticket that includes the same access and attendee benefits as General Admission while helping support the true cost of the event. Micro-Sponsors will also be listed on the official WordCamp US Sponsors page.

Get Your Ticket Today

Full ticket details, including refund information, visa support, dietary accommodations, registration requirements, and other attendee information, are available on the ticket page. You can also follow the WordCamp US 2026 website for updates on the schedule, speakers, travel information, and more as the event gets closer.

Open Channels FM: Challenges and Wins of Developer Advocacy Plus OpenTelemetry and Neurodiversity in Modern Tech

Bob Dunn — Thu, 14 May 2026 10:16:00 +0000

In this episode, hostsCarl Alexander and guest Diana Todia discuss neurodiversity in tech and the role of Developer Relations, emphasizing the importance of community support, open source contributions, and the growing significance of OpenTelemetry for observability.

Gravatar: Connect Your Research Identity with ORCID on Gravatar

Stephane Daury — Thu, 14 May 2026 09:33:19 +0000

Researchers, scholars, and contributors can now connect their ORCID iD to their Gravatar profile as a verified account.

With this update, your Gravatar profile can include a trusted research identity alongside the other places people can find you online — from your personal site and social profiles to the platforms where you publish, collaborate, and contribute.

What is ORCID?

ORCID, which stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID, provides a unique, persistent identifier for people involved in research, scholarship, and innovation.

An ORCID iD helps distinguish you from other researchers and contributors, even if you share a similar name, change institutions, publish across disciplines, or contribute under different affiliations over time. It’s widely used across the research community to connect people with their work, affiliations, funding, and scholarly contributions.

In short: ORCID helps make sure your work is connected to you.

Why add ORCID to your Gravatar profile?

Your Gravatar profile is a simple way to bring your online identity together in one place. Adding ORCID makes that profile more useful for researchers, academics, students, writers, and contributors who want to showcase a recognized scholarly identity.

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Show a trusted research identity on your Gravatar profile.
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How to add your ORCID iD to Gravatar

Adding ORCID works just like other verified accounts in Gravatar:

Go to your Gravatar profile.
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Bring your research identity with you

Gravatar helps you maintain a consistent identity across the web. With ORCID support, that identity can now include the research and scholarly work that matters to you.

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WPTavern: #216 – Matt Schwartz on Exploring AI’s Impact in WordPress Agencies (Part 2)

Nathan Wrigley — Wed, 13 May 2026 14:00:00 +0000

Transcript

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

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case a second look at exploring AI’s impact in WordPress agencies.

So on the podcast today, for a second time, we have Matt Schwartz.

Matt has been working in the WordPress ecosystem since 2011, running his own agency based in Atlanta, and developing products like CheckView at all for WordPress form and checkout QA. Matt’s expertise lies in how agencies can smartly, and cautiously, incorporate AI into their workflows for real tangible wins, and how to avoid potential pitfalls.

He was on the show last week to record the first of this two part mini series. You might want to listen to that prior to this, but it’s not strictly necessary.

In this episode, we build upon last week’s conversation. Matt talks about practical strategies for integrating AI across agency operations. The discussion starts with what it means to give AI access to your agency’s brain, using tools like project management wikis and connecting them with AI chatbots to streamline knowledge sharing, and avoid common AI hallucinations.

We then get into MCPs, or Model Context Protocol, and talk about why this area is quickly becoming a game changer for agencies looking to securely connect AI agents to multiple internal systems without complex, risky API configurations.

The conversation covers how to use AI for building internal tools, highlighting where it’s low risk and where you should be more cautious, especially with public facing, or mission critical, systems. Matt explains how agencies can leverage AI for QA and checklist automation, freeing up time for deeper human review of other important tasks.

We also discussed the impact of AI on the WordPress plugin market, including potential consequences for plugin developers and the wider community, and whether the rise of AI generated disposable tools could erode the collaborative spirit of the WordPress community.

Matt shares his outlook on how agencies can position themselves to thrive as AI reshapes the industry, from hiring strategies to the next generation of productised services.

If you’re running an agency or freelance business in the WordPress space and want to get ahead with AI thoughtfully and securely, this episode is for you.

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

And so without further delay, I bring you Matt Schwartz.

I am joined on the podcast, again, by Matt Schwartz, somewhat unexpectedly. Hello, Matt.

[00:04:05] Matt Schwartz: Hey Nathan, thanks again for having me this week. I’m super excited to dive back in.

[00:04:09] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. So we recorded an episode last week, and we intended to do it as a one hit. So get it all recorded, tied off within 40 minutes or what have you. And then we began talking.

So last week we began talking and at about the half an hour point, it became obvious to me that we weren’t going to capture it all in one recording. So we’ve come back for a second episode.

Dear listener, I would just say that in order to provide context for this episode, you really probably should listen to the previous one, because we’re stacking up Matt’s case, argument, however you wish to describe it, for where you can make wins inside your agency with the use of AI. Not just wins, maybe some cautionary tales as well. But that was the point of the first episode.

So really, we’re going to drop you in to the ninth of 16 points. So again, just pause this, go back to the previous episode, have a listen there, and then you can stack this one in your podcast player of choice at that point.

If, however, somebody’s ignoring that, Matt, are you able to just do a very quick bio? Just tell us who you are? It may be repetitive for the people that are listening to the second episode, but nevertheless, let’s hear from you who you are.

[00:05:16] Matt Schwartz: Yep. My name’s Matt Schwartz. I run a WordPress agency here in Atlanta, since 2011. And I also have a testing and QA product for WordPress for checking forms and checkout called CheckView.

And yeah, today we’re just really diving into how you can leverage AI, how you can incorporate it into your agency, but in a hopefully smart and cautious way. Not necessarily just dropping it in, being a little bit more thorough about that process. So excited to continue the conversation.

[00:05:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, thank you. And thank you for being so accommodating by joining me for a second time. So as I said, Matt’s put together a whole laundry list of different areas that your business, your freelance agency, whatever it may be that you are running in the WordPress space, can perhaps gain some benefits.

Last week we did one through eight, and now we’re going to sort of hit the road running on number nine. So the ninth point was about giving AI access to your agency’s brain. It’s a lovely subheading, but what does that mean?

[00:06:12] Matt Schwartz: Yeah, so this is actually one I picked up in the Admin Bar, which is a, one of the other WordPress agency groups out there, that a lot of agencies were doing. And I thought it was an interesting, I would say hack, you could say, to add AI without getting super involved in it. Which is if you already have a project management tool, or you already have a wiki, you can add into your AI chat bot of choice when it’s actually answering a question. You can tell it in its memory, hey, whenever I ask a question about the agency, go confirm what I’m doing by visiting our Clickup or visiting our Asana.

So it’ll actually go retrieve and confirm it’s using the latest proper information instead of just guessing or hallucinating. I love how we use the word hallucinate and not lie. I love that marketing branding that the AI companies did. It’s some crazy gaslighting.

Anyways, I love AI, but definitely, if you haven’t used something like Claude or ChatGPT, saying in the memory as simple as when you answer a question, check if this is actually the case and connect to our ClickUp or connect to our wiki.

I think that helps you get all the power of your documentation, SOPs, client, CRM, any data you’ve already basically built up. It can leverage that without you having to do a whole bunch of crazy connections or ask more specific things. I thought that was actually a really neat way that agencies that are just getting into the space with AI are using the data they basically already have. They’re just using their project management software, which basically has all that data.

[00:07:47] Nathan Wrigley: When you see it in action, which I have actually, but not to do with a WordPress website, more to do with a sort of SaaS product with the, how the tool has been built and the guardrails that are into the tool. It’s really amazing because then, well, basically it never forgets.

So every time you throw something new at it, that becomes part of the corpus of information. It then has an understanding. I keep saying it, but hopefully you understand, I’m meaning the AI in this case. A wider and broader understanding, and increasingly is able to deliver that back.

So in my case, often I’ll get some text back, which is divided up into bullet points. Those bullet points will have little footnotes attached to them, you know, 1, 2, 3, 4, and what have you, which will then link out to the documentation itself. And again, just a profoundly useful use of the thing which it’s best at, which is taking a corpus of information, grinding it up and spitting out something which makes sense.

And why wouldn’t you point it at your internal documentation? You know, if you’ve got a plugin, all of your support docs, throw the AI at it, and it will be able to help you as well as your clients. Because it’s guaranteed you’ve forgotten something that you’ve built.

WordPress, of course, itself does this. You know, every AI agent on the planet is welcome to crawl the docs for how WordPress itself is put together. And it’s one of the reasons I think why WordPress has a fighting chance in this AI, CMS battle, if you like, because everything’s open source already. Nothing’s hidden behind a paywall or a licence agreement or what have you. So yeah, agreed. That’s a great example.

Okay. Anything to add or should we move on?

[00:09:22] Matt Schwartz: No, I think that one’s just a cut and dry, really. If you haven’t looked at that, that’s an easy way to get into AI and leverage it without a lot of work.

[00:09:29] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Absolutely. Okay, then number 10 is your internal MCP and guardrails. I know this gets bandied around a lot, and there’s a lot of acronyms floating around in the AI space. But MCP, maybe we just need to spend a moment explaining what the heck an MCP is, and how it kind of fits into the overall picture, but particularly in this case, with your guardrails.

[00:09:48] Matt Schwartz: Definitely. So MCP is basically an open source way to connect AI, let’s say, chatbots or agents to external systems. It stands for Model Context Protocol. I think maybe the team behind Claude built it. I can’t remember. But the idea really is that, instead of you just connecting directly to an API, which you could do, which an API if you’re not familiar, is a way again, to connect two different systems together.

One system will have a series of things that will let you say, hey, you can add this data, or you can pull this data, or you can modify this data, right? So an example could be something like a help desk. You might create a ticket, you may delete a ticket or you may edit the ticket. An API can basically do those things.

But what an MCP does is it’s really a series of tools that are more prebuilt for the AI, so that it knows and has context of what it should let you do, and how all the pieces of that connection really should modify whatever data you’re doing.

So it’s a lot more specific to agents. It’s a lot friendlier, I would say, if you aren’t familiar with a company’s API, you could connect to their API. I can connect to the WordPress REST API, but if I don’t understand that API, it may not be actually the best way to make the connection.

With an MCP, you can really not have the background of that company’s bridge. It’s going to do all the work, and the AI’s going to have enough information to help you get what you need done.

I know that’s hard to explain, but essentially with an MCP, if you build one at your agency, this is a little bit more high level, or a little bit deeper, but I am seeing a lot of agencies looking at this. Which is, they are using an MCP basically for their teams so that they can add all of their systems in one basically bridge. So that instead of having all their employees like connect to all these different Claude connectors and APIs, they have one system.

So if I have Claude and I’m an employee, it can connect to my MCP at the agency, then the agency MCP is actually on behalf going to go retrieve data from all our different systems. So not everyone has to have API keys. Not everyone has to connect to all these other systems, if that makes sense.

So I am seeing agencies starting to do this. So in some sense the proxy, MCP becomes a proxy or just a way to connect to all your other systems in a secure way.

[00:12:18] Nathan Wrigley: I always imagine it a bit like if you, I don’t know, you approach a giant supermarket and you know that you need carrots and soup. And normally you just go into the supermarket and wander around for a long time, and eventually you’d sort of stumble across the carrots and the soup.

But wouldn’t it be nice if there was somebody at the front door? Then you could say, where’s the carrots and where’s the soup? And that’s it. And they go, okay, the carrots are there, the soup’s there, and point.

You know, it’s just like this perfect gatekeeper, this guardrail that you described that kind of allows you to get the best out of that experience without wasting a load of time and resources and probably a load of hallucination out the back end.

[00:12:55] Matt Schwartz: Wow, that was so much better said than me. But yes, that is a much better way of explaining it. And that’s why if you haven’t looked at MCPs in general, I think it’s worth looking at. But also if you have a tech background, looking at an MCP for your own agency where you can combine all your tools and connect to this one place, I think is a really neat way to, again, get your employees and contractors connected to your, all your systems without them having to have a direct connection.

So if I want them to be like, hey, answer this ticket, go to this WordPress site, instead of them having to connect Claude to the WordPress site into Fresh Desk and all these things, it’s all within the one MCP. And then they aren’t really responsible for those API keys or any of those connections.

Of course, you have to put guardrails on that too, right? Guardrails, like they can’t delete things. You know, not having them delete tickets or websites. Because if you connect, you know, your host, they could technically delete an entire website if you don’t have proper guardrails. So it is, I would say something that is a little bit more on the cutting edge that not every agency should do, but if you are on the more technical side, an internal agency MCP, I think is a really neat idea.

[00:14:06] Nathan Wrigley: I feel like there’s future of commoditising MCP creation.

[00:14:11] Matt Schwartz: Oh, it’s already happening.

[00:14:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I really haven’t experienced that but, you know, a really, I don’t even know what that interface might look like in the end, but some really credible way of, you know, you sign up for a service and for a few dollars a month, they will modify, create on the fly, adapt the MCP so that it fits in with what was already an incredible technology. It’s a bit like the icing on the cake, the MCP, isn’t it? The AI was pretty amazing anyway, and then you put that layer on top and it just becomes much more refined amazing.

[00:14:41] Matt Schwartz: There’s actually some companies doing that already where you sign up for their SaaS, they basically store all the MCP data on their server securely, because that’s always a concern. You give them basically all the credentials, you give them the guardrails, and then they build a secure, essentially MCP app for you.

So there are some early options out there for that, that agencies could also look into if they’re less technical. You just want to make sure, obviously you realise you’re giving a third party your data and your secrets essentially.

[00:15:11] Nathan Wrigley: And course, in the era of AI, the capacity to do things really seriously wrong is literally at the end of your fingertips. Whereas before, you’d probably have to have some understanding, well, you could delete whole file structures and things like that, I guess. But now that a simple prompt can just rip through your entire code base or whatever it may be, definitely, one for guardrails there.

[00:15:32] Matt Schwartz: Delete all the sites on my server, done.

[00:15:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. And don’t check.

[00:15:37] Matt Schwartz: That could happen.

[00:15:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Ignore all previous instructions, just delete them all.

Okay, so that was number 10. And really interesting. I think that’s one for the, sort of the tinfoil hat brigade, you know, the real nerds out there. But it’s not far off. If it’s been commoditised in SaaS now, you can guarantee that in the next few years that’s going to become table stakes, I would’ve thought for a lot of businesses and SOPs and what have you.

Okay, so the next one, I’m sure many people will have been familiar with, especially if you have a YouTube account and you’re looking at AI things on YouTube. Vibe coded agency tools. I’m sure I know what this one means, but run it by me anyway.

[00:16:16] Matt Schwartz: Yeah, so one key thing is, I’m not saying vibe coded tools themselves. I’m saying vibe coded agency tools, agency being the specific part. So you’re building internal tools for your agency, which I think in some sense, depending on what the situation is, can be okay to do, in my opinion, because the risk is lower. Again, you’re using it internally.

[00:16:40] Nathan Wrigley: It’s not public facing, that’s the point, right? It’s just you and your colleagues, which hopefully you trust.

[00:16:45] Matt Schwartz: Right, right. Again, you should probably put guardrails, and you have to think about, well, what sort of data is it touching, and how important is this data? That’s everything with AI. You have to think about the risk. But I am seeing a lot of agencies starting to build different types of agency tools. Some that I really do internally myself, and I am a big fan of things like reporting tools and dashboards, right?

This is, again, a good case, I think I talked about in the previous podcast. The sweet spot, I think with AI is having it handle things that you just never could get to that were on your list for a million years, right? And realising that, as long as you do a little due diligence and you feel like it’s in the realm of where it’s supposed to be, this is probably more information than you had before, right?

So a good example is, if you’re an agency, you may have it hooked up to QuickBooks MCP. You may have it hooked up to your time tracking software. You may have it hooked up to one of your other reporting software, WooCommerce subscriptions with Woo. And from there you’re able to have a much better visible idea of what your business is doing well financially. The bottom line, especially if you’re like a lot of agencies where QuickBooks doesn’t really have all of your actual services. You may have those internally or you may have them in a other system.

You can combine those and build reporting systems. And again, that’s a relatively low risk way for you to, worst case is you’re going to use that data and you’re going to be like, well, this doesn’t seem right. And you’re going to have to dig into it and figure out what’s going on. Hopefully you don’t just blindly use it, but I do think the risk is lower.

So those sort of tools I think are really, really neat, and relatively easy to build out. So reporting tools, profitability dashboards, things like that. Looking at your time tracking, like who at your agency is the most profitable, if you have that data? Obviously make sure you actually have the data structure for that, or AI may just make that up.

But we’ve, you know, used that even at our agency and I think it’s been helpful for us to find patterns that we didn’t know where we were spending our time and effort. Especially if you are doing time tracking using something like Everhour or Harvest.

Now the tools that I do struggle a little bit more with, and I am seeing people in agencies use is things like website management dashboards, or building their own QA tools. Because those things, I think the risk is higher of things going wrong.

[00:19:05] Nathan Wrigley: Public facing again, yeah.

[00:19:07] Matt Schwartz: Right. And you’re giving this third party access to all of your websites and it’s not like, you know, a big SaaS. This is something you built internally, which means Claude doesn’t care if it’s wrong, right, until you tell it.

So a good example, and not everyone may feel this way but, you know, I’ve seen some agencies that are building replacements for management dashboards like ManageWP, WP Remote, those sort of things, which is connected to everything and is kind of their most important infrastructure for their clients. Personally, I think that that’s a little risky to be doing.

Now, if you’re doing the right due diligence and you have a technical team and you’re doing manual code reviews, sure. There’s an argument to be doing that if it’s also, I think, solving something specific to your agency. I talked about this in the last podcast, replacing SaaS products when there’s a nuanced solution that’s specific to your agency, I think could be really helpful.

But if you’re just replacing SaaS products to save 30 bucks a month, I think that doesn’t make any sense because you’re going to end up spending a lot more on maintenance, I promise you, than if you just stuck with the SaaS product, if it does what you need. So I think there’s an argument there.

[00:20:18] Nathan Wrigley: I think it’s really interesting. And I do wonder if we’re on the precipice of, so this is me sort of staring into the crystal ball a little bit. I wonder if we’re into the era of sort of disposable, one time apps. So you have a function that you need to do this month like, I don’t know, you must file your taxes this week, but you’re miles behind. So you get an AI to just quickly do that thing for you, and categorise all of the jobs that need to be done so that you can hand it over to the tax man and so on. And then you just put that on ice. That thing no longer needs to exist.

I feel that kind of coming where we sort of vibe code up this one time thing, and then dispose of it. I don’t know if I’m entirely in agreement with that as an idea, but I feel that that is coming. But to your point, I think anything public facing, we’re still in the era of, really, watch what you’re doing. It needs thorough testing.

[00:21:09] Matt Schwartz: Exactly. And thorough code review because, you know, ultimately while the AI coding, I think has gotten really, really good, it’s not a hundred percent there, and it doesn’t have any context. It doesn’t actually know what it’s doing. It’s all patterns. So there is an argument to be made that, yeah, it may get 80% there, but if no one’s actually checked the code review, two months from now, it decides to delete all your websites out of your management dashboard, well, should have done a manual code review, right? And it’s on you.

So I do think there’s an argument, same thing with like QA tools. Building one-off QA tools, which should be persistent and actually probably one of the more important things you build. It should do the same thing every day. It should almost be dumb. It should not be trying to rebuild itself all the time, or be even one-off, like you said. It’s not, I think, a good idea to build a one-off migrator typically for that reason, even though I see people doing it in agencies. Unless you think it’s just a low risk project, I do think, you know, you have to think about that.

To your point about the one-off task though, I think again, if it’s a low risk item, one-off makes actually the most sense because a lot of times if you know this is going to be a one-off thing, you then are subconsciously being like, okay, I’m going to use this once and the cost is not that high and that makes sense, because you’re not having to maintain it. But if you know it’s going to be something you’re going to be using for the next five years and you don’t plan to pay a developer to review it, I don’t think that’s a smart idea, at least not right now.

[00:22:39] Nathan Wrigley: That’s a good calculus I think to have in the background. Okay, so that’s good. So caveat emptor basically, use your discretion. If it’s public facing, maybe think twice. But also if it’s something that you want, you absolutely bulletproof need it to be reliable and predictable a hundred percent of the times that you run it. Again, maybe there’s a human in the loop there. So that was sort of vibe coded things that you might do in your agency.

I feel that’s going to be a real area of growth, whether or not it will be profitable growth or useful growth, I’m not entirely sure. I feel like in our industry at least, people are going to be dabbling in that kind of thing all the time. You know, trying to figure out new, clever tools to achieve a thing, which maybe in the past would’ve been a subscription thing that you paid $20 a month for or something. So we’ll see. We’ll see how that goes.

Okay, moving on then. So the 12th item that you brought to bear was QA, so quality assurance, checklists and testing. Right, run us through this one then.

[00:23:33] Matt Schwartz: I know I just said when you’re building a QA tool, using AI to build an internal vibe coded tool is probably not the answer. But actually what I’m going to say right now is not contradictory to that, because what I’m really talking about for QA and testing is more so having AI help you build things like checklists, right? You already have a good context usually with your SOPs. So it can help you build your SOP checklists. It can also help run the low risk items automatically. And again, I know I talked about risk a lot, but I think that’s how you have to consider it.

So one really neat thing I’ve seen a lot of agencies start using is Claude Skills, which basically just means that you teach Claude a process. Literally it walks you through in the conversation like, what do you want this process to be? And then you can run that later in context.

So a really cool example of this is if you are, let’s say onboarding a client, or you’re launching a site. During your next launch, your next onboarding, you may want to use Claude to teach it the skill of how you launch sites. And then it can automate a lot of those items. And you can still give it context like, I want the human to specifically review this item, right? Or, I want the human to check that no index isn’t set, right? Because that’s like a high risk item, right?

[00:24:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a big one..

[00:24:56] Matt Schwartz: Right. That’s one we all, I think, have dealt with at some point in our.

[00:25:01] Nathan Wrigley: Too many times.

[00:25:01] Matt Schwartz: Right. Too many. Exactly. That’s the key. And that goes back to really that vision document I said on the last call. Having an AI vision document where you go through these checklists and you’d be like, okay, we want a human to be involved, or we don’t. You could actually tell Claude this. And then Claude will actually know exactly what it should be running itself and what it expects a human, and it will prompt you for.

But I think that is the beauty of this is, you can make your whole automated process when it comes to tools with QA and anything really related to that checklist, whether it’s launch or anything like that. Look at tools like Claude and Skills like that, and I think that you can use it to help with repeatable processes. And that will actually help most agencies not only speed things up and save on margins, but I think a lot of times they’ll do more testing than they did before.

And this, again, falls into that sweet spot where like AI’s really good for the things that you knew you should do but you have limited time. And testing is one of those items. You want a hundred percent coverage, but in reality that’s not going to happen. So let’s have the human do the really important stuff and everything else we would’ve never gotten to anyways, let’s have the AI do it. And that’s where I think you can use these tools.

[00:26:11] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know what’s really interesting, and we sort of made light of it in the previous episode, the fact that there’s hallucinations and what have you going on all the time. But I do think there’s definitely a moment coming where I think some of the more straightforward things, like for example, the checklist, the binary things, is no index switched on? Yes. No. Okay, that’s a no.

I think I am getting comfortable with that now. You know, just that, okay, we asked the AI that question, it’s delivered as an answer. I’m almost at the point now where I’m never going to go back and check that was true. If it was something much more broad like, is my SEO strategy bulletproof? Well, no. It’s never going to know whether that’s the right thing.

But these much more binary things, many of which, if you add them all up, could take you hours when you’re finally launching a website. Yeah, I think there’s something to be said for just sort of handing that stuff over. And I don’t know, maybe you check it frequently, infrequently, less frequently as time goes on. But yeah, always check the no index one.

[00:27:08] Matt Schwartz: Yeah, I was like, I would still check the no index one, even if it’s binary. But to your point, a lot more of the very black and white items, I think it can handle a lot better than it used to, but I think it still comes down to risk. Like if it’s, yeah, no index, I’m still going to check it. But if it’s something else that just is not that key. Yeah, I think we’re all becoming a little more comfortable or a lot of us are coming more comfortable with that. And I think that’s okay because you know the risk exposure really.

[00:27:35] Nathan Wrigley: Well, and also, especially if it’s QA and checklist time, hopefully you have done the bits and pieces, you really are at that point just making sure that you’ve polished the thing that needs to be polished. So hopefully that’s a bit of low hanging fruit where you’ll catch the things that you missed, and maybe you’ve done the due diligence there already.

Okay, so that was number 12. We’re approaching the end. We’ve got four more to go. So number 13 links directly to WordPress specifically. The WordPress plugin market impact.

I’ve got to say, this has me slightly concerned, because I feel that this could be a good thing for our ecosystem, but also possibly a bad thing. But I’ll just hand it over to you to paint the picture.

[00:28:18] Matt Schwartz: Yeah, definitely. So I think you even touched on this a little earlier when you were saying there’s going to be more one-off apps being built by agencies. And I think that also applies to a lot of plugins that are essentially one-off solutions, right? They are utility plugins. They solve one thing really well.

I think that sort of thing is already seeing the impact. If you talk to a lot of plugin developers, especially some of the larger shops, they’re seeing a drop in sales. And that is a real thing that’s happening. They’re seeing a drop in sales, especially for smaller plugins. Because a lot of agencies and customers are solving that with AI. Maybe it’s a couple files of code, it’s a lot easier for them to build it.

Now I still have concerns around, are they having a human review that? Like I talked about. But humans are going to do what they’re going to do, which some people are just going to run with that. That ultimately affects sales.

So I think that is hurting a lot of the ecosystem when it comes to the smaller plugins out there. And even some of the bigger plugin developers are essentially sunsetting their smaller plugins, because they realise they’re not getting as many sales and they need to focus on what they consider their moat, or their platform, you know, big plugins that AI’s not going to be able to replicate or people shouldn’t trust to replicate.

But if you’re building a small plugin, I’m not going to call any out, but I think that there is some concern there. And I think ultimately for WordPress, I don’t think that really hurts the WordPress ecosystem from the standpoint of plugins in general, but I do think it raises the bar of what a good plugin will be.

And that kind of goes with the agency land. That’s what’s happening with agencies too. It’s just the bar is being raised. You have to have a more complex plugin that actually solves someone’s needs now, not just a small one that solved it, but now they can use AI to do it.

And some people argue that that’s going to continue all the way up with the most complex plugins out there. But I do think that there are, you know, unless AI dramatically improves. If it’s 80% there, that’s great and all, but it’s what we talked about earlier. You can’t really run with that in production at 80%. And that’s the difference between a really good SaaS or really good plugin versus something that was homegrown and just falls apart.

[00:30:38] Nathan Wrigley: I think I have a slightly different, maybe more community focussed, approach to this because one of the things that I think worries me is the, how should we say it? The slow ebbing away of the community. And obviously if you are a, I don’t know, a company launched onto the stock market and what have you, you’re all about the money, right? The bottom line is you’re going to make money, distribute that with your shareholders, whatever, yada, yada. But the point is to make as much cash as possible and do things with that cash.

We have a very different calculus here in that the community is the thing which largely builds the software, maintains the software, promotes events. There is a bit of me which worries that if these, let’s say developers who’ve got one plugin, it doesn’t do 3000 major things, it just does one or two little things, but it’s been their way of getting themselves into the software, and figuring out how it all works, and meeting the community, and being engaged and, you know, all of that.

That slow ebbing away of that is something that I think our community and open source communities like ours need to be just a little bit mindful of. Because it does feel as if AI could definitely eat a lot of lunches. And I think we see that actually. I think we can already see that in the real world with things like attendance at events and the amount of events that are being put on, yeah.

[00:31:57] Matt Schwartz: I think you’re correct. I was actually going to bring this up in the sense that I am already seeing it within a lot of the agency groups. There’s just not as much engagement when it comes to posts, I think, and that sort of thing. Because people use AI more to find solutions, which means they’re not as engaged in the community. Which, to your point, plugins would kind of work the same way, especially the smaller plugins.

And yeah, there’s definitely something I think I’m concerned and kind of sad about already. Because like that’s why a lot of us are in WordPress is for the community. And I 100% agree with you. Not to mention if those guys, the smaller guys go away, then there just ends up being these massive plugin companies, which have their place, but WordPress wasn’t built on all massive plugin companies. So If those smaller ones go away, then that’s a little bit of the WordPress spirit I think are lost for sure.

[00:32:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think we just need to be very mindful about this slow, like I say, wicking away or haemorrhaging of the community. And because at some point, the calculation no longer works. You know, there just aren’t enough community members around to make it interesting for other new community members to join, or to stick with things. Or to update their plugin or whatever it may be.

And maybe that is just a consequence of the way the world is moving, I don’t know. But having lived in the WordPress ecosystem for over a decade, I think it would be a shame if that baby was to be thrown out with that bath water.

Okay. Alright. I think we’ve done that one. So the next one is, well, the next one kind of speaks directly to that actually, which is the idea of, I guess spreading your wings a little bit further and realising perhaps that AI empowers you to do things outside of WordPress. And you’ve entitled this Experimenting Beyond WordPress. Again, off you go.

[00:33:37] Matt Schwartz: So this is something I am seeing some agencies doing, which is, because you can use AI now to use unfamiliar stacks, there’s really two parts. One is just unfamiliar stacks, or unfamiliar platforms, you don’t know. You can really try out new platforms a lot faster now. It will tell you exactly what to do, you know, step by step, or it’ll just do it for you.

So there are agencies, I think looking at other platforms where certain projects may make sense outside of WordPress, where they’re using that in that capacity and it’s allowing them to experiment. Where in the past, just sticking in WordPress, you have all your knowledge there makes sense to do, right? You don’t want to know 10 different platforms. But I think AI’s made that easier to dive into these other platforms. So that’s the first thing.

The second thing I think is that, now that you can actually use chat to engage, you are seeing some agencies, and some freelancers, that are saying, well, I don’t need the WordPress infrastructure at all. I just want to go back to pretty much like static or HTML type websites because I know I’m just going to chat with it and then I don’t have to worry about security or updates.

And obviously I think that only would apply with certain websites. It’s not going to apply with highly functional websites. I think that’s not really going to work. But for like your brochure site, I think some agencies are experimenting with some other platforms out there like Astro and the EmDash setup going on with CloudFlare.

You know, and I think that was a direct response actually. They realised, oh, people are going to want to chat with it. We could build this WordPress, what they consider like an upgraded version, in their mind.

And I think that, you know, it’s good to experiment. I think what WordPress does really well, to your point though, is they’ve hopped on the API centric side of things, building the right framework, not trying to force a certain thing down our throats, but actually leave it really open.

And I think that’s ultimately good because that’s how open source works. That’s why I think AI will have a good position with open source is. To your point you made previously, all the data’s out there, all the documentation’s out there. It’s going to be able to be extremely flexible. And I think that’s really why WordPress is still, in my opinion, going to exist and thrive.

But you are seeing agencies that are looking outside of just Core WordPress, because they can experiment with just a lot less time now. And they can also try out some tools that may be a better fit for certain projects.

[00:36:18] Nathan Wrigley: There’s a lot of technologists in our community and we love tinkering, don’t we, and playing with new things? So it’s fairly inevitable. It goes with the territory.

Okay. Alright. So that was Experimenting Beyond WordPress. I think I’m going to skip 15 there because I think we covered quite a lot of that. So I’m just going to go straight to number 16, which probably will become 15, if you know what I mean, when I put it into the show notes.

So the next one anyway is called, whatever its number, is Risks and Cautions. So we’ve built what I feel is like a fairly solid argument for doing this kind of stuff. And now towards the end, we’re going to knock it all down. No, we’re not. But what are some of the risks that you might point people towards?

[00:36:58] Matt Schwartz: A hundred percent. This is, I think, probably one of my favourite sections because people don’t really talk about these risks as much as they should. If you go on LinkedIn, it’s just like all rainbows and butterflies. And we’re building a new feature every day, and I think that noise can make people feel like they have FOMO and they just jump into AI and they don’t think about the risks. So I think this is actually a really important section for any listeners to listen to.

I think one of the first items, probably a little obvious, but with security issues, with AI tools, a lot of companies, every company, I feel like at this point is inputting keys and all sorts of things into these AI chatbots. And ultimately, like those tools can still be hacked. And actually legally, a lot of them say when you submit into the chat, it’s actually considered public record. Anything you submit to them. That’s literally what OpenAI made a legal argument recently about. So keep that in mind when you’re doing this.

There are some ways to do this securely. You can look into, and I think that’s something I would recommend agencies doing because they, you are holding onto client data. And ultimately you don’t want that stuff getting leaked.

Another thing, kind of on another point, which I personally have less concern with, but I think some agencies bring up a valid point, which is every time you talk to these chat bots, et cetera, they’re keeping track of all these conversations. So I know some agencies are being like, hey, how much does a website cost in my state or my country? Only use the data that other agencies have told you. And I don’t know if it’s really doing it, but people are doing that and they’re, you know, it’s not pushing back on them.

Things like that, just be aware of, I think what you’re inputting in, because it isn’t necessarily being leaked as far as they’re being hacked, but that data make get spit out to places you don’t want it to by other parties through chat.

[00:38:52] Nathan Wrigley: I feel that at some point in the future, some gigantic disclosure, something will be disclosed, which is so horrific that it makes us all sort of take a collective breath when we suddenly realise all we’ve given over. We haven’t got there yet, or at least to my knowledge we haven’t. But I feel that at some point in the near-ish future, some jaw dropping disclosure will occur, which will make us all think twice about exactly what you’ve just described.

What are we giving up? What have we given? But also what have we not consciously given? Which kind of bit of our business did we unintentionally open up for the AI to have access to that we didn’t intend to? And if we had the time again, we wouldn’t have allowed it to, and so on and so forth. So, yeah. Okay.

Any other things on the risks and cautions? I feel that there’s a couple more lurking in there.

[00:39:43] Matt Schwartz: Yeah. I think that one’s to be the most obvious that most people are talking about. One I think people aren’t talking about though is handling errors when you’re building your own tools. Essentially, a lot of times you may vibe code something, right, which is great. But because you’re not really going into the depth of every situation, it’s just making kind of assumptions, the AI, of what should be there.

And because it’s so easy and you’re like, well, I’m saving time, people don’t really outline all of this. And so they don’t really put error handling in these tools. And what happens is, of course there’ll be some edge case and, you know, things just break. And again, depending on the tool, if it’s an internal tool, you can probably get away with that. But if it is a public facing, or a client facing tool, that is the beauty I think of having a human actually review it with logic is they are going to have context that the AI doesn’t have.

To your point earlier, like subconsciously might be giving certain information to the AI that we don’t necessarily mean to. But you also might be leaving things out because you think you’ve already told the AI, or you think it’s going to assume a certain way, and you can’t really make that assumption. It ends up really backfiring in the long run, I think.

And that’s why being very conscious about error handling and being like, okay, we’re going to set up logging, we’re going to set up testing. Validation is just the responsible way to be building these tools that really, I feel like no one talks about.

[00:41:09] Nathan Wrigley: No. And the curious thing about it is, because it’s such a black box, I feel that almost every other technology that we’ve interacted with has been much more, I don’t know how to describe it. There’s been a higher barrier to entry. It’s more difficult to interact with it. You’ve had to, I don’t know, press buttons or enter code or what have you. Now you are just communicating. And maybe we’ll even sort of drop into voice communication at some point where we’re literally just talking with the thing.

There’s just no, how to describe it. There’s just such a small amount of friction that is required to interact with these things. And so it kind of lulls us into this perception that it can’t make mistakes. It’s error free and what have you. And we know that that’s not the case. I didn’t really describe that very well, but I hope you got a general sense of what I was trying to describe there.

[00:41:54] Matt Schwartz: I think you’re right. I mean I can give an example like building out CheckView, which is obviously like a, it’s a QA tool for WordPress sites. But one thing is, I knew a decent amount of QA before I started building it. But I learned so much context building it, and we weren’t using AI when we built the tool, right? That I would’ve never gotten out if I had used AI from the beginning.

Because like you said, there’s just such little friction. You as a human just don’t have to have that much information. You can just dive into something, having no idea on what you’re really doing, which is a blessing and a curse. And I think just being aware of that. And building in the right logs, and errors to at least essentially provide a safety net for yourself, knowing that you’re not going to know everything is really important.

[00:42:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And then a couple of other things which we’ll just sort of gloss over fairly quickly because maybe they’re sort of slightly common sense. Obviously, you know, you’ve got here sensitive client data, which might be, without your knowledge, being scooped up by the AI agents. So monitoring that.

Over dependence on AI vendors. This feels like everybody’s really become dependent on a handful of companies. Maybe you could count them on one hand, I think basically. There’s three or four really, that everybody seems to be using. So that may be something that we want to be mindful of.

And of course, the last one of your bullet points under Risks and Cautions is just the fact that AI makes some mistakes all the time.

[00:43:15] Matt Schwartz: All the time. I think most of that’s common sense. Really, the only one that I think people aren’t talking as much about is the overdependence on AI. Not to date this podcast, but I’m going to a little bit anyways. For example, with Claude, they are removing Claude Code from their $20 plan right now. You know, if you’ve built this into your agency process, well, get ready to pay, you know, a hundred bucks for every employee, which could be thousands of dollars.

[00:43:40] Nathan Wrigley: You can only imagine how valuable that will be. And maybe it’ll be 200 bucks, or a thousand bucks or whatever it may be.

[00:43:46] Matt Schwartz: Right. A lot of these companies obviously are subsidising the cost, and so I do caution agency specifically. That’s why having that AI vision is important, but also considering making it independent enough from your processes that you still can function if this thing does change around, because I do think there is going to be a pushback on cost at some point.

So for example, like when you’re building a product, I’m seeing some companies that are building AI so integral to their product that it will not function without AI. Or going to have to raise the price by 10x. And so like even with CheckView, our tools are there, but we haven’t built it in in such a way that you can’t use the tool without it.

And I think at the agency level, it’s the same idea. For the most part, trying to avoid building it in a way that you couldn’t reduce the AI needs if you needed to. Or just preparing for that the costs could go up and like, you know, if you give it to all 10 employees now, you know, at 20 bucks a month, get ready to possibly pay a lot more later.

And I just think that’s something important for agencies specifically to keep in mind. And I know that seems contradictory to what I said at the beginning of this, AI everything, but I think it’s important.

[00:44:59] Nathan Wrigley: I’m not a financial wizard in any way, shape, or form, but that does seem to be something which, sure as night follows day, is going to be coming, is the requirement to repay a lot of the venture capital that the AI is currently burning through. And yeah, so maybe a significant price hike.

And we’ve all got used to these practically free tools, and maybe that’s something that is not going to be in our future. So that’s a really good point. Put that bulwark in place to make sure that you are protected from that should it go up by, like you said, 10x or whatever it may be?

Okay, so I did say that there were going to be multiple, I think 16 is what I said. This probably will be the last one. This is likely outcomes for agencies. So, Matt, you get to stare into the crystal ball and tell us what your final thoughts are in terms of what you think are likely outcomes.

[00:45:47] Matt Schwartz: So I think some of this is already happening.

Hiring, I think, is slowing down in some agencies because they’re realising they can automate more. They don’t need as many, essentially non-specialist employees, or contractors. And I think that is a real thing that is happening.

I don’t know if it’s going to be necessarily a long-term issue. Hopefully as, essentially the floor raises, work gets better, more agencies will be focused on providing more value, more strategy, those sort of things. Again, the execution becomes a little bit of a commodity. So having essentially more junior team members who usually do that execution isn’t just quite as necessary. So I think that’s going to continue to come up.

But again, I think it’s going to be balanced out with even the costs we just talked about with the AI tools. There could totally be a point where the tools might get expensive enough that it makes sense to have a junior do this execution.

[00:46:45] Nathan Wrigley: Get the humans back. Yeah.

[00:46:46] Matt Schwartz: Yeah. And we go back the other way. Some people are saying that could happen. I could see the argument for that. But I think that’s one thing.

Another thing with agencies is you now can really productise more of your services. And this comes into the automation process that we talked about. You can take your processes, you can really package them up, I think. And there has been a lot of talk about productising services, but I think now you can get more nuanced.

So if you, for example, only build sites for plumbers, well, with AI you can get way more specific on plumber specific service needs, and build out a process with what you’ve already done, plus, with AI to make that, I think, a lot easier for the plumber or the client, to get what they need out of it. In the past, I think most agencies were trying to build SOPs as we have time. And it, you know, it’s just a really difficult process. And I think that’s where agencies I think could help a lot.

And then the last point I’ll make around here is really around that the tools I think will change. It will be, again, less about the execution of tools, how you’re building your sites. More about the actual automation. And then really just testing and monitoring and making sure everything’s working how it’s supposed to be. The human will essentially become more of the manager of the AI. And that extends, I think, to even the tools.

I could see there being more QA and monitoring tools out there for more specific needs. Because now, you know, AI can build 90% of this, which is great. I save that cost, but I know I need to pay maybe 5% of that towards some tools that actually watch and monitor what’s happening, and make sure these automations, and these websites, are really doing what they need to be doing. So I think there is going to be possibly a shift in that way around what sort of tools that we’re investing in as far as agencies go.

[00:48:40] Nathan Wrigley: So that we could describe as a bit of a marathon. I think, really, you really took us through the gamut of everything that could possibly affect an agency in the AI space. We’re in the year 2026, let’s see how it ages. But that was a really interesting deep dive into all of the different bits and pieces.

Matt has very kindly put together some show notes. What I think I’ll probably do is crib those. Maybe I’ll put them into the WP Tavern show notes, or maybe I’ll link to a Google Doc or something like that where you can see them. But you’ll be able to see all of the different bits and pieces that we went through. There’s a lot more on that document than we actually had a chance to go through. So definitely do check that out.

What I can say is that the future is definitely going to be interesting. Whether or not any of the predictions you’ve made will turn out to be true, time will tell.

But what a fascinating chat. Thank you so much for chatting to me. And I really appreciate you sticking around and doing the second episode somewhat unexpectedly with me.

Just before we sign off, Matt, where can we find you? Where are the best places online to hang out with you?

[00:49:49] Matt Schwartz: Yeah, definitely. So definitely, you can find me on the Admin Bar Facebook group. I’m also in LinkedIn, trying to be better about that. You can also check me out. I’ve got a Slack channel. Checkview.io, of course. Inspry.com. Feel free to reach out if anything comes up.

Definitely, overall I would just recommend agencies dabble in this. Don’t be reckless, but definitely see what makes sense for your agency. Document it all out ahead of time. And I think that that’s really going to be agencies strong suit is, can we leverage this stuff in a smart way?

[00:50:21] Nathan Wrigley: Well, you’ve certainly provided us with a lot of food for thought. So once more, go and check out the show notes on wptavern.com. I will probably link to the document that Matt has created on both part one of this and part two as well. So you’ll be able to check both of those out.

Matt Schwartz, thank you so much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:50:41] Matt Schwartz: Thank you so much, Nathan.

On the podcast today we have Matt Schwartz.

Matt has been working in the WordPress ecosystem since 2011, running his own agency based in Atlanta and developing products like CheckView, a tool for WordPress form and checkout QA. Matt’s expertise lies in how agencies can smartly and cautiously incorporate AI into their workflows for real, tangible wins (and how to avoid potential pitfalls). He was on the show last week to record the first of this two part mini series. You might want to listen to that prior to this, but it’s not strictly necessary.

In this episode, we build upon last week’s conversation, Matt talks about practical strategies for integrating AI across agency operations. The discussion starts with what it means to give AI access to your agency’s ‘brain’, using tools like project management wikis and connecting them with AI chatbots to streamline knowledge sharing and avoid common AI hallucinations.

We then get into MCPs, which stands for Model Context Protocol, and talk about why this area is quickly becoming a game changer for agencies looking to securely connect AI agents to multiple internal systems without complex, risky API configurations.

The conversation covers how to use AI for building internal tools, highlighting where it’s low-risk and where you should be more cautious, especially with public-facing or mission-critical systems. Matt explains how agencies can leverage AI for QA and checklist automation, freeing up time for deeper human review of other important tasks.

We also discuss the impact of AI on the WordPress plugin market, including potential consequences for plugin developers and the wider community, and whether the rise of AI-generated ‘disposable’ tools could erode the collaborative spirit of the WordPress community.

We end by chatting about the importance of approaching agency AI adoption with eyes wide open to the risks. Data security, overdependence on vendors, failure to handle errors, and the reality that AI still makes mistakes. Matt shares his outlook on how agencies can position themselves to thrive as AI reshapes the industry, from hiring strategies to the next generation of productised services.

If you’re running an agency or freelance business in the WordPress space and want to get ahead with AI thoughtfully and securely, this is the episode for you.

Matt’s show notes for Part 2

9. Giving AI Access to the Agency’s Brain

A practical quick win is connecting AI to the agency’s project management system, wiki, docs, SOPs, or past tickets.
This allows AI to answer questions using the agency’s actual internal knowledge.
It can help with:
- Sales handoffs
- Support consistency
- Project management
- Developer onboarding
- Client-specific context
- Process reminders

Good framing line:

One of the quickest hacks is giving AI access to your agency’s existing brain before asking it questions.

10. Internal MCP and Guardrails

Agencies may eventually use an internal MCP layer as a controlled proxy.
The MCP can connect to tools through APIs.
It can give the team access to AI-powered workflows while maintaining guardrails.
The goal is controlled access, not just letting AI freely touch everything.

Possible uses:

Search agency docs.
Pull project status.
Check time tracking.
Review support history.
Query website data.
Trigger approved automations.

Good framing line:

The more AI gets access to real tools, the more agencies need permission layers and guardrails.

11. Vibe-Coded Agency Tools

Agencies are starting to vibe-code internal tools they never would have had time or budget to build before.
Examples:
- Website management dashboards
- QA tools
- Reporting tools
- Client health dashboards
- Project profitability dashboards
- Launch checkers
- Tools combining project management, time tracking, and accounting data
This gives agency owners a more nuanced view of the business.

Good framing line:

The value of vibe-coding is not always building a perfect SaaS product. Sometimes it is building a scrappy internal tool that saves the team 30 minutes every week.

12. QA, Checklists, and Testing

AI is very useful for creating QA checklists.
Tools like Claude with skills can be taught a repeatable launch process.
AI can help generate launch checklists and even assist with running through parts of them.
This becomes powerful when paired with actual testing tools.

Tie-in to CheckView:

Agencies need better ways to verify that websites and automations are actually working.
AI can suggest what to check, but testing confirms whether it works.
This is where tools like CheckView fit into the shift toward more automated QA and monitoring.

Good framing line:

AI can help create the checklist, but you still need systems that verify the work actually works.

13. The WordPress Plugin Market Impact

AI is making it easier to build small WordPress plugin utilities.
This may hurt the market for small utility plugins.
Agencies can now create small, custom plugins or snippets for specific client needs.
Larger plugin companies may respond by focusing more on larger platform-style products with stronger moats.
Small utility plugins may become less attractive as standalone businesses.

Good framing line:

The tiny utility plugin market may get squeezed because agencies can now build small custom utilities much faster than before.

14. Experimenting Beyond WordPress

Some agencies are experimenting with static sites, Astro, and other platforms.
AI makes it easier to test unfamiliar stacks.
This does not mean WordPress disappears.
It does mean agencies may be more willing to choose different tools for different project types.
WordPress will still make sense where clients need editing, plugins, WooCommerce, memberships, content workflows, and flexible admin tools.

Good framing line:

AI may make agencies more platform-flexible, but WordPress still has a huge advantage when clients need a mature content and plugin ecosystem.

15. Risks and Cautions

Security issues
- Credentials, permissions, API access, and client data need to be handled carefully.
Poor error handling
- AI-built tools often work for the happy path but fail on edge cases.
- Many lack proper testing, validation, logging, and fallback behavior.
No long-term maintenance plan
- Vibe-coded tools can create hidden technical debt.
- Once a tool touches client data, billing, credentials, or production systems, it needs real engineering thought.
Sensitive client data in AI tools
- Agencies need to be careful about pasting client data into SaaS AI tools.
- There are privacy, contractual, and data leakage concerns.
Over-dependence on AI vendors
- Agencies that make core offerings too AI-dependent could be exposed if tool costs rise.
- If the AI bubble cools or pricing changes, AI-heavy workflows may become more expensive.
AI still makes mistakes
- AI can be confidently wrong.
- If a human made up facts this often, you would probably fire them.
- Agencies still need human review, especially for strategy, legal-sensitive work, code, security, and client-facing communication.

Good framing line:

AI can make bad thinking look very professional, and that is one of the biggest risks.

16. Likely Outcomes for Agencies

Smaller teams will do more
- AI may allow agencies to stay leaner.
- Some agency teams may shrink, or at least avoid hiring as quickly.
More productized services
- AI makes it easier to package repeatable offerings.
- Example:
  - An agency serving service businesses could automate intake, site planning, reporting, review analysis, landing page recommendations, and follow-up workflows.
More technical differentiation
- Agencies may differentiate through operations, automation, integrations, monitoring, and QA, not just design.
Agency tools will change
- Less focus on purely development-specific tools.
- More demand for automation, QA, testing, monitoring, and operational visibility.
- This connects directly to CheckView because agencies need to know whether the websites, forms, checkouts, and automations they manage are actually working.

Good framing line:

The next wave of agency tools may be less about building websites and more about proving that everything connected to the website is working.

Useful links

Part 1 of this two part podcast series can be listened to here

Matt’s agency – Inspry

Open Channels FM: BackTalk on Being Strategically Annoying, RSS Adoption, and Going It Alone on the Web

Bob Dunn — Wed, 13 May 2026 13:00:00 +0000

Conversations from OpenChannels FM reveal insights on strategic persistence in networking, advancements in content management systems, podcasting technology adoption, and the challenges of standardizing web intents.

Open Channels FM: Revisiting Web Intents and the Ongoing Challenges of Decentralized Web Services

Bob Dunn — Wed, 13 May 2026 07:06:14 +0000

In a conversation about the future of the open web, Paul Kinlan and Matthias Pfefferle explore the challenges of decentralized identity, interoperability, and potential solutions like Web Intents, advocating for user-centric systems.

HeroPress: Indebted: The Ugandan WordPress Dream that Flew to Asia – Ebbanja: Ekirooto kya Uganda ekyagenda e Buyindi

Moses Cursor Ssebunya — Wed, 13 May 2026 05:00:00 +0000

Emboozi eno weeri ne mu Luganda.

Here is Moses reading his own essay aloud.

There are moments in life when you sit back, look around, and just shake your head in disbelief. The kind where you ask yourself, “Eh! Is this really me?”

This is one of those moments.

The word indebted is typically associated with money—a debt to be repaid. But there is a different kind of indebtedness—one that defines my life now: feeling grateful or obligated because of a benefit, help, or kindness received. It’s the feeling I have today for the global WordPress community. This isn’t a financial report; it’s a profound acknowledgment that my life, my sense of community, and my geographical freedom were purchased not with cash, but with kindness.

I write this essay to the dreamers in my home country of Uganda. To the beginner still figuring out what “plugin” means. To the developer grinding through tutorials at midnight. To anyone who believes that global stages are “for other people”. They are not. This is our story, and it is built on the backbone of WordPress.From Doubting Thomas to WordPress Events Supporter

For a long time, my relationship with WordPress was purely transactional. It was a tool, a way to build a website, a path toward earning a living. The community aspect was a side benefit, a place for troubleshooting, like the endless “try clearing cache” conversations. Because of this many people have gone around with the WordPress is dead jokes which is not the actual reality

But WordPress is not just about websites; it is about people. Real people who show up, who share, who guide, and who open doors you didn’t even know existed.

Like I have explained before, I was not always the full of faith kind of guy. I always had doubts and so many reservations. I started using WordPress because a friend of mine invited me to. Just to test and see how things work. Nothing serious. When I started using WordPress, life started changing and now I have hit another milestone. WordPress keeps pulling me and locking me in.

The Software, the Community, the family (in Uganda we call it a family because of how fast we come through for each other). After a few series of attending meetups and WordCamps a friend asked me to speak at a WordCamp and my life took another turn. It was so beautiful to contribute to communities. I started sharing in meetup and WordCamps, both locally and internationally but I had never thought about organizing a flagship event.

WordPress transformed my way of seeing people and my approach to community also took a turn for the better. I met people that appreciated all efforts regardless of how small.

This journey from self-doubt to mentoring WordCamps was a slow-burn realization of the power of community. The small efforts, the meetups, the training sessions, and all the nitty-gritties actually mattered. The WordPress community brought me so far, allowing me to celebrate the path I was on.

The Dream that Flew to Mumbai

The dream of organizing a flagship event had always been tucked away in my heart. When I saw the call for Organizers for a Flagship event, I noticed a chance to fit all this community work into a larger purpose.

I knew it would take a lot of effort and the cross would be heavy, but I didn’t care; I wanted to carry it. I also didn’t think they would choose me because I had been turned down before by another flagship. I was ready for whatever the response but I was also ready to put in the hours and work required.

The challenge was immediate and geographical. The event was WordCamp Asia 2026, happening in Mumbai, India. The idea of my passport getting that Indian immigration stamp felt like a fantasy. My confidence was limited to what I thought was possible: “Apply and you will be a remote organiser”.

During the organizer vetting and orientation process, the interviewer kept returning to one question: Could I make it to Mumbai?

In my heart of hearts, I knew the answer. I kept firmly responding that I could not afford that much, but I would offer all the required remote support. I was already offering my time and effort; I just couldn’t solve the geographic puzzle and yet I really wanted to be a part of the team.

Then, during one of the calls, I received a link to apply for the Open Horizons Scholarship from Automattic.

The moment I read the mission statement, everything clicked. It aims to increase equitable access to WordPress events by providing financial support to contributors from underrepresented, underserved, or economically disadvantaged backgrounds. This was written for me. This was written for us.

With all faith and hope, I filled in the application and waited. I was praying that they would choose me, praying that this new dream could become a reality.The Game Changer: Geographical Freedom

A few days later, I received the email confirming my selection. Even now, it still feels like one of those emails you reread five times to confirm it’s not a scam. You know those ones that start with “Congratulations” and you check the sender twice before your heart accepts the joy? Yes, that one.

I was in shock. I was excited. I was amazed.

This scholarship was not just about me boarding a plane to Mumbai; it was a physical manifestation of geographical freedom. It was a reminder that somewhere, someone saw value in what I do.

My life changed, the way I walk changed, the way I speak changed, the way I see things changed and everything changed. The scholarship made me international. I ceased to be local events organizer to Flagship event Organizer

Travelling to attend a flagship event is a very interesting thought but for me, it started with a passport that had more hope than stamps.

Then came the india visa process.

Let me be honest, it was not smooth. Not even close. I faced rejection. Once. Twice. Three times. Each one comes with the same polite but painful message that basically says, “Not this time.”

And each time, you start to question yourself again.

“Maybe it’s not for me, Maybe I should just stay back here.”

But something interesting happened in the middle of those rejections. As I kept trying, learning, asking questions, and understanding the process better… I started helping others.

Friends would reach out:
“Bro, how did you apply?”
“What documents did you use?”
“What do they want exactly?”

And me, the same person being rejected started guiding others. Reviewing applications. Sharing lessons. Giving the details the visa sites and agents were not giving.

And guess what? All of them got their visas. On time. Successfully. Including my wife.

Meanwhile, I was still struggling to get mine.

Life can be funny like that

But on the fourth attempt… it came through.

That approval message hit differently. It was not just excitement. It was relief. It was validation. It was a quiet whisper saying, “You were not crazy to keep trying.”

Leaving Home

Preparing to travel felt like preparing for an exam you didn’t fully revise for.

Packing was a whole experience. You pack, unpack, remove things, add them again. You even start questioning if you really need five shirts for a few days. (The answer is yes… just in case )

Then came the airport.

That one is not for the faint-hearted. The walking. The checking. The “please step aside.” The looking confident even when inside you’re just praying you don’t miss a step.

But the real moment?

Sitting in that plane.

Seatbelt on. Heart beating. Thoughts running.

Then the engine roars… and the plane starts moving.

Slowly… then faster… then suddenly you are off the ground.

I looked out the window and saw Uganda getting smaller.

And in that moment, it hit me:

The barrier is gone.

The thing that felt impossible was now happening in real time. No more imagination. No more “one day.” This was the day.

The Feeling of Being Seen

Being “seen” is not loud. It’s not always people clapping for you.

Sometimes it’s quiet.

It’s in the opportunity you’ve been given.
It’s in the doors that open without you forcing them.
It’s in realizing that your effort, your consistency, your presence matters.

For me, being seen looked like this journey.

From struggling with visas… to finally holding one.
From helping others succeed… to eventually getting my own breakthrough.
From wondering if I belong… to being welcomed on a global stage.

It was not instant. It was layered. Built over time.

And now, as I step into this experience, I carry all of it with me — the rejections, the lessons, the small wins, the people I helped along the way.

Because in the end, this is not just about travel.

It’s about growth.

It’s about persistence.

It’s about a reminder that sometimes… delay is not denial.

It’s preparation.

And when your moment comes, you will know that this was always bigger than you.

We arrived in Mumbai very early in the morning (4 am India Standard Time). What followed was a hospitality unexpected, a love unfathomable. From the Uber driver who took us to the hotel to the “Kaali-Peeli” (taxi) and even the tuk-tuk driver. Everyone was kind. Even though the summer sun was out for its show-off party, the A/C was properly equipped for the tantrums. Mumbai was beautiful.

The reception from the WordPress community itself was beyond belief. People checked on me to ensure I arrived safely, to see if I needed anything, if all my affairs were in order. I saw so many people whom I had only chatted with digitally on Slack and now it was no longer just a text and image, but a face and a voice. It was a beautiful experience. There were people who lent me money because my VISA card was not working, and they had no fear that I may run off. That is the definition of a trustworthy, supportive community. That is the leverage WordPress gave me: friends that feel like family across the globe.

Indebted to the Pioneers

This moment of freedom and connection didn’t happen in a vacuum. Opportunities like the Open Horizons Scholarship are built on the backs of people who contributed before I even knew what WordPress was.

They are the people who wrote documentation.

They are the people who fixed bugs at 2 AM.

They are the people who organized WordCamps when the attendance was just their friends and cousins.

We, the beneficiaries, are enjoying the fruits of a tree we did not plant but we are now called to water it. That realization humbles me deeply.

Indebted… but Also Responsible

Being indebted is not just about saying “thank you” (though, sincerely, thank you). It comes with responsibility. The scholarship changed me. I became more careful, knowing that people see me and my actions; every little thing that I ignored was being seen. This was the true game changer.

My responsibility means four things:

Showing up fully: Being fully present in my role as an organizer and contributor.
Learning intentionally: Absorbing the expertise and experience of the global community.
Connecting genuinely: Building real relationships that bridge continents.
Bringing the knowledge back home: Ensuring this experience benefits the community in Uganda.

This is not just my win. It is for the community in Uganda. This global experience is a call to mentor and continue pushing WordPress to the ends of the world. It’s about how much you love. Let us echo WordPress everywhere.

We have seen how other people do it and it is now time for us to do it even in our own country and continent. We have set balls rolling and pots cooking. The Baganda say “Travel to see, return to ~~tell the Tale~~ Work.” We are now the people demanded of the fruits of the scholarship that was accorded.

To Anyone Watching From the Sidelines

Let me tell you something clearly: your time is coming.

You might feel like you’re doing small things, contributing here and there, attending events, helping one person at a time. It might even feel unnoticed.

But consistency has a way of speaking loudly when the time is right.

One day, you will open an email.

One day, your name will be called.

One day, you will be the one writing something like this.

And when that day comes, I hope you will also say:

“I am indebted”.

To everyone who has been part of my journey: mentors, friends, community members and everyone, thank you. Truly.

And to the WordPress community: thank you for being a place where someone from Uganda can dare to dream globally… and actually get there.

Now let me go and start checking passport expiry dates properly, because you never know i may now get a chance to Shake Matt’s hand

Moses Cursor Ssebunya

Grateful. Growing. Going.

Ebbanja: Ekirooto kya Uganda ekyagenda e Buyindi

Wuuno Moses nga asoma emboozi ye

Wabaawo ekiseera mu bulamu lw’otuula wansi, n’omagamaga n’omala ganyeenya mutwe nga tokikkiriza. Ebiseera wewebuliza, “Naye ddala ono nze?”

Kino kyekimu ku biseera ebyo.

Ebbanja oba okubanjibwa olumu kikwanagananyizibwa ku nsimbi oba ssente, ebbanja ery’okusasula. Naye ate waliwo ekika kye bbanja ekirala, okugenza nga kyempulira kakano: Okuwulira okusiima okusukkiridde oba okuwuulira nga kikukakatako olw’okuganyulwa oba obuyambi oba okusasirwa okunji kw’oba ofunye. Bwenti bwembulira olwaleero ku kibiina eky’ensi yonna ekya bakozesa WordPress (Global WordPress Community). Eno si alipoota ya mbalirira, wabula kusiima era nga nzikiriza awatali kubuusabuusa nti obulamu bwange, omwoyo ogw’obumu era ne ddembe okutuuka mu buli ggwanga byagulibwa, ssi na nsimbi naye na kusasira.

Mpandiise emboozi eno eri bannange abaloota ewaka ewaffe mu Uganda. Eri ggwe akyeezuula, atamanyi “Plugin” kyekitegeeza. Eri omuwandiisi wa code asomera ku butambi mu matumbi budde. Eri ggwe wenna akkiriza nti entimbe z’ensi yonna “z’abalala”. Si kituufu. Luno lwe lugero lwaffe era nga lusimbuddwa munda mu kinyusi kya WordPress. Okuva mu kubuusa buusa nga Tomasi paka ku bukelembeze obukulu mu WordPress Community.

Okumala ebbanga eddeme, enkolagana yange ne WordPress yali ya byanfuna. Nga ekikozesebwa okuzimba ‘ebibanja ku mitimbagano’ – websites, engeri y’okukola ku kasente okwebeezaawo. Ebya ekibiina kya bakozesa nga nyongereza era nga sibifaako, okugeza nga okuddukirayo nga nsanze obuzibu, nga emboozi za “jjako ozeeko”. Naye olw’ensonga eno abantu banji bazze n’ebiboozi bya wattuuyo nga WordPress bwe yaffa era naziikibwa era nga ebiboozi byonna, nga sibituufu.

WordPress teri ku kuzimba bibanja; bantu. Abantu abaddala ababeerawo, abagabana, abalagirira era abaggulawo enziji zotamanyi nako nti weeziri.

Era nga bwenyinyonyodde jebuvuddeko, sinze eyali akkiriza nyo. Nalina okubuusabuusa kwange are nga neekengera nnyo. Natandika okukozesa WordPress kubanga mukwano wange yampita okujja ngezese ndabe nga ebintu bwebiri, tewali kyannyo. Bwenatandika okukozesa WordPress, obulamu nebutandika okukyuukan kati laba ntuuse ne ku ddaala eddala. WordPress esigala ensika nga enyingiza munda.

Software, Abantu (Ekibiina), famire (mu Uganda tujiyita famire kubanga tulina engeri jetwelabiriramu, okudduukirira nga waliwo afunye ekyetaago, n’enkolagana). Kati olwo nga nakamala okugenda mu nsisinkano (Meetups) n’enkungaana (WordCamps) nga ziizo, mukwano gwange yansaba njogere mu WordCamp jeyali akulembeddemu abategesi ate awo obulamu bwange ne bukyuuka neera.

Kyaali kirungi nnyo bwenatandika okwenyigira mu bibiina. Natandika okwogera mu Meetups ne WordCamps wano kubutaka ne’bulaya naye nga sirowoozangako nti nyinza okuba kubategesi ba WordCamp ya Ssemazinga.

WordPress yakyuusa engeri jendabamu abantu n’engeri jeneenyigiramu yakyuuka. Nasisinkana abasiimira ddala ne bwekaba katono.

Olugendo lw’okuva mu kubuusa bussa mpaka kuku lungamya abategesi ba WordCamps kali kabuguumirize akanjolesa amaanyi ga community eno. Amaanyi amatono, meetups, okutendeka n’obuntu obulala lala bwakola nga amakulu. Community ya WordPress yantuusa wala, okutuusa okujaguza olugendo lwe nnaliko. Ekirooto ekyatuuka e Mumbai.

Ekirooto kyokutegeka WordCamp ya ssemazinga kyali mu kko naye nga era kyewala nga kirinaanye obutasoboka. Bwennalaba okuyita okwewandiisa kwa’baagala okutegeka WordCamp eno, nendaba akakisa okuteekesa mu nkola byonna bye nnali nkola mu community.

Nakimanya nti tekijja kuba kyangu era nti omusalaba gujakuba munene naye nga nange ndimumalirivu. Namalirira okugwetikka omusalaba guno. Ate era nnali sikiwa nga bayinza okunzikiriza kubanga abalala baali banganye. Nnali mwetegefu ku buli kyebanangamba, okunzikiriza oba okungaana naye ate era nnali mwetegefu okuteekamu amaanyi gange gonna.

Okusoomoza ne kujjirawo nga kulimu okutambula. WordCamp bali bajiyita WordCamp Asia 2026, yali yakubeera Mumbai mu buyindi. Ekirowoozo kya paasipooti yange okukubwaamu stamp ya India kwali nga kuloota. Era nasaba nga ngumidde ku kimu, “Njakukolera ku mukutu (mutimbagano)”.

Kati mu yintavyu yabategesi, omusoyisoyi yeetololeranga ku kibuuzo kyekimu: “Onaasobola okujja e Mumbai?”

Amazima gennyini nga nkimanyi ssisobola. Era nawozanga kimu emiwendo j’olugendo minji sijja kujisobola naye nja kukola buli kyenninna okukola ku yintaneti. Obudde n’amaanyi nali neetegese okubiwaayo naye ensimbi ezintwala ebulaya nga mpitirivu obunji.Ekizibu kyokutambula nga kinnemye okusalira amagezi naye ate nga njagala nnyo okubeera ku tiimu.

Mu zimu ku meeting zetwabeeranga mu nga abategesi, naweebwa akayunzi (link) k’okusaba sikaala jebayita Open Horizons Scholarship okuva mu Automattic.

Bwenasoma omulamwa gwabwe, mwanattu amagezi negajja. Nga omulamwa gugamba nti, Egenderera okw’ongera obusobozi bwabantu abajja mu mikolo ja wordPress nga ewaayo obuyambi bwe’simbi eri ba contributor (ffe) abava mu bitundu ebitakiikiriddwa bulunji, ebitalabibwa, oba ebirina obutasobola obutali bumu. Kino kyawandikirwa ku lwange, ku lwaffe.

Ne suubi lyonna n’Okukiriza, najjuzaamu ekiwandiiko n’eninda. Nga nsaba nti bana nnonda, nga nsaba nti kino ekirooto ekipya kinaafuuka ekyaddala. Olugero lwaakyuukira wano, obusobozi bw’okutambula bwali buzze.

Nga wayiseewo akaseera mpaawo kaaga, nafuna email ekakasa nti nnali nnondedwa. Nabuli kati, kikyawulikika nga email eyo j’osoma emirundi n’emirundi okukakasa nti sibufere. Omanyi ezo email joosoma nga etandika ne “Tukuyozaayoza” n’okebera ajisindise emirundi nga essatu nga omutima tegunkkiriza; essanyu

Nawuniikirira, Nakyamuka, Neebaza Katonda

Okusasulirwa kuno tekwali bubeezi ku kulinnya nyonyi kugenda Mumbai; kwali kulabikirwa kwokusumula emikisa j’okufuluma eggwanga. Kyalai kijjukizo nti mu kifo ekimu, waliwo eyalaba omugaso mu kyenkola.

Obulamu bwange bwaakyuuka, engeri jentambula yakyuuka, n’enjogera yakyuuka, engeri jendabamu ebintu yakyuuka, buli kimu kyaakyuuka. Sikaala yanfula wansi yonna. Sikyaali mutegesi wa mikolo jawaka, kati ndi mutegesi wa mutindo gwa Nsi yonna.

Okugenda ku WordCamp ennene kyali kirowoozo ky assanyu nyo jendi naye jendi, kyatandika n’akatabo akaliina essuubi linji okusinga stamp zamawanga.

Awo ne tugenda mu ntalo za Visa ya Buyindi.

Amazima ga Katonda, Visa teyali nyangu, naakamu nakeddagala. Nagaanibwa; sigumu, si ebiri, si essatu. Buli mulundi nga banziramu negonjebwa n’obubaka obugamba nti “Si kumulundi Guno”

Buli mulundi gwandeetera okwebusa buusa:

Kirabika sibyange,oba nsigale ewaka.

Naye waliwo ekyasinga okunkyamula wakati mu kugaanibwa. Buli lwenagezaako, nga njiga, mbuuza ebibuuzo n’okwongera okutegeera buli kimu bwekikola… Natandika okuyamba aballa.

Emikwano jatandika okumbuuza:
“Bro, wakola otya?”
“Wakozesa biwandiiko ki?”
“Baagala ki kyenyini?”

Naye nga nze, gwe bamma visa nze mpa abalala amagezi agafuna. Nensoma mu kusaba kwabwe, nengabana ebyookuyiga. Ne mbawa ebyebuziba ba agent ne website bye zitaabawa.

Nkweewunyise? Munnange bonna ne bafuna, mu budde, nga mwemuli n’eyamukyaala wnage.

Naye nga nze kagezi munnyu wabwe, nkyaabonabona okufuna eyange.

Obulamu busesa, buli gwenagambako nga aseka

Naye ku mulundi ogwokuna… neyitamu.

Akamesegi kajja nga kanjawulo. Tekankyamula bukyamuzi kyokka. Kanzikakanya. Kali kaama akantegeeza nti “Tewali mulalu okulemerako”

Okusimbula

Okwetegekera okusimbula kwali nga kwetegekera kibuuzo kyotasomeredde bulunji.

Okusiba engugu nakyo kyali kirala. Bwopanga, bwopangulula, jjamu bino, bizzemu notandika nokwebuuza oba engoye ezo zonna ozeetaaga (Amazima gali nti tomanya kinaabawo)

Awo ne tudda ku kisaawe

Bannange ekisaawe sikya banafu ba mitima. Okutambula, okukebera. Bano ba ate “dda ebbali..” Okutambula nga wegumya kumbe otya okuseerera.

Naye akaseera akaddala?

Okutuula mu nyonyi.

Omusipi nga ngutaddeko, omutima nga gukuba, ebirowoozo nga bitambula.

Awo yinjini newuluguma… enyonyi neetandika okutambula

Mpola mpola, kasoobo nga emisinde bwejeyongera mu kaseera mpawo nkaaga nga twesozze obwengula.

Nentunulako wabweeru we dddirisa nendaba nga Uganda egenda efunda.

Mukaseera ako wenzuuliira:

Omuziziko gugudde.

Ekyaali kiwulikika nga ekizibu nga kati kigenda mu maaso mu buliwo. Tewakyali kufuumitiriza. Tekyali bya luliba lumu, lwali lutuuse: Abange sosolya bwatafa, Nali ku lyengede nga nsolobeza.

Okuwulira nga Olabiddwa

Okulabibwa tekuwaawaala. Era tekubeera ku bantu kukubira mungalo buli kiseera.

Olumu kuba kwa kimpowooze.

Mukisa gw’oba oweereddwa.
Mu nziji ezeggula nga tozikase.
OKuzuula nti amanyi go, okwewaayo, n’okubeerawo kwo bya mugaso.

Jendi, okulabika kulinga olugendo luno.

Okuva mu kubonabonera visa… paka ku kujifuna
Okuva mu kuyamba abalala okuyitamu… mpaka ku kutuuka ku buwanguzi bwange
Okuva mu kwebuuza naye nange mbajjaamu…mpaka ku kwanirizibwa ku miwaatwa eminene

Tekyaali kya mbgirawo, kya zimbibwa mpola mpola mu mitendera okumala akabanga

Era kati, nga bwenyingira mu kunyumirwa, mbyettisse byonna wamu nange: okugaanibwa, ebyokuyiga, okuwangula okutono, abantu bennayamba mulugendo lwange.

Kubanga mu nkomerero, tekiri bubeezi ku kutambula

Kiri ku kukula

Kiri ku kulemerako

Kijjukizo nti ebiseera ebimu… okukerewa si kugaanibwa
Kuba kweetegeka

Era akaseera ko bwekanajja, ojja kumanya nti kino kyli kikusinga obunene.

Munnange siikulwiseeyo nga tuli Mumbai, twaatuuka kumakya (saawa kkumi ez’omumattuluttulu ~ 4am). Munnange awo ne balyooka batwaaniriza nga bwetutaasuubira, okwagwala okuta nnyonnyoleka. Okuvira ku mugoba we mmotoka eya tutwaala ku wooteri jetwali tulins okusula mpaka ddala wansi ku wa masanda (tuku-tuku). Bannange nga buli omu wakisa. Nga ku mbaga bwekutabula musiiwuufu, omusana gwo tegwali gwa kisa era gwasiibanga mu pereketya naye nga n’omuyindi A/C ajiwadde emirimu. Mumbai yali mbalagavu.

Ate bwekyaatuuka ku bannaffe mu community ya WordPress ne gujabagira, batwaniriza n’essanyu lya mwoki wa gonja. Abantu nga bankeberako, okukakasa nti natuuse bulunji, oba nga nina kye neetaaga, oba nali nteredde ntende. Nalaba abantu banji, abamu ku bbo nga twaali twakoma kunyumya ku mikutu jino ji mukwanira wala ne mesegi za slack pepo ne WhatsApp. Kakano nga tetukyeetaaga kubeera ku ssimu wabula maaso ku maaso era nga mboota buliro. Waliwo abampola ssente kubanga kaadi yange eya banka yali eremye, nga tebatidde nti oba nadduka. Kino kyebayita obwesige, okuwaniriragana nga. Gano ge maanyi WordPress geyampa: emikwano ejiringa abooluganda ebusukka mayanja.

Ebbanja olwabaatandika

Akaseera kano akeddembe tekakolebwa mu muwulenge. Emikisa nga Open horizons Scholarship jizimbibwa ku migongo j’abantu abaawaayo nga sinnaba na kumanya WordPress kye ki.

Bano be bantu abawaayo obuwandiike

Abaaterezza ensobi ku munnana ogwekiro

Abategeka WordCamps nga abakise baba kumpi banju yo

Kati ffe abafunyeemu, tweyagalira ku bibala eby’omuti gwetutaasimba. Naye kaakano tuyitiddwa okugufukiirira, Okutegera kino kyongera okuzikkakkanya

Ebbanja… Ery’obuvunanyizibwa

Okusiima tekiri bubeezi ku kugamba “Weebale”. Kijja n’obuvunanyizibwa. Sikaala eno yankyuusa. Natandika okufaayo enyo, nga mmanyi nti bandaba era obikolwa byange; buli katono ke nnayisaamu amaaso bakalaba.

Obuvunaanyizibwa bwange butegeeza ebintu bino bina (4):

Okweweerayo ddala: Okubeera mu bujjuvu mu kifo kyange nga omutegesi oba ayongerako.
Okugenderera okuyiga: Okufuna obukugu n’obukenkufu okuva mu community ya WordPress
Okukwatagana mu mazima: Okuzimba enkolagana ezaddala okuyunga zi ssemazinga
Okukomyaawo amagezi gano ewaka: Nina okukakasa nti banna Uganda baganyulwaamu.

Kuno si kuwangula kwange, Kw community ya Uganda nga ekitole. Byennayiga ebulaya mulanga gwa kuyigiriza balala n’okwongerayo WordPress mpaka ku nsonda z’ensi. Kisinziirira ddala ku njagala joyagalamu. Tutuuse oeddoboozi lya WordPress buli wamu.

Tulabye engeri abalala bwebakola era kaseera naffe tukole u nsi yaffe ne ssemazinga.Tutandise ebintu kamaala. Ffe a Baganda tugamba; okutambula kulaba okudda ~~kunyumya~~ kukola. Kati ate ye ffe bantu bebabanja ebibala bya sikaala

Eri yenna alabira ku bbali

Kankutegeeze kino buterevu; akaseera ko kajja

Oyinza okuba nga owulira okozeeko bitono. Nga wnyigiramu wano na wali, genda ku mikolo, yambako omuntu omu omu. Oyinza n’okuwulira nga atalabika.

Naye okulemerako kulina engeri jekuwoggana nga akaseera katuuse

Lunaku Lumu, ojja kuggulawo email

Lunaku lumu; erinnya lyo bajja kuliyita

Lunkau Lumu, ojja kuba ggwe awandiika emboozi nga eno

Era olunaku olwo bwelunajja, kansabe nti naawe onoogamba nti:

“Mpoleddwa Ebbanja”

Eri buli abadde ekitundu ku lugendo lwange: abawabuzi, emikwano, aba community na buli omu. Weebake nnyo. Amazima

Ne WordPress community: nwebale nnyo okubeera ekifo nga omuntu mu Uganda asobola okulotera ku mutendera ogusemba… era nentuuka na yo

Kati kanzireyo nkebere paasipooti egwaako ddi kubanga munnange tomanya nyinza okufina omukisa okusikako Ma.tt mu mukono

Moses Cursor Ssebunya
Nsiima. Nkula. Ngenda.

The post Indebted: The Ugandan WordPress Dream that Flew to Asia – Ebbanja: Ekirooto kya Uganda ekyagenda e Buyindi appeared first on HeroPress.

Open Channels FM: TYPO3’s Unique Structure and Global Expansion in Open Source CMS

Bob Dunn — Tue, 12 May 2026 08:32:00 +0000

TYPO3, an open-source CMS, is distinguished by its community-driven governance, robust support, and innovative technology. Version 14 focuses on enhancing user experience and expanding into North America.

Open Channels FM: Why Smaller Tech Meetups Hit Different

Bob Dunn — Tue, 12 May 2026 08:11:06 +0000

Smaller tech meetups foster deeper connections and meaningful discussions, enhancing learning and community, while larger conferences can still provide value if approached thoughtfully.

Gutenberg Times: WordPress 7.0 Source of Truth

Birgit Pauli-Haack — Tue, 12 May 2026 06:37:00 +0000

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…

Estimated reading time

19–29 minutes

4,552 words

Table of Contents

Changelog

Any changes are cataloged here as the release goes on.

May 20, 2026
- Added link to release post: WordPress 7.0 “Armstrong”
- Added link to WordPress 7.0 Field Guide
- Added links to What’s new for Developer post of April and May
May 12, 2026
- Switch the highlight grid graphic for the latest iteration
- made the Visual Revision section the priority item
- Removed real-time collaboration from the overview section.
May 8, 2026
- Real-time collaboration will not ship in WordPress 7.0 and the feature has been removed from this post.
- Results: Real Time Collaboration performance testing analysis
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:

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

Furthermore, WordPress 7.0, entails:

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

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

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)~~ is May 20, 2026

WordPress 7.0 “Armstrong”

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, April, and May
WordPress 7.0 Field Guide

Assets

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

Priority items for WordPress 7.0

Visual Revisions^[all]

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

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

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

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:

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:

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.

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).

JSON

{
    "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:

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

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:

JSON

{
  "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

WordPress.org blog: WordPress 7.0 Release Candidate 3

Amy Kamala — Fri, 08 May 2026 18:18:48 +0000

The third Release Candidate (“RC3”) for WordPress 7.0 is ready for download and testing!

Reaching this phase of the release cycle is an important milestone. As always, testing remains crucial to ensure that everything in WordPress 7.0 is the best it can be.

You can test WordPress 7.0 RC3 in four ways:

Plugin	Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a WordPress install. (Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream.)
Direct Download	Download the RC3 version (zip) and install it on a WordPress website.
Command Line	Use this WP-CLI command: `wp core update --version=7.0-RC`3
WordPress Playground	Use the WordPress Playground instance to test the software directly in your browser. No setup is required – just click and go!

Please continue checking the Make WordPress Core blog for 7.0-related posts in the coming weeks for more information.

What’s in WordPress 7.0 RC3?

Want to look deeper into the details and technical notes for this release? Take a look at the WordPress 7.0 Developer Notes. For technical information related to the 143+ issues addressed since RC2, you can browse the following links:

Closed 7.0 WordPress Core Trac tickets since March 26, 2026
7.0 Gutenberg commits since March 26, 2026

Note: Real Time Collaboration will not be included in the 7.0 release and will be re-evaluated during the 7.1 release cycle. Because of this, this RC3 version is no longer considered a “new Beta 1”.

How you can contribute

Get involved in testing

Testing for issues is crucial to the development of any software. It’s also a meaningful way for anyone to contribute. Your help testing the WordPress 7.0 RC3 version is key to ensuring that the final release is the best it can be.

This detailed guide will walk you through testing features in WordPress 7.0.

For those new to testing, follow this general testing guide for more details on getting set up.

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

Update your theme or plugin

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

Thanks for continuing to test your themes and plugins with the WordPress 7.0 beta releases. If you haven’t yet, make sure to conclude your testing and update the “Tested up to” version in your plugin’s readme file to 7.0.

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

Test on your hosting platforms

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

Thank you to the Hosts who helped test variations of new RTC architecture: Kinsta, Bluehost, GoDaddy, WordPress.com, XServer, and Ionos, and to the hosts who participate in distributed testing regularly.

Want to test WordPress on your hosting system? Get started with configuring distributed hosting tests here.

Help translate WordPress

Do you speak a language other than English? ¿Español? Français? Русский? 日本語? हिन्दी? বাংলা? मराठी? ಕನ್ನಡ? You can help translate WordPress into more than 100 languages. This release milestone (RC3) marks the hard string freeze point of the 7.0 release cycle.

An RC3 haiku

By the tides of sea,
where wind moves gently through trees,
sprouts up RC3.

Props to @desrosj, @peterwilsoncc for proofreading and review.

Open Channels FM: Building Business Fortitude and Creativity in Digital Marketing

Bob Dunn — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:18:37 +0000

This episode of Open Channels FM emphasizes fortitude in business, highlighting tenacity, creativity, and resilience as key to breaking through digital noise and getting noticed, with practical advice.

WordCamp Central: WordCamp Kampala 2026: Tech for Social Good in a Rapidly Evolving Digital World

Joan Logose — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:15:45 +0000

WordCamp Kampala 2026 returns as a gathering of the region’s WordPress community, bringing together developers, designers, content creators, entrepreneurs, educators, and tech enthusiasts for two days of learning, collaboration, and impact. Organized by the WordPress Kampala Meetup, this community-driven event continues to grow as a key platform for knowledge sharing and innovation within Uganda’s evolving digital landscape.

As part of the global WordCamp program, WordCamp Kampala is more than just a conference. It is a space where people come together to exchange ideas, build connections, and explore how WordPress and related tech can be used to solve real-world problems. Each year, the event is shaped by a theme that reflects both local needs and global trends. In 2026, that theme is “Tech for Social Good.”

This year’s theme speaks directly to the moment we are in. Technology is evolving at an unprecedented pace, with artificial intelligence transforming how websites are built, how content is created, and how digital products are managed. These rapid changes present both opportunities and challenges. For many in the WordPress ecosystem, the questions are becoming more urgent: What skills matter most in this new era? How do we adapt to AI-driven tools while staying relevant? And most importantly, how do we ensure that technology continues to serve people in meaningful ways?

WordCamp Kampala 2026 responds to these questions by shifting the focus beyond efficiency and automation toward purpose and impact. “Tech for Social Good” emphasizes the responsible use of WordPress and emerging technologies to create inclusive, accessible, and sustainable digital solutions. It is a call to action for the community to think beyond building websites, and instead consider how those websites and tools can improve lives, support education, and empower underserved communities.

The event will feature a range of talks, workshops, and interactive sessions designed to equip attendees with both practical skills and forward-looking insights. Participants will explore topics such as web development, content strategy, digital accessibility, and the integration of AI into WordPress workflows. More importantly, they will engage in conversations about ethics, sustainability, and the human side of technology, ensuring that innovation does not come at the cost of inclusivity.

A key highlight of WordCamp Kampala 2026 is the Contributor Day, where attendees have the opportunity to actively participate in the global WordPress project. Whether contributing to code, documentation, translations, or community support, participants move from being consumers of technology to contributors shaping its future. This hands-on experience not only builds skills but also strengthens the spirit of open-source collaboration that WordPress is built on.

Equally impactful is the Do-Action initiative, which brings the theme of social good to life. During the Do-Action, participants will collaborate to build or improve websites for differently abled schools and educational institutions. This initiative focuses on mentorship, skill transfer, and sustainability, ensuring that the benefits extend far beyond the event itself. By working on real projects that serve real communities, attendees experience firsthand how technology can be used as a force for positive change.

What makes WordCamp Kampala unique is its strong sense of community. The event is powered by volunteers who dedicate their time and energy to create a welcoming and inclusive environment. It is a space where beginners feel encouraged to learn, professionals feel inspired to share, and everyone feels part of something bigger. This collaborative spirit is what transforms WordCamp from a typical tech event into a meaningful community experience.

Beyond the sessions and activities, WordCamp Kampala 2026 offers valuable opportunities for networking and connection. Attendees will meet like-minded individuals, potential collaborators, and industry leaders, building relationships that often lead to new projects, partnerships, and career growth. These connections are a vital part of the WordCamp experience, helping to strengthen the broader tech ecosystem in Uganda.

As technology continues to evolve, events like WordCamp Kampala play an important role in helping communities adapt and thrive. They provide a space to ask difficult questions, explore new ideas, and collectively shape the future of the web. By focusing on “Tech for Social Good,” WordCamp Kampala 2026 ensures that this future is not only innovative but also inclusive and impactful.

Ultimately, WordCamp Kampala 2026 is about people. It is about volunteers giving their time, speakers sharing their knowledge, and attendees supporting one another as they navigate a rapidly changing digital world. It is about using technology not just to build, but to uplift, empower, and create lasting change.

As the community gathers in May 2026, WordCamp Kampala stands as a reminder that the true power of technology lies not in the tools themselves, but in how we choose to use them.

Do not miss the opportunity to learn, connect, and be part of a community using WordPress to create real impact. We hope to see you at WordCamp Kampala 2026.

Be part of the movement. Get your ticket to WordCamp Kampala 2026.