Hi there,

After a four-week break - courtesy of a sciatic nerve with strong opinions - I'm happy to be back in by office chair and in your inbox. There is plenty to catch up on.

Beyond the updates on the new WordPress and Gutenberg versions, you'll find stories below from WordPress veterans on migrating to and working with block themes on client sites and dive into more complex theme solutions or

Don't let me keep you from your light summer reading.

Have a splendid weekend ahead!

Yours,
Birgit

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

The team around release lead Aaron Jorbin pushed WordPress 7.0.1 Maintenance release out the door to update millions of WordPress sites. The update covers 17 Trac tickets and 14 Gutenberg PRs. The full list is available in the RC 1 announcement post from last week.

In WordPress 7.0.1 Fixes Registration Spam, wp_kses() CSS Corruption, and 7.0 Admin Design Glitches, I cover the most important fixes for end users and developers of this release. You'll learn how the registration-spam loophole got closed, which admin design glitches were sanded off, and why developers can finally remove their wp_kses() CSS workarounds. Update your sites soon if auto-updates aren't enabled.

Ryan Welcher compiled What's new for developers (July 2026), and it's all about the 7.1 cycle getting real: Beta 1 lands July 15, final release August 19 at WordCamp US. You'll want to test responsive styling, the React 19 runtime flag, and Unicode email addresses now. Also on your radar: merge proposals for Core Abilities and Guidelines, the 40px component default, icons inheriting color, and Playground's MCP support.

The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #131 - Gutenberg Plugin Releases 23.1 - 23.3, Calls for Testing for 7.1 and more

Berislav "Bero" Grgičak announced what's new in Gutenberg 23.5, released July 1. The headliner: you can now drag the editor canvas to any width, with the device preview dropdown and resize handles working together for responsive editing. The experimental Media editor gains a magnified crop canvas, pixel-snapping handles, and Cover block support. Also notable: text shadows in Global Styles, flip and rotate controls for the Icon block, and a minimum WordPress version bump to 6.9.

For the next episode of the Gutenberg Changelog, I sat down with Ellen Bauer to chat about what's coming next for WordPress. We dug into the latest Gutenberg plugin releases (23.4 and 23.5) and the recent WordPress 7.1 update. Plus, we walked through some big merge proposal, like the Design System Theming. our excitement around responsive styling coming to WordPress. It's a packed episode full of news you won't want to miss! The episode will land in your favorite podcast app over the weekend.

WordPress 7.1 roadmap and more calls for testing

Anne McCarthy published Roadmap to WordPress 7.1., scheduled for August 19, 2026. Longstanding styling gaps are being tackled: responsive styling and interactive-state styling let you adjust blocks per viewport or on hover - no custom CSS required. You'll also find new Playlist, Table of Contents, and Tabs blocks, a smarter command palette, a Design → Identity screen, the admin bar inside the editors, a media editor modal, and expanded Unicode support for email addresses.

Also mentioned Real-time collaboration, Knowledge Guidelines, React 19 upgrade, Classic block deprecation have been punted since the posts came out. Beta 1 arrives July 15 and will settle which of the other Roadmap features are in and which will be punted to a future release.

The latest Weekend Edition listed three calls for testing. Meanwhile, two more came online:

Nikunj Hatkar, this year's team rep of the Core Test team, posted a call for testing responsive styling. You'll be able to style blocks differently for tablet and mobile right in the editor - no custom CSS or media queries needed. The underlying PR unifies the resizable canvas with the device-preview switcher. Fire up the linked WordPress Playground instance, walk through the four test scenarios, and share what feels intuitive or broken. Plugin and theme developers should test their canvas integrations, too.

Dennis Snell published a call for testing Unicode email addresses. With initial support merged, is_email() and sanitize_email() now accepting non-ASCII addresses like grå@grå.org, and validation aligns with the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) spec. You'll want to check your plugins and themes: the new WP_Email_Address class gives you structured access to local and domain parts, and a snippet lets you disable Unicode support until third-party integrations catch up.

Three Merge Proposals

Core contributors put together three merge proposal for new features to be added to Core for public comment.

Jorge Costa published a merge proposal to expand WordPress Core Abilities in WordPress, adding three read-only abilities covering settings, content, and users. Building on the Abilities API from 6.9, they give the AI Client real tools to call, so agents can understand your site's configuration, posts, and people. Settings and post types opt in through a dedicated flag, and management abilities are planned for a later WordPress version.

Greg Ziółkowski published a merge proposal for Guidelines built on Knowledge, a new custom post type headed for WordPress 7.1. Knowledge gives your site one shared home for standards, memories, and notes - with revisions, capabilities, and REST access built in. Guidelines is the first feature on top, letting you capture voice, tone, and per-block rules right where writing happens. Although, originally aimed at WordPress 7.1, in their latest comment, Anne McCarthy indicated that it needs to simmer some more before it's considered for inclusion in WordPress Core.

Andrew Duthie published a merge proposal for Design System Theming, bringing design tokens and a new theme component to WordPress. Built by the Gutenberg Components Team, it turns hard-coded admin styles into CSS custom properties, so your plugins and screens stay consistent and accessible. A color ramp tool generates harmonious, accessible scales from just two seed colors, and the user color scheme reaches the Site Editor - with dark mode on the horizon.

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

Anne Katzeff published a tutorial exploring the WordPress Cover Block for parallax scrolls. You'll learn how the Fixed Background setting turns a Cover block into a layered parallax effect - background, middle ground, and foreground text moving at different speeds. The post steps through nesting a second Cover block, switching which layer scrolls, and improving text readability with grouped backgrounds. A video tutorial rounds it out. She also demos her process in this YouTube video.

Carrie Dils shared a case study, One Header, Two Themes, on phasing a legacy Elementor site toward Full Site Editing without a rebuild or content freeze. Using ThemeSwitcher Pro to run two themes side-by-side, she built one shared header in a plugin that both themes render. You'll learn from five real-world snags - WooCommerce's hooked blocks, cascade conflicts, routing gaps, query-string bypasses - and why shipping the shared layer first de-risks everything after.

Gina Lucia compared WordPress block themes vs page builders on the Ollie blog. You'll get a clear-eyed walkthrough of what classic themes, page builders, and block themes each handle - scope, design control, performance, lock-in, and maintenance - with side-by-side tables. Her conclusion: block themes combine sitewide design control with visual editing natively, so you rarely need a page builder anymore, though migration costs and team habits can justify keeping one.

Elliott Richmond explained why he spent 16 months turning 400+ holiday cottages into WordPress blocks. The kate & tom's site moved from ACF flexible content to a native block theme, freeing the marketing team from waiting on custom widgets. You'll appreciate his candor: 10,590 widgets migrated via a purpose-built plugin, re-run against fresh production snapshots, with flaky conversions fixed by hand. Even untuned, PageSpeed jumped from 22 to 67.

Wes Theron published a video tutorial, How to Create and Edit Navigation Menus in WordPress, for anyone getting comfortable with block themes. In under ten minutes, you'll learn how to edit your menu with the Navigation block, add pages, posts, categories, and custom links, and build dropdown menus. Timestamps let you jump straight to the part you need - handy if dropdowns are the only thing standing between you and a finished header.

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

Henrique Iamarino shared how the Automattic Design team built a WordPress theme without ever opening Figma. You'll follow the making of Crafted, a production-ready theme created almost entirely in the WordPress Editor: Global Styles for typography and spacing, Create Block Theme to save edits to theme files, WordPress Studio for local review, and an AI assistant for finishing-touch hover CSS. His takeaway: the Editor is now a professional design surface.

Justin Tadlock explained how to dynamically load template parts in block themes on the Developer Blog. Instead of maintaining a pile of near-identical templates, you can hook into the render_block_data filter and swap a template part's slug on the fly - say, a different sidebar per post category. His walkthrough covers early returns, fallback behavior, and file setup, and the technique works for headers, footers, and banners, too.

AI and WordPress

Jeff Paul announced what's new in AI 1.1.0, the latest release of the canonical AI plugin. Two experiments headline, type-ahead text suggests inline ghost text as you write in the block editor, and key encryption secures your AI Connector API keys in the database. You'll also find smarter content readiness checks with locale-aware counting, more control over guest comment moderation, a new core/read-settings Ability, and a peek at 1.2.0 plans.

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

11 Jul 2026 1:37am GMT

David Snead, director of the Secure Hosting Alliance and a long-time Internet policy leader, shares his perspective on the complexities that emerge when technological solutions like age verification are implemented in the digital infrastructure space. Dave's reflection highlights how the push for more secure, regulated environments can unintentionally create barriers for vulnerable or less tech-savvy […]

10 Jul 2026 2:34pm GMT

HTML and XML are markup languages based on plaintext files. This means that any given character could be part of a syntax form (a tag, a comment, a character reference, etc…) or it could be representing itself the way it reads in the file literally.

Whenever a character might be ambiguous, both languages require explicit indication of the intent of the character. In HTML this occurs via escaping, while XML allows escaping or wrapping the content in a marked section, specifically a CDATA section.

These terms confuse me at times, especially since CDATA and CDATA sections are distinct forms of the same content, and it's easy to conflate each term. This post is here to disambiguate the terms, their meanings, and why they exist.

The punchline comes at the end, but the story is hopefully worth the read.

Markup and mixed content

One of the first jobs of a parser for any plaintext-oriented format is to determine if the next input character represents real text or is part of a syntax form that carries special meaning. If it's a syntax form we would call it markup, but if the characters are part of real text meant for display or rendering or reading then we call it data.

Anything that is not syntax is data.

The interpretation of the next character depends on the region of the document in which it's parsed. While the rules for syntax forms are complicated¹, this post will focus on the data forms.

PCDATA - "parsed character data"

May form: tags, comments, sections, character references, literal text.

Characters in this region could be data or could form the start of a new markup element. It's "parsed" because it needs parsing before determining what it represents.

The HTML specification renames this to Data, which is simpler and a bit harder to search for. In XML, however, it's used in a document-type definition (DTD). When an element may contain content - text - its data model must include #PCDATA. Otherwise the only characters allowable within that element are other elements, comments, and whitespace. XML documents are required to be valid SGML documents, so its own specification adopts the terminology from SGML's.

Those who have worked with DTDs might note that elements in XML may contain #PCDATA while attributes contain CDATA instead. First of all, the # is there only to make it explicit that PCDATA is referring to the reserved keyword, rather than a <pcdata> element. Secondly, there's a good reason for this, which is that attributes can only contain text - they can't contain other elements of markup. If an attribute value could contain a <span> element, for example, then the attribute value would need to be #PCDATA instead, but this is prevented by design.

PCDATA actually contains more than just literal text and elements. In addition to comments, processing instructions, and other node-like syntax, one important feature of PCDATA is the character reference. These make it possible to represent characters that would conflate with syntax (such as '<' - <) or which might be cumbersome to enter on a keyboard (such as '§' - §). When parsing, each character in these sequences neither creates an element nor displays as the text itself; rather, the entire sequence is parsed and translates into the character it refers to.

HTML pre-specifies a fixed set of named character references, but any Unicode code point may be referenced by its decimal or hexadecimal numeric index. While XML also allows referencing code points by their index², it only pre-specifies the five named characters which correspond to its main markup introducers: <, >, &, ', and ". In XML, any additional named character references are created through the DTD by defining entities.

CDATA - "character data"

May form: [character references], literal text.

If a character isn't markup, then it's character data, which means that it's representing its literal self or it's part of a character reference. Once the parser has entered this region it will not create markup elements.

CDATA is the most confusable kind of character data; this is because there are many kinds of CDATA that share the same name:

• XML attributes may contain CDATA, where character references are decoded.
• XML CDATA sections only contain CDATA, but character references are not decoded.
• HTML kind of has the same CDATA sections, but only in foreign elements (inlined SVG and MathML elements).
• SGML elements may be declared to have a CDATA content model, in which case all content until the appropriate closing tag is to be parsed as character data, where character references are not decoded.

CDATA sections contain only literal text

Many people are familiar with CDATA sections, but it took me far longer to understand them than my intuition led on. They are the vestige of SGML "marked regions" which tell the parser to handle a specific range of bytes in a special way. The CDATA section is one of those, which tells the parser to completely turn off until it reaches ]]>.

It had other marked sections, however, which served different purposes.

The IGNORE and INCLUDE sections may seem strange, since SGML already has comments, and INCLUDE effectively does nothing, but the sections can be marked by replaced entities, making for conditional inclusion which can be overwritten via command-line arguments when invoking the SGML parser.

XML only retained CDATA sections from SGML, while HTML never included them. They are useful because they are so easy to parse. All characters inside of them are to be treated as literal text, up until the first occurrence of the terminating ]]>. Unlike elements, the marked sections do not nest.

There are no CDATA sections in HTML

The Internet is full of discussions about the use of CDATA sections in HTML, but there are no such things, mostly. HTML itself is an amalgam of pure HTML and embedded SVG and MathML. Content inside of those embedded SVG and MathML elements is parsed differently, and within this "foreign content" there are CDATA section nodes.

When something which look like a CDATA section appears in an HTML document, it's transformed into a "bogus" HTML comment and considered a snippet of malformed markup. To make things more confusing, the parsing rules differ inside an HTML document for these regions depending on whether they are found within HTML elements or foreign elements.

• When a real CDATA section appears within SVG and MathML, it parses as in XML or SGML - everything is literal text until the nearest ]]>.
• When a malformed CDATA look-alike appears in an HTML element, it gets special treatment - the parser only turns off until the nearest >. This means that these sections end even without a closing ]]>, and when they do, all of their contained content disappears from the page.

That small difference confuses naïve parsers and is a regular source of bugs.

SGML contains CDATA regions outside of marked CDATA sections

SGML made it possible to define more kinds of content than XML does for a given element. For example, an element in SGML can be declared to have a CDATA content model, in which case the element itself behaves like a CDATA section. All characters after the opening tag are treated as literal text until the parser finds the nearest appropriate end tag3. XML rejected this ability because it increases the complexity of the parser and requires that every document also contains a full DTD when parsing. For example, if an element were declared to have CDATA content, then a <at> b would represent that literal string; on the other hand, if it were declared like any other normal element, it would have three children: "a ", the <at> opening tag, and " b".

These kinds of elements do exist in HTML, though a few were modified when HTML5 was standardized in 2008. Inside of the elements, the parser essentially turns off, which makes them easy to parse and can help avoid the need to extensively escape content. These elements are, of course, <script> and <style>4.

Were it not for the CDATA declared content model, every angle bracket and ampersand would have to be escaped in included JavaScript and CSS. In XHTML this was required, because it had no CDATA declared content model (since it was XML)⁵.

All text in XML is CDATA

Herein lies the most-confusing aspect of discussing CDATA - XML contains CDATA sections as well as CDATA as normal text. After parsing there is no distinction between <tag> and <![CDATA[<tag>]]> in the parsed content.

Many XML generators (or serializers) provide two mechanisms for creating text content: one wraps text in a CDATA section and leaves the text as it came (apart from avoiding including the terminating sequence); the other escapes syntax characters instead. While there are times where it would be appropriate to intentionally pick one over the other, a good library design would at least offer a third mechanism (if not only providing this third mechanism) which simply produces CDATA, itself determining when to wrap and when to escape⁶, and whether or not to produce chunks of wrapped text interspersed with chunks of escaped text.

The real difference between these two kinds of CDATA is purely presentational in the source document, as the XML snippet below only contains one text node, not two. Creating CDATA does not imply creating a CDATA section!

RCDATA - "replaceable character data"

May form: character references, literal text.

There's one more confusing designation for characters in the HTML and XML input streams: RCDATA. RCDATA is almost identical to CDATA, except that in contexts where CDATA does not decode character references and entities, RCDATA will decode them into CDATA. This is confusing, because in the context of an XML attribute, the CDATA designation in a DTD automatically implies that character references are decoded, unlike the CDATA sections in content.

To this end there are no RCDATA attributes, since character references are always decoded inside attribute values. The RCDATA declaration is like the SGML CDATA content declaration: all characters following the opening tag for this element will be treated as text until the nearest matching closing tag (the difference being only that character references are recognized and decoded).

It's worth remembering that XML rejected the CDATA content type because of how it complicates parsing, and it also rejected the RCDATA type. On the other hand, RCDATA was incorporated into HTML, but statically so. HTML has no configurable DTD, but in its specification two elements contain RCDATA content:

• TITLE
• TEXTAREA

While it's easy to comprehend the way that <textarea> works, and that's probably because we are used to entering text into one on a web page, the behavior of <title> is consistently confused in all manner of programming languages, platforms, and HTML-parsing code.

The TITLE element only contains character data - it cannot contain other markup. The parsing is among the easiest sections of an HTML document to parse: once the <title> opening tag is detected, the parser can capture everything until the nearest </title> closing tag. Everything it captured is literal text, after decoding character references.

This complicates content management systems like WordPress which allow posts to have HTML in their post titles, because a page can show richly-formatted article titles which cannot be represented in the browser tab's label, and care must be taken to extract the plaintext content from that HTML before display in those contexts.

Coda

HTML and XML both speak about different kinds of characters in their source documents and content models, which traces from the complicated ways that SGML documents could be constructed. SGML's complexity almost always stems from the central idea that computers should do extra work to remove the hassle for humans to enter structured content in plaintext documents.

HTML, inspired by SGML, adopted some of the names and mechanisms for parsing those regions of text in distinct ways, but codified a single parsing standard independent of SGML. When XML was later developed, it was meant to form a simplified subset of SGML. This subset flipped the tradeoffs, leaning on humans performing extra work to remove the hassle for computers to parse structure in plaintext documents. For these text forms, this meant rejecting a few of the constructs while retaining others.

This is also another demonstration of how balanced tags are not enough to have well-behaved HTML with a naïve parser. A well-formed XML document may be parsed with a terse PERL script and regular expression, but HTML relies heavily on the context in which characters are found. Any HTML parser must know the special rules for each kind of element's content model.

In summary

• When it's unclear whether a character forms text or markup, that is PCDATA. Once parsed, there is no PCDATA anymore; it's either a form of DATA or MARKUP.
• All text nodes in HTML are "DATA."
• "CDATA" just means "character data" and means that after parsing, the content is text. It does not indicate whether character references are to be decoded or not; that comes from the region in the document, based on its context.
• There are no CDATA sections in HTML7.
• All text nodes in XML are CDATA, but only after being parsed.
• CDATA sections offer a convenient way to avoid escaping, but are indistinguishable from the equivalent escaped text.
• HTML contains two special RCDATA elements which only and always contain a single text node child: <title> and <textarea>. Everything until the closing tag will be parsed as text, even if it looks like markup.

This post is already long and still over-simplifies the picture. SGML is a rich and robust specification and includes NDATA and SDATA, HTML includes a latching PLAINTEXT parsing mode in which the rest of the entire document is parsed as literal character data, and there are other surprising goodies in how entities interact with the character mode.

Thanks for making it through to the end, or jumping directly here if you couldn't wait.

1. As an example, each part of a tag - its name, attribute names, attribute values - carries its own parsing rules. The same is true for comments, DOCTYPE declarations, and every other syntax form. ︎
2. XML only allows character references to the characters in its "character set," which is almost all Unicode code points, but excludes some control characters and U+FFFE and U+FFFF. ︎
3. Because SGML was designed to minimize the amount of necessary syntax, it's not necessary to have a full end tag for an open element, but that's a simple-enough model to understand the concept. ︎
4. The <style> element is straightforward, but the <script> element has its own complicated modification of the CDATA content model. It's mostly CDATA, but makes it possible to escape the closing tag so that very old pages won't break. HTML also applies this parsing mode for the <iframe>, <noembed>, <noframes>, and <noscript> elements (as well as for the deprecated <xmp> element), but these nominally should have no content inside of them (or shouldn't be used); applying the CDATA content model prevents creating other elements as their children. ︎
5. Frustratingly, in XHTML one must escape JavaScript and CSS in the page to avoid parsing failure, while in HTML one must not. This alone makes for a complicated stage in any reliable HTML/XHTML converter. ︎
6. Wrapping a language like HTML inside a CDATA section is a convenient way to represent the HTML visually and retain the ability to easily modify it, but entities present a problem. The serializer must either pre-translate the entity into its resolved character content, losing the macro-like behavior and its name; or leave the entity in place, thus nullifying it because it will not be recognized as an entity on parse. However, in such a situation, a serializer is free to terminate the CDATA section, append the entity, and open a new one to continue. ︎
7. As mentioned in the discussion about CDATA, embedded SVG and MathML elements can contain CDATA sections, but these are not technically HTML elements. ︎

10 Jul 2026 11:07am GMT

WordPress 7.0.1 is now available. As the first maintenance release of the 7.0 cycle, it's strictly a bug-fix release: every included ticket addresses either a regression introduced during 7.0 development or an issue intentionally deferred at the end of the cycle.

The release ships fixes for 17 core Trac tickets and 14 Gutenberg PRs. Because this is a maintenance release, sites with automatic background updates enabled will update to 7.0.1 automatically - everyone else should update as soon as possible. Here's what stands out for each audience.

Kudos to release lead Aaron Jorbin and his team for pushing this release over the finish line and getting it into hands of WordPress users quickly.

The most important fixes for end users

Registration page spam is shut down (#63085). The account registration page could be abused to send "Login details" spam emails from your site. This is arguably the most impactful fix in the release for anyone running a site with open registration - it protects both your users' inboxes and your domain's email reputation.

The 7.0 admin reskin gets its rough edges sanded off. WordPress 7.0's refreshed admin design shipped with a handful of visual glitches that this release cleans up:

• Form elements are now standardized in the mobile viewport (#64999)
• The image editor's scale and crop inputs no longer mismatch in size, and the info icon uses the new color scheme (#64937, #65428)
• The publish settings panel no longer crowds its primary action buttons together (#65286)
• The Media Library's loading spinner is properly aligned in the modal filter toolbar, and the search bar no longer jumps position after a search (#65275, #65296)
• A "black flash" that briefly appeared on wp-admin pages before the interface finished loading is gone (Gutenberg #78493)

Emoji behave correctly again. Two related fixes: the emoji detection script is once more printed in the admin (#65310), and certain characters are no longer incorrectly replaced by Twemoji images (#64318).

Accessibility improvements to the new revisions experience. The Visual History / Revisions feature introduced in 7.0 receives several accessibility fixes: focus now moves to the revisions slider when entering revisions mode, and changed blocks are marked with a CSS outline as a secondary, non-color indicator - important for users with low vision or color blindness (#65122, Gutenberg #77530, #78393, #79691).

The most important fixes for developers

wp_kses() no longer corrupts valid CSS (#65270). Since 7.0 RC4, wp_kses() could mangle legitimate background-image: url(…) declarations into a broken style=")" attribute. If your theme or plugin outputs inline background images through KSES-filtered content, 7.0.1 restores expected behavior - any workarounds you shipped can now be removed.

global-styles-inline-css can be dequeued again (#65336). Since 7.0, developers were unable to remove the global styles inline stylesheet. If your build pipeline or performance optimization strips this and re-serves it another way, that control is back.

PHP 8.5 compatibility fix in wp_get_attachment_image_src() (#64742). An incorrect array access triggered issues under PHP 8.5. If you're testing sites on newer PHP versions, this removes one blocker.

A removed Navigation function returns as a deprecated shim (Gutenberg #78484). block_core_navigation_submenu_render_submenu_icon() was removed in 7.0, breaking themes and plugins that called it directly. It's restored as a deprecated shim - but treat this as your migration notice, not a reprieve. Update any code that references it.

Editor state management fixes reduce false "unsaved changes" warnings. Two Gutenberg fixes matter here:

• controlled/mode block changes are now marked non-persistent (#79350), and
• related navigation entities are no longer dirtied during passive renders (#79000).

Together these should mean fewer spurious dirty states and a cleaner undo history - a quality-of-life improvement if you build with template parts and navigation blocks.

Block Visibility: "hide everywhere" keeps working after a block opts out of visibility support (#65389). If you register blocks that disable visibility support, previously hidden instances now stay hidden as expected.

How to update

You can update directly from Dashboard → Updates in your site's admin, run wp core update with WP-CLI, or download WordPress 7.0.1 from WordPress.org and install it manually. Sites that support automatic background updates for minor releases will begin updating on their own shortly.

The full ticket list is available in the release candidate announcement, Trac report 4, and the 7.0.x editor tasks board on GitHub.

What's next: WordPress 7.1

With 7.0.1 out the door, attention turns to the next major release: WordPress 7.1 is scheduled for August 19, 2026. To see what's planned for the release, check out the Roadmap to 7.1 on the Make WordPress Core blog.

10 Jul 2026 9:34am GMT

WordPress 7.0.1 is now available!

This minor release includes fixes for 31 bugs throughout Core and the Block Editor, addressing issues affecting multiple areas of WordPress including the block editor, admin ui, and media. For a full list of bug fixes, please refer to the release candidate announcement.

WordPress 7.0.1 is a short-cycle maintenance release. The next major version of WordPress will be 7.1; it is scheduled for release on 19 August 2026 at WordCamp US.

If you have sites that support automatic background updates, the update process will begin automatically.

You can download WordPress 7.0.1 from WordPress.org, or visit your WordPress Dashboard, click "Updates", and then click "Update Now". For more information on this release, please visit the HelpHub site.

Thank you to these WordPress contributors

This release was led by Aaron Jorbin, Brian Haas, Carlos Bravo and Estela Rueda.

WordPress 7.0.1 would not have been possible without the contributions of the following people. Their asynchronous coordination to deliver maintenance fixes into a stable release is a testament to the power and capability of the WordPress community.

Aaron Jorbin, Abdur Rahman Emon, Abhishek Kumar, Adam Silverstein, Adam Zieliński, Aditya Singh, Aki Hamano, Andrea Fercia, Andrei Draganescu, Andrew Serong, annezazu, Ben Dwyer, Brian Coords, Brian Haas, Carlos Bravo, cogdesign, Dan Luu, Daniel Richards, Darshit Rajyaguru, David Baumwald, Dennis Snell, Dhruvang21, Ella Van Durpe, Erick Wambua, Esteban, Estela Rueda, George Mamadashvili, Greg Ziółkowski, Himanshu Pathak, Hit Bhalodia, Huzaifa Al Mesbah, iflairwebtechnologies, James, Jarda Snajdr, Jb Audras, Joe Dolson, Joen Asmussen, Jon Surrell, Jonathan Desrosiers, Karthikeya Bethu, Khokan Sardar, Lucian R., luismulinari, Mahammad Darvishov, Manhar Barot, Marco Ciampini, Marin Atanasov, Maryam Sultana, Masum, Miguel Fonseca, Miroku, Mohammed Noumaan Ahamed, Mukesh Panchal, Mustafa Bharmal, Nik Tsekouras, Noruzzaman, Ozgur Sar, Peter Wilson, Presskopp, Rahul Kumar, ramonopoly, Riad Benguella, Rishabh Gupta, Roshni Ahuja, Sainath Poojary, Saksham Sharma, SAndrew, Scott Reilly, Sergey Biryukov, siliconforks, Stephen Bernhardt, Swanand M, Takashi Kitajima, Terence Eden, threadi, Tushar Patel, Umesh Nevase, WebMan Design | Oliver Juhas, Weston Ruter, Yogesh Bhutkar, Yusuf Mudagal

How to contribute

To get involved in WordPress core development, head over to Trac, choose a ticket, and join the conversation in the #core channel. Need help? Check out the Core Contributor Handbook.

Props to @jorbin for proofreading.

09 Jul 2026 5:33pm GMT

Tech feels wild and unpredictable, yet super empowering. Success now hinges on broad awareness and curiosity, not just deep specialization. Embrace the chaos.

09 Jul 2026 3:24pm GMT

Thirteen years ago today, I received my very first props for contributing to WordPress Core. If my WordPress contribution journey were a person, it would now be a teenager. It's pretty wild to think about, but I've now been contributing to the WordPress project in some way for a third of my life!

What is a "prop"?

In the WordPress open source project, community participants receive credit for contributing to a given change or deliverable by receiving "props."

Props should be given to all those who contributed to the final commit, whether through patches, refreshed patches, code suggested otherwise, design, writing, user testing, or other significant investments of time and effort. Usernames are parsed for the credits list and WordPress.org profiles.

WordPress Core Handbook

The names of all the contributors who helped make a specific release possible are collected in the weeks leading up and added to the Credits API, which powers the Credits page in the WordPress dashboard.

To date, I have been listed on the Credits page for 24 consecutive releases starting with 4.7, and 29 of the 35 releases overall since my first credited contribution in WordPress 3.6 "Oscar", alongside 224 other contributors.

Every year is a bit different than the last, but I can confidently say that this past year has been significantly different. What it means to develop software or contribute to open source is changing rapidly with advanced AI innovations seemingly every day combined with these tools being accessible to more people than ever before. But throughout all this, one truth holds strong: open source software is more important than ever.

Looking Back

It seemed only fitting for me to instruct AI to analyze my contribution activity over the last 365 days to try and find anything interesting!

Prompt

Today is the 13th Anniversary of my first credited contribution to the WordPress project. I try to write a blog post each year to mark the occasion.

I'm looking for ideas for this years edition. Please go and read all of my past posts (accessible here at this category feed https://jonathandesrosiers.com/category/contributing-anniversaries/feed) and give me 10-12 ideas for what to focus on this year. You can also look through the other content on my site for other ideas.

After you do that, I want you to look at the git history for the wordpress-develop and gutenberg repositories between July 8, 2025 and yesterday (July 7, 2026). I want you to parse the logs to summarize my activity and find some particular ways to analyze the data that are interesting.

Be creative! These posts are the most fun when I am able to find some unique insight into a year's worth of contributions.

Results

Your year 13 in numbers (Jul 8 2025 → Jul 7 2026)

The headline: 80 of your 119 core commits (67%) are "Build/Test Tools." Add Tests + General and it's ~80%. You spent year 13 as the plumber of WordPress - CI, build pipeline, dependency stewardship, release infrastructure.

The most interesting angles the data surfaced

1. The nocturnal committer. ~50 of your commits land between midnight and 4am. Tuesday (37) and Thursday (31) are your peak days; Saturday is nearly dead (3).
2. The month that didn't exist. January 2026: zero commits. March 2026: 40. Your cadence is a heartbeat synced to the 6.9 and 7.0 release cycles, not the calendar.
3. The June 30th ritual. You bumped Gutenberg's pinned hash seven times in a single day (v22.8.0 → v23.4.0) - a whole quarter of catching-up compressed into one sitting.
4. Supply-chain quiet work. Pinning full-length action SHAs, replacing abandoned third-party actions, migrating release logic to a GitHub App, ca-bundle updates - you spent the year hardening the software supply chain nobody thanks you for.
5. Keeping the ancient libraries breathing. lodash, underscore, backbone, getID3, Twemoji - you're the caretaker of WordPress's legacy vendored code.
6. Future-proofing the matrix. MySQL 9.5/9.6/9.7, MariaDB 12.1, PHP 8.5 (HEIF/HEIC) - you test tomorrow's platforms today.
7. A first, quietly historic commit: "Include example for disclosing AI usage" - you helped write core's early AI-disclosure norms.

10-12 ideas for the year-13 post

1. "The Plumber's Year: 67% of My Commits Were Infrastructure." Own the unglamorous. A love letter to build/test/CI work - the contributions that never show up in a release announcement but without which nothing ships. This is your strongest, most authentic angle.
2. "Confessions of a Nocturnal Committer." Fun, human, data-driven: your midnight-to-4am commit cluster, Tuesday/Thursday peaks, the dead January. Chart your year as a heartbeat and reflect on what it says about maintainer rhythms (and sustainability/burnout).
3. "216 Times." Companion to your 2024 props post, flipped: this year you received credit ~216 times in core (119 committed + 97 propped). Explore the two halves of a committer's fingerprint - the work you land yourself vs. the work you shepherd for others.
4. "The Boring Commits That Keep 40% of the Web Safe." The supply-chain security angle: pinned SHAs, abandoned-action replacement, the GitHub App migration, ca-bundle. Frame maintenance-as-security - timely and underappreciated.
5. "I Test the Future So You Don't Break in It." MySQL 9.7, MariaDB 12.1, PHP 8.5 - a piece on being the person who runs tomorrow's platforms against today's code, and why the test matrix is a form of care.
6. "The Commit I'm Proudest Of Was One Line About AI." Use "Include example for disclosing AI usage" as a springboard into how WordPress (and you) navigated AI's arrival in the contribution workflow in 2025-26. Very of-the-moment.
7. "Anatomy of a Revert." Six times this year you reverted your own or others' work. A candid, senior-contributor essay on why reverting is a feature not a failure - iteration, humility, and trunk stability.
8. "A Year in Dependencies." The stewardship story - lodash/underscore/backbone/getID3/Twemoji. What it means to be the caretaker of code written a decade ago that you can't just delete. Legacy as responsibility.
9. "Who I Built With." Refresh your collaborator lens for year 13: westonruter (24), jorbin (22), johnbillion (15), peterwilsoncc (14), wildworks (13)… Name the people behind the props lines and tell a story or two about the work you shared.
10. "The Shape of a Release Cycle, Drawn in Commits." Overlay your monthly commit counts on the 6.9 and 7.0 timelines - the March spike, the December bundled-themes push, the quiet stretches. Show readers what a maintainer's year looks like mapped to what shipped.
11. "Same Job, New Tools: Automating Myself Out of the Loop." Your Gutenberg PRs are almost all release automation - GitHub App auth, GHCR publishing, reproducible builds, Dependabot. A reflective piece on spending your labor building the machine that does the labor, and what that means for the next generation of contributors.

I haven't validated any of these numbers, but they do seem relatively accurate at first glance. I had ChatGPT create an embroidered patch that reflects the summary above.

And some of those writing suggestions are pretty good ideas! I'm out of time for today, so I'll file these in the backlog for another day. But here's to another year of helping the world find their voice to share their stories using WordPress.

Past Milestones

"Props" Anniversaries: Ten, Eleven, Twelve (archive).

Commit-iversaries: Two, Five, Six, Seven (archive).

Featured image credit: CC0 licensed photo by Mark Westguard from the WordPress Photo Directory.

The post 13 Years Contributing to WordPress appeared first on Jonathan Desrosiers.

09 Jul 2026 3:39am GMT

Lights! Camera! Action!

Todd Spangler at Variety writes: Automattic's 'Code for the People' Documentary Is a Rallying Cry for Users to Fight for the Open Internet, from the NYC premiere last week.

I'm looking forward to the San Francisco premiere of the documentary, and then tomorrow everyone can stream it for free on codeforthepeople.com! Appearances by Anne McCarthy, Beau Lebens, Eric Binnion, Ian Stewart, Marjorie Asturias, Mary Hubbard, Matías Ventura, Matthew Miller, Paolo Belcastro, and Paul Maiorana.

We need to tell the story of Open Source in as many ways and places as possible. It's never been more critical.

Film is new to us, and it's funny how quickly things change: There's a segment with a few "OpenAI not open" sound bites, but to their credit, they have been releasing open-weight models (Safeguard is particularly interesting). That said, the top open-weight models are all from China, save for Nvidia's Nemotron, in ~12th place.

When I went to the first WordCamps in Beijing and Shanghai in 2009, it was a very different time. They were the biggest in the world at the time! I don't think you could take photos in Tiananmen Square as freely as I did then; now to visit I think you need an appointment, ID checks, and security checks.

Even during WordCamp, it felt like the freedom of Open Source was in high demand, but it also created a lot of fear. I found out later that one of the student volunteers who helped their professor organize everything had been taken in for hours of questioning following the event.

On that trip, I saw how fine-grained the Great Firewall could be when individual posts (IIRC, about bad milk from a factory harming babies) wouldn't load, but the rest of the site would. WordPress.com had been totally blocked, taking about a quarter of our traffic at the time, but behind the Firewall, Open Source continued to thrive and grow, and now the frontier open models are being driven by China in a way I never would have predicted!

Once you've had a taste of freedom, it's hard to go back.

08 Jul 2026 11:16pm GMT

On the podcast today we have David Snead.

David has been involved in the hosting industry since 1999, starting out as legal counsel for one of the earliest shared hosting companies and going on to work with over 50 others. He helped found the i2Coalition, serve as in-house counsel for cPanel and WebPros, and now leads the Secure Hosting Alliance.

If you're listening to this podcast, I'm sure that many of you will have worked closely with hosting companies. Perhaps you run an agency or business that depends on the reliability, ethics, and security of hosting providers. David is here to talk about cross-industry collaboration in the hosting world, specifically around improving security, professionalism, and communication between hosts.

The conversation focused on why and how the Internet Infrastructure Forum (IIF) is building a framework for real-time intelligence sharing and abuse reporting, aiming to help the entire ecosystem detect and prevent attacks faster than adversaries can adapt.

David talks about the challenges hosting companies face, especially smaller ones, in keeping up with security, and how this evolving project hopes to ease this by sharing actionable, non-proprietary abuse information across registrars, hosting providers, DNS services, and more. He discusses the growth of both the Secure Hosting Alliance and the IIF, the business case for collaboration, and the nuances of legal and technical information sharing across borders.

If you're in hosting, run a web agency, or just want to know how the backbone of the web is working to stay more secure and connected, this episode is for you.

Useful links

i2coalition website

Secure Hosting Alliance website

08 Jul 2026 2:00pm GMT

Це есе також доступно українською.

"Listen… the birds are already singing," said Danylo - a Ukrainian I'd met at a previous WordCamp - as we were wrapping up the last hour of the WCEU afterparty in Krakow. "It's time for us to go." He started singing "Hei! Hei! Hei, sokoly! Omynaite hory, lisy, doly." I started singing with him. The Polish guys next to us continued singing in Polish "Dzwoń, dzwoń, dzwoń dzwoneczku, Mój stepowy skowroneczku." Some people behind us joined the choir. That was "Hey Sokoly" - a Ukrainian-Polish folk song - carrying us out of Bastion III, a 19th-century Austrian fortress on the edge of Krakow's Old Town, as the night turned to morning.

But to explain how I ended up there, I need to go back to where it all began.

Mykolaiv

It all started in Mykolaiv, the city of shipbuilders and brides, where I spent my childhood. I graduated from two universities I had been attending simultaneously and started looking for a job during a gap year. I planned to find work to earn some money for further education while preparing for the entrance exams to one of the Finnish universities. Mykolaiv didn't provide good opportunities for graduates unless you had very good connections, but I managed to find a job at an "IT" company. In 2011, the term "IT" didn't mean much to me, but they required English, which was my major, so I thought - why not. The work wasn't particularly difficult: I had to pretend to be "Bob" from the United States, helping customers who had purchased physical products by tracking their orders and walking them through setup instructions. I was fired after a month and a half. Maybe I underperformed, or maybe somebody just didn't like me - either way, it's water under the bridge.

The first job I'd gotten entirely on my own, the first paycheck that proved I could be independent, and the first time being fired - all of it hit me at once. The last part was devastating, made worse by comments like "it was too good to be true," "we told you they'd trick you," and "look at so-and-so, doing such-and-such and earning properly." It was hard to sit with feeling like a failure. But somewhere in that difficulty, I got tougher - and more determined to prove everyone wrong.

TemplateMonster

The first job was a failure, but it gave me one clear answer: I needed to stay in IT. The next job was TemplateMonster.com - well known in certain circles. It was the complete opposite of what I'd experienced before. In 2012 they were selling templates for the most popular CMS platforms of the time: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and various e-commerce solutions. The onboarding alone took two months, which tells you something about how seriously they took their people - staff rarely left, and when they did, it was for personal reasons, not because they were pushed out.

My job was to help customers with their templates: installation, editing, customization. Difficult, but genuinely interesting - I liked it. This was the first time I encountered WordPress. I worked six nights a week, and Sundays were the strangest - your day off, but your body had adjusted to night shifts and refused to cooperate. None of that bothered me much. Being able to build sites and make things look exactly right was addictive. I overworked, learned constantly, pestered developers with questions, all just to quench my thirst for knowledge. It ended quickly: I got accepted into three master's programs in Finland, chose one, and left for Central Finland.

Helsinki

Studying in Finland was genuinely different from anything I'd known in Ukraine - in the best possible way. Once the mandatory courses were done, I started looking for work. It was harder than I expected: a year of passive searching, then six months of applying every day. Eventually, I landed at a Helsinki-based agency building WordPress websites - which is still what I do today. A friendly team, around ten people - I'm still close with many of them. We built sites of varying complexity during the day and spent evenings playing board games, swapping stories, and throwing the occasional party.

That's also where I attended my first WordPress event: WordCamp Helsinki 2017, a two-day conference. It didn't blow me away, but it opened something. When you work in a small agency, you live inside your own bubble - and then suddenly a whole other world appears. You see the other side of WordPress: the community, the people pushing it forward, the people wrestling with the same problems you are and finding creative ways through.

That first local WordCamp was enough to make us want to go further. In 2019 the team went to Berlin for WCEU - my first trip abroad outside of the Finland-Ukraine route I knew well. We spent a few days exploring the city and attending the event. WordCamp Europe is a different scale entirely: thousands of attendees, hundreds of volunteers making it happen. Standing in that crowd, I knew I wanted to be part of it - not just as a visitor. And then corona happened.

Porto

WCEU 2020 and 2021 were online, and I felt they were missing the whole point - thousands of people in one place, feeding off each other's energy. So when Porto was announced for 2022, I started packing. This time, I joined as a volunteer, to see WordCamp from the inside. It was the right call. It was also a difficult time for Ukrainians - the full-scale invasion was by then well into its second year, and everyone was finding their own way to cope. For me, this event became a source of strength. I connected with the Ukrainian community, had real conversations with speakers, and came away feeling like I'd experienced what WCEU is actually for.

That trip also clarified something I'd been circling around for a while. I've always loved traveling, but there was a barrier that had nothing to do with visas or money - though those were factors too. It was a justification problem. Coming from a culture where time should be spent purposefully, traveling for its own sake felt hard to defend. A work conference, though? Completely justifiable. Nobody asks how much fun you had. I've been to Germany, Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, and Poland this way. Spain is next.

Attending WordCamps is one thing. Building a similar event is another.

WP Suomi

In 2025 I became the lead organizer of WP Suomi - the first independent Finnish WordPress event, held in Helsinki. The months before October 10th were intensive in ways I hadn't anticipated: budgets, logistics, gifts, merch, catering, venue coordination, a hundred small details that needed to be right simultaneously. I remember waking up at midnight worrying that I hadn't ordered something in time and it wouldn't arrive before the event. Most of the work that goes into an event like this is invisible to the people attending. They see the schedule, the food, the afterparty. They don't see the half a year of pieces being polished before the puzzle comes together.

On the day of the event, there was nothing left to worry about. Whatever needed doing had been done - if something had been missed in the preparation, it would show up now and there would be little we could do about it. So why worry? The time for that was the preparation, not the day itself. The team - experienced, reliable, no hand-holding required - knew exactly what they were there for.

Around 300 people attended WP Suomi. Forty filled out our feedback form afterward, giving an overall score of 4.47 out of 5. But the number mattered less than what people wrote: networking, atmosphere, meeting old friends and new ones, a community that welcomes everyone openly. Reading that, I recognized the same feeling I'd had at WordCamp Helsinki 2017 - something new, interesting, and full of possibility.

Organizing WP Suomi gave me a clearer understanding of what goes into making these events happen. Having been a volunteer at WCEU and then a lead organizer at WP Suomi, I arrived in Krakow with a slightly different perspective - a better sense of what the people around me were going through. This year I'm back on the WP Suomi organizing team as speakers coordinator - a different role, another angle.

Krakow

WordCamps have changed for me over the years - less about the sessions on stage, more about what happens between them. As an organizer, you miss most of the talks anyway, pulled in ten directions at once. But real life happens in the corridors, and at the parties in the evenings.

This matters especially for the Ukrainian community. The war has scattered us across Europe - different countries, different companies, different lives. WordCamp Europe has become one of the few places where we reassemble in person: to share what the year brought, to meet people we only knew online, to see the community still growing despite everything. Many couldn't make it to Krakow, some would not be able to visit these events anymore. For those of us who could, the room carried extra weight.

That's what Danylo and I were singing about at dawn outside Bastion III, even if neither of us said it out loud. I hope to do that someday in the afterparties in Helsinki and Kyiv - whenever that becomes possible again.

Volodymyr's Work Environment

We asked Volodymyr for a view into his development life and this is what he sent!

HeroPress would like to thank Draw Attention for their donation of the plugin to make this interactive image!

"Послухай… пташки заспівали"

«Послухай… пташки заспівали», - сказав Данило, українець, з яким я познайомився на попередньому WordCamp - ми якраз протеревенили останню годину afterparty WCEU у Кракові. «Значить нам теж час іти». І тут він від душі почав співати «Гей, гей, гей, соколи, оминайте гори, ліси, доли». Я підхопив пісню разом із ним. Поляки, що ішли поруч продовжили польською: «Dzwoń, dzwoń, dzwoń dzwoneczku, mój stepowy skowroneczku». Хтось позаду теж приєднався до хору. Це була «Гей, соколи» - українсько-польська народна пісня - під акомпанемент якої нас виносив натовп із Бастіону III, австрійської фортеці XIX століття на околиці краківського Старого міста, саме тоді, коли вже ніч переходила у ранок.

Щоб пояснити, як я там опинився, доведеться повернутися до самого початку цієї історії.

Миколаїв

Ця історія бере свій початок у Миколаєві - місті суднобудівельників і наречених, де я виріс. Здобув освіту у двох університетах, де навчався одночасно і почав шукати роботу під час року перерви перед продовженням навчання. Я планував знайти собі роботу, щоб заробити грошенят для продовження навчання, готуючись до вступу в один із фінських університетів. У Миколаєві було важко знайти якісь серйозні перспективи для випускника, хіба що в тебе є зв'язки, але я примудрився знайти роботу в "IT" компанії. У 2011 термін "АйТі" нічого мені не говорив, але там потрібна була англійська, яка була моїм основним предметом в університеті, тому я подумав, а чом би й ні? Робота не була важкою: треба було казати, що я "Боб" із США і допомагати клієнтам, які купували фізичні продукти, відслідковувати їх замовлення і давати інструкції, як використовувати оте, що вони поназамовляли. Мене звільнили через півтора місяці. Можливо, я щось не так робив, можливо, просто не вдався обличчям - у будь-якому випадку, що було, то загуло.

На цю роботу я влаштувався самостійно, без будь-якої підтримки, перша заробітна плата була символом моєї незалежності, і перше звільнення - це був бурхливий вир емоцій. Але остання частина просто вибила землю з-під моїх ніг, гірше тільки зробили коментарі на кшталт: "це було занадто добре, щоб бути правдою", "та ми тобі казали, що там надурять", і "подивись на нього - він робить те та й се, ще й добре заробляє". Дуже важко було бути вдома і відчувати себе невдахою. Але це відчуття зробило набагато більше ніж будь-яка ефемерна підтримка - воно мене загартувало і пробудило палке бажання довести, що всі помилялися щодо мене.

TemplateMonster

Хоч перша робота виявилась провалом, вона дала мені чітке розуміння, що треба продовжувати шукати роботу в IT. Наступну роботу я знайшов у TemplateMonster.com - добре відому у певних колах. Вона була повною протилежністю моєму минулому досвіду. У 2012 році вони продавали шаблони для більшості популярних CMS-ок того часу: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, і для різних рішень електронної комерції. Лише ознайомлення з роботою і навчання зайняло два місяці, що промовисто свідчить про те, наскільки серйозно компанія сприймала своїх людей - майже ніколи не звільняли, а якщо люди й ішли з роботи, то з власних причин.

Моїм завданням було допомагати клієнтам із шаблонами, які вони придбали: встановлення, налаштування, редагування. Було доволі складно, але дуже цікаво - мені подобалося. Тоді я вперше познайомився із WordPress. Я працював шість ночей на тиждень, а неділі були найважчими, бо тіло звикало до активності вночі і відмовлялося спати. Хоча такий графік мене не дуже турбував. Можливість створювати будь-які сайти і кастомізувати їх саме під себе - оце було до дідька захопливо. Я багато перепрацьовував, вивчав щось нове, заколупував розробників питаннями, щоб хоч трохи вгамувати жагу до знань. Але усе закінчилося несподівано швидко: я отримав три листи про зарахування на магістратуру у Фінляндії, вибрав один університет і поїхав до Центральної Фінляндії.

Гельсінкі

Система навчання у Фінляндії побудована зовсім по-іншому - і, на мою думку, на краще. Коли я закінчив основні курси моєї спеціальності, я почав шукати роботу. Завдання було не з легких: рік я шукав пасивно, де-не-де подаючи заявки на роботу, і ще пів року я зайнявся цим активно, відгукуючись на декілька вакансій щодня. Зрештою, доля занесла мене у Гельсінське агентство, що розробляло сайти на WordPress - цим я займаюся і сьогодні. У нас була дуже дружня команда, приблизно з десяти людей, з більшістю з них я досі дружу. Ми будували сайти дуже різного рівня складності, удень, вечорами грали в настолки, ділились історіями зі свого життя і влаштовували грандіозні вечірки.

З цією командою я вперше відвідав подію WordPress: WordCamp Helsinki 2017 - дводенну конференцію. Я не був вражений наповал, але вона відкрила мої очі на дещо. Коли ти працюєш у маленькому агентстві, і живеш у своїй бульбашці, а тут неочікувано відкривається цілий всесвіт. Ти бачиш іншу сторону WordPress - спільноту, людей, які рухають увесь проект вперед, людей, які стикаються з тими самими проблемами, які знаходять творчі способи ці проблеми вирішити.

Того першого місцевого WordCamp'у було достатньо, щоб нам захотілося рухатися далі. У 2019 році наша команда поїхала до Берліна на WordCamp Europe - це була моя перша закордонна поїздка за межі звичного для мене маршруту між Фінляндією та Україною. Ми провели кілька днів, досліджуючи місто й відвідуючи конференцію. Масштаб відчувався зовсім по-іншому: тисячі учасників і сотні волонтерів, які усе організовують. Стоячи серед цього натовпу, я зрозумів, що хочу бути частиною цього, і не просто як відвідувач.

А потім почалася пандемія коронавірусу.

Порто

WordCamp Europe 2020 і 2021 років проходили онлайн, і мені здавалося, що вони втратили найголовніше - тисячі людей, зібраних в одному місці, які заряджають одне одного своєю енергією. Тож коли оголосили, що WCEU 2022 відбудеться в Порту, я почав збирати валізу. Цього разу я приєднався до команди волонтерів, щоб побачити WordCamp зсередини. І це було правильне рішення. Для українців це був непростий час - повномасштабне вторгнення вже тривало, і кожен шукав свій спосіб впоратися з новою реальністю. Для мене цей захід став джерелом сили. Я ближче познайомився з українською спільнотою, жваво дискутував зі спікерами й повернувся з відчуттям, що нарешті зрозумів, нашо той WordCamp.

Та поїздка також допомогла мені усвідомити дещо, над чим я давно розмірковував. Я завжди любив подорожувати, але існував бар'єр, який не мав стосунку ні до віз, ні до грошей - хоча й вони теж відігравали свою роль. Проблема була в тому, як виправдати саму подорож. Я виріс у культурі, де час потрібно витрачати з користю, тому подорожувати просто заради подорожі здавалося чимось, що важко пояснити. А ось робоча конференція - зовсім інша справа. Це цілком виправдана причина. Ніхто не питає, скільки задоволення ти на ній отримав. Саме так я побував у Німеччині, Португалії, Італії, Швейцарії та Польщі. Наступна - Іспанія.

Відвідувати WordCamp - це одне. Створювати подібний захід - зовсім інше.

WP Suomi

У 2025 році я став головним організатором WP Suomi - першого незалежного фінського заходу, присвяченого WordPress, що відбувся в Гельсінкі. Місяці, які передували 10 жовтня, виявилися набагато напруженішими, ніж я очікував. Бюджет, логістика, подарунки, мерч, кейтеринг, координація локації - і сотні дрібниць, які мали зійтися в потрібний момент. Пам'ятаю, як прокидався посеред ночі з думкою, що не встиг замовити щось вчасно і воно не приїде до початку події. Більшість роботи, яка стоїть за такими заходами, залишається непомітною для учасників. Вони бачать програму, їжу, афтепаті. Але не бачать тих пів року, протягом яких окремі деталі поступово складаються в єдину картину.

WP Suomi відвідали близько 300 людей. Після заходу сорок учасників заповнили форму зворотного зв'язку, оцінивши його в середньому на 4,47 із 5. Але для мене важливішою була не сама оцінка, а те, що люди писали: нетворкінг, атмосфера, зустрічі зі старими друзями й нові знайомства, спільнота, яка відкрито приймає кожного. Читаючи ці відгуки, я згадав себе і те саме відчуття, яке пережив на WordCamp Helsinki 2017, - це щось нове, захопливе й сповнене можливостей.

Організація WP Suomi допомогла мені значно краще зрозуміти, що стоїть за проведенням таких заходів. Після досвіду волонтера на WCEU, а згодом і головного організатора WP Suomi, я приїхав до Кракова вже з іншим поглядом - набагато краще розуміючи, через що проходять люди, які працюють поруч. Цього року я знову в команді організаторів WP Suomi, але вже в ролі координатора спікерів. Інша відповідальність, інший погляд.

Краків

За ці роки WordCamp для мене змінився. Тепер він менше про доповіді на сцені й більше про те, що відбувається між ними. Як організатор, ти все одно пропускаєш більшість виступів, адже тебе одночасно тягнуть у десять різних боків. Але справжнє життя вирує в коридорах і на вечірках після завершення основних сесій.

Особливо важливо це для української спільноти. Війна розкидала нас по всій Європі - різні країни, різні компанії, різні життя. WordCamp Europe став одним із небагатьох місць, де ми можемо знову зустрітися наживо: поділитися тим, що приніс цей рік, побачитися з людьми, яких досі знали лише онлайн, і переконатися, що наша спільнота продовжує зростати попри все. Багато хто не зміг приїхати до Кракова, на жаль дехто вже ніколи не зможе побувати на цих заходах. Для тих із нас, кому це вдалося, ці зустрічі мають особливе значення.

Саме про це ми з Данилом співали на світанку біля Bastion III, хоча ніхто з нас не сказав цього вголос. Сподіваюся, колись мені ще доведеться робити це на афтепаті в Гельсінкі та Києві - щойно це знову стане можливим.

The post "Listen… the birds are already singing" - "Послухай… пташки заспівали" appeared first on HeroPress.

08 Jul 2026 5:00am GMT

BuddyPress 14.5.0, 12.7.0, and 11.6.0 are now available.

These are security and maintenance releases that include two security fixes, along with a number of compatibility improvements, bug fixes, and code modernization updates. We strongly recommend updating your sites as soon as possible.

Highlights

• Two security issues:
  • Prevent user ID spoofing in the Messages REST API endpoint via improved validation.
  • Restrict Component management to Users with the appropriate Capabilities.
• Improves compatibility with WordPress 6.9, including support for block style loading optimizations and replacement of deprecated WordPress APIs where appropriate.
• Includes numerous bug fixes across BuddyPress, including BP Nouveau, Groups, Friends, Activity, Administration, and several PHP 8.x compatibility improvements.

Download

You can update automatically from your WordPress Dashboard, or download BuddyPress 14.5.0 directly:

• https://wordpress.org/plugins/buddypress/
• https://buddypress.org/download/

For the complete list of changes included in this release, see the changelog:

• https://codex.buddypress.org/releases/version-14-5-0/

Many thanks to our 14.5.0 contributors

Thanks to everyone who contributed patches, testing, reviews, bug reports, and responsible security disclosures that helped make this release possible.

Contributors include: emaralive, vapvarun, westonruter, joelkarunungan, nikunj8866, shawfactor, r-a-y, t.schwarz, dcavins, noruzzaman, rollybueno, potcus, pratiklondhe, yatesa01, bhargavbhandari90, amitraj2203, GaryJ., espellcaste, needle, and johnjamesjacoby.

Security issues were responsibly disclosed via the WordPress Bounty Program over at HackerOne and through the WordPress Plugins Team. If you were not properly attributed for your contribution here, leave a comment and we'll get you added.

07 Jul 2026 5:57pm GMT

Insights into the DevRel role's importance, explore endless API possibilities, and consider the balance of digital freedom, cost, and usability in today's tech landscape.

07 Jul 2026 1:04pm GMT

This auspicious 250th Independence Day, I find myself thinking of what Om wrote in iAMerican when he became a US citizen in 2013.

On a globe, America is a landmass, a country. In an immigrant's heart it is a belief that future is almost always better. It may not be perfect and it is certainly not equal, but it still is one of a kind - the only place where an absolute stranger with a funny name and a funny accent with no friends or contacts can show up, work hard and actually get to do what he was destined to do. […]

In most places in the world, outsiders like me don't have that chance. That simple truth is what makes America so special. A chance - to be somebody even if you are nobody. America is a state of mind and I have opted-in!

I feel lucky to have been born here, and if I hadn't been, I think I would have gotten here as fast as I could. I'm grateful to the public schools that educated me, the teachers who pushed me, the internet that freed my mind, and the culture of risk and innovation in technology that invested a million dollars in a 21-year-old dropout kid trying to build a company around (but not replacing) an Open Source project.

It's not unimaginable that these things could have happened someplace else, but it would have been a long shot.

On the lighter side, SNL's Washington's Dream skit is one of their best ever, Google has a pretty funny commercial reimagining the Declaration being written, and another famous Matthew (McConaughey) gives a great 2-minute speech. "We need skeptics. Yes, we do. We do not need cynics. One cares enough to question, which we should, and the other one's already quit."

05 Jul 2026 6:59am GMT

In ecommerce, it's not just about the tech but how it helps merchants grow. Open source can offer control and adaptability, especially with platforms like Woo and WordPress.

02 Jul 2026 9:59am GMT

So on the podcast today we have Ivana Ćirković.

Ivana is a digital marketer with 18 years of experience working both in and out of the tech industry, and currently leads marketing at WPBakery. She's an active participant in WordPress events, having attended and spoken at numerous local and international WordCamps over the years.

In this episode, our focus is on the WordPress Credits initiative. We learn how this program, launched by the WordPress Foundation, connects students with real-world opportunities to contribute to the WordPress ecosystem, earn certifications, and increase their competitiveness on the job market.

Ivana discusses her own experience as a WP Credits mentor, working with students as they learn about digital marketing, remote work, and open source contributions. We explore how universities can modernise their curriculums and add real-world value for students by participating in the initiative, and how businesses can get involved, not just to support the community, but to help shape and discover future talent.

The program's evolving structure also gets attention, and we learn how students are guided through hands-on activities such as translation or documentation, and how their progress is tracked publicly via profiles on WordPress.org. Ivana shares the opportunities and challenges for both educators and businesses, with thoughts on accountability, mentorship, and the need to bring new faces into the WordPress community.

If you're interested in the future of WordPress, education, or bridging the gap between academia and industry, this episode is for you.

Useful links

WordPress Credits

WPBakery

What it (really) means to be a part of the WP Credits program?

01 Jul 2026 2:00pm GMT

Insights on community support, decision-making, starting new projects, and the importance of agency reputation in hosting. Engage and share!

01 Jul 2026 1:11pm GMT