In this episode, Birgit Pauli-Haack welcomes Carolina Nymark back to discuss recent Gutenberg releases (22.3, 22.4, 22.5) and preview features coming in WordPress 7.0. Birgit Pauli-Haack shares her recovery journey and emphasizes the value of Carolina Nymark’s expertise. Carolina Nymark introduces herself as a long-time WordPress core committer and theme bundle maintainer, explaining her role in triaging, testing, and updating default themes.
They highlight key updates in the Gutenberg plugin and developer resources, such as enhanced plugin settings page creation, streamlined theme development using WordPress Playground and GitHub, and new tools for AI integration. The hosts dive into major Gutenberg enhancements: block visibility controls now let users tailor which blocks appear on various devices, custom CSS can be applied to individual blocks in posts, and image cropping has become more intuitive. Pattern editing is stabilized, improving content-only editing and preventing accidental layout changes.
Notable new features include a dedicated fonts page in the appearance menu, improvements to navigation (like mobile overlays and submenu options), a responsive grid block, enhanced breadcrumbs and tabs blocks, and greater customization in the query and image blocks. They touch on the growing importance of collaborative tools—real-time editing and notes within WordPress—and mention plans for visual revision comparisons.
Throughout, Birgit Pauli-Haack and Carolina Nymark stress community involvement, feedback, and testing as crucial for these features’ success. The episode wraps up with encouragement to try the new capabilities, share feedback, and a reminder to balance tech work with life outside the screen.
- Editor: Sandy Reed
- Logo: Mark Uraine
- Production: Birgit Pauli-Haack
Show Notes
Special guest: Caroline Nymark
WordPress Developer Blog
- What’s new for developers (February 2026)
- What’s new for developers? (January 2026)
- How to use DataForm to create plugin settings pages
- Streamlining block theme development with WordPress Playground and GitHub
- From Abilities to AI Agents: Introducing the WordPress MCP Adapter
Gutenberg Releases
- What’s new in Gutenberg 22.5? (04 February)
- What’s new in Gutenberg 22.4? (20 January)
- Gutenberg 22.3 (December 17)
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Transcript
The transcript is in the works.