Hi, there 
this week, you’ll find a great mix of new releases, new tools, new plugins and events.
Outside the WordPress sphere I signed up for the FediForum Un-Workshop, an event bringing together people who will discuss obstacles and ideas on growing the Open Social Web. It’ll be a three-hour virtual event on March 12, 2026. It’s on the same day as Human Made’s WP:26 event, though.
I hope you enjoy this week’s edition and I wish you a great weekend!
Yours, 
Birgit
Human Made announced WP:26, a virtual event on March 12th exploring where WordPress is heading this year. You’ll hear from Mary Hubbard (WordPress executive director), speakers from Pantheon, Yoast, News UK, and PMC on topics like hybrid CMS architectures, agentic AI systems, and the CMS as orchestration layer. Following last year’s WP:25 with 700+ attendees, this one targets digital leaders, architects, and teams betting on WordPress long-term—registration is open now. It’s free and will be recorded, I reckon.
WordCamp Asia communication team is publishing great content to get ready for the event: Tickets are still available, Sponsorships as well and you can learn more about Mumbai, Indian culture and food. The WordCamp will take place between April 9 and 11, 2026. The first rounds of speakers are announced, too. Will I see you there? It would be wonderful to meet you! You are welcome to use my public calendar to schedule a meeting.
If WordCamp Asia is not on your radar, check out the WordCamp calendar for in person or educational event closer to you or on a different date.
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
WordPress 6.9.1 RC1 is now available. Led by Aaron Jorbin and Aki Hamano, the final release is planned for February 3, 2026. You can test using the Beta Tester plugin, WP-CLI, or a direct download. This maintenance release addresses bugs introduced in 6.9, with 23 Core fixes and 25 Block Editor fixes. Notable corrections include mail function errors, broken styling on the Add Plugins screen, widget accessibility issues, and several Interactivity API router fixes.
Gutenberg 22.5 RC 1 is also available for testing. The final release is scheduled for February 4, 2025. It will bring practical refinements for your editing workflow. You can now add custom CSS to individual blocks, and the Image block shows aspect ratio controls for wide and full alignments. List View gets more useful with full block titles and actual content displayed for list items. The release also stabilizes viewport-based block visibility and pattern editing, plus adds focal point controls for fixed Cover backgrounds and text column support for Paragraphs.
Mary Hubbard, executive director of WordPress open-source project, outlines the big picture goals for WordPress in 2026, signaling a return to three releases annually with WordPress 7.0 arriving at WordCamp Asia. You’ll see real-time co-editing move into Phase 3: Collaboration, client-side media processing graduate to Core, and new blocks like Tabs and Icon ship out of the box.
What I am most excited about is Hubbard’s emphasis on WordPress meetups as the primary front door to contribution and calls on Make teams to prepare clearer onboarding paths for incoming contributors. If there isn’t a WordPress Meetup in your city or region, the community team would love to help you start one. Before my year-end vacation I collaborated with co-organizers, and we revitalized the München WordPress Meetup. If you are in the city, join us on February 11 at 19:00. Or every second Wednesday of the month.
Anne McCarthy shares her latest round of exploring work in progress for WordPress 7.0, with beta 1 just weeks away. You’ll find hands-on looks at real-time collaboration transport layers, visual revisions, responsive block hiding, customizable navigation overlays, and the Cover block’s new video embed support. The Gallery block gains lightbox navigation, while Tabs and Breadcrumbs blocks continue maturing. McCarthy encourages you to test via WordPress Playground and to leave feedback on GitHub.
David Smith posted a call for testing customizable navigation mobile overlays targeting WordPress 7.0. This feature finally gives you full control over mobile hamburger menus using blocks and patterns—add branding, calls-to-action, images, and custom styling instead of being stuck with WordPress defaults. Overlays are saved as template parts, so themes can ship their own variations. Feedback is requested by February 9th, with a ready-to-go Playground instance for quick testing.
Your feedback would ddirectly shapes what ships in core—catching bugs, validating UX decisions, and surfacing edge cases before millions of sites receive the update. It’s one of the most impactful ways to contribute to WordPress without writing code, and the Test Team provides clear scenarios and templates for reporting issues. Give it a whirl, and learn first hand how this new feature works.
The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #125 – WordPress 6.9, Gutenberg 22.1 and Gutenberg 22.2 with JC Palmes, WebDev Studios
Ryan Welcher highlights the most important updates from the What’s New for Developer (January 2026) post in his latest video: Responsive Grids, PHP Blocks, Smarter Tools: WordPress in January.
Brandon Payton published wp-playground, a new AI agent skill that lets tools like Claude Code and Codex run WordPress via the Playground CLI for fast, repeatable testing. The skill auto-detects where your code belongs—mounting plugins or themes by recognizing file signatures—and reduces the “ready to test” moment from roughly a minute to a few seconds. You can install it via npx openskills install WordPress/agent-skills, and contributions are welcome at the new WordPress/agent-skills repository.
Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
Varun Dubey‘s comprehensive look at Gutenberg blocks in 2026 and WordPress development in the AI era walks you through how the block revolution has fundamentally shifted WordPress workflows. You’ll find practical guidance on when to choose patterns over custom blocks, explore emerging AI tools like WordPress Telex and Kadence’s inline generation, and understand why block metadata makes AI integration particularly powerful. Solid reading whether you’re building blocks or simply trying to keep pace with where WordPress is heading.
Troy Chaplin‘s Block Finder plugin gives you a dashboard metabox to quickly locate any core or custom Gutenberg block across your entire site. You can filter by post type, detect InnerBlocks nested within parent containers, and jump directly to editing posts containing specific blocks. Particularly handy if you’re managing large-scale migrations or hunting down where a particular block lives—one reviewer credited it with helping audit over 700 sites during a Classic-to-Gutenberg transition.
Weston Ruter released Post Date Block: Published & Modified, a plugin addressing a long-standing gap in the Date block. You can now display both publish and modified dates when they differ—with configurable prefixes, suffixes, and single-line or two-line layouts. The plugin uses the HTML Tag Processor to inject clean markup with proper microformat classes, and it’s now live on WordPress.org. Ruter positions it as a prototype until something similar lands in core, possibly via the upcoming Shortblocks feature.
On the WP Builds podcast episode 452, Nathan Wrigley chats with photographer and developer Michael Campanella about FolioBlocks, his block-based gallery plugin built from a working photographer’s perspective. You’ll hear about grid, justified, masonry, carousel, and the clever modular gallery that uses rows and stacks for visual priority. The plugin includes real-time filtering via comma-separated keywords, WooCommerce integration for selling prints, and image downloads—all with true visual parity between editor and frontend.
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
Kadim Gültekin’s Block Theme Color Switcher lets your visitors preview every style variation your block theme offers without you creating multiple demo sites. The plugin automatically parses theme.json and the styles folder to generate a floating frontend menu where users can swap color palettes instantly—no page reload required. Selections persist via localStorage, making it particularly useful for theme developers showcasing their work or sites offering accessibility options like high-contrast modes.
Johanne Courtright‘s tutorial on the real power of CSS Grid goes well beyond basic column setups into territory useful for theme builders. You’ll learn how minmax() creates flexible-yet-constrained layouts, how named grid lines with -start and -end suffixes unlock implicit areas, and how grid-template-areas lets you draw layouts in code. The full-width breakout pattern—achieving edge-to-edge elements without negative margins—offers a cleaner alternative to the margin-based approach WordPress core currently uses for wide and full alignments.
Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.
Ryan Welcher released WordPress Interactivity API Helper, a VS Code extension that brings intelligent autocomplete and validation to data-wp-* directives. You get context-aware suggestions for state, actions, and callbacks based on detected stores in your PHP and JavaScript files, plus warnings for duplicate directives and undefined namespaces with typo suggestions. If you’re building interactive blocks and find yourself constantly referencing the documentation for directive syntax, this extension should smooth out your workflow considerably. Go to Extension > Search for Interactivity and install.
Nick Diego announced WordPress Studio 1.7.0 with a major CLI upgrade that turns the command line into a full-featured companion for local development. You can now create, start, stop, and delete local sites entirely from the terminal, plus run WP-CLI commands without installing it yourself—Studio handles all the environment configuration. Diego walks through practical examples of pairing the CLI with AI coding tools like Claude Code and Cursor, where agents can spin up sites, run diagnostics, and deploy preview sites without you touching the Studio UI.
JuanMa Garrido‘s WPSmith brings the Laravel php artisan experience to WordPress, wrapping Playground’s CLI and WP-CLI into one streamlined tool. You can spin up disposable sites with wpsmith new, manage database snapshots via checkpoint and rollback commands, reset to fresh state, or seed test data—workflows that don’t yet exist in tool like Studio’s CLI. Scaffold shortcuts like forge:plugin and forge:block round out the toolkit. It’s designed for both developers and AI agents working entirely from the terminal.You can take a glimspe on how it works on YouTube.
WordPress and AI
On his personal blog, Jonathan Bossenger shared four WordPress apps he built with AI that he uses daily. You’ll find
- WP Debug for quick access to WordPress debug logs,
- WP SQLite for inspecting WordPress Studio databases,
- WP Mail for capturing local emails during development, and
- WP Shell for running PHP snippets.
Each scratches a specific itch without a steep learning curve—and in a fun twist, the post itself was largely AI-generated using the WP AI Client.
In his latest video “Benchmarking AI models for WordPress development” , Bossenger walks you through getting started with WP Bench, the AI benchmarking tool for WordPress development tasks. You’ll follow along as he clones the repository, sets up the Python environment, and configures API keys. The real fun comes when he pits his MacBook against an Intel workstation, testing local and cloud models including GPT, Claude Sonnet, Qwen Coder, and Deepseek Coder to see which delivers the best performance for WordPress coding workflows.
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