Author: Gerardo Medina

  • AI Search Optimization for WordPress: What Actually Works in 2026

    AI Overviews are cutting clicks, but cited pages win bigger. Learn what actually helps your WordPress site get quoted by AI search, with real data.

    The post AI Search Optimization for WordPress: What Actually Works in 2026 appeared first on Themeisle Blog.

  • Gutenberg Times: Gutenberg Changelog #134 – Gutenberg 23.7, 23.8, WordPress 7.1 and more

    In this 134th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog Podcast, Birgit Pauli-Haack hosts Jessica Lyschik , senior developer at Greyd, to discuss recent Gutenberg and WordPress developments. The conversation centers on the releases of Gutenberg 23.7, 23.8, and WordPress 7.1 (“Mary Lou”), highlighting user-facing enhancements and developer-oriented changes.

    WordPress 7.1 introduced notable features, including new styling tools, updated media flow, notes functionality for collaboration, and improved support for AI-driven workflows. Jessica Lyschik emphasized the impactful addition of pseudo states (hover, focus, active) in buttons and navigation links, though global style options for navigation states are still being developed for 7.2. The new icon API was also discussed, which currently requires plugins for full editor integration.

    Both speakers observed an ongoing shift: features first become available via theme.json for theme builders, then gradually get exposed in the UI for broader audiences. They also touched on the evolving approach to child themes, font management, and the need for clear style inheritance indicators. Specific enhancements in Gutenberg 23.7/23.8, like responsive editing toggles and improvements to dynamic galleries and block inspector controls, were covered alongside new opt-out mechanisms for block controls.

    The episode closed with a look toward WordPress 7.2, highlighting efforts to address “block editor paper cuts” (small annoyances) and improved tracking of in-progress features. Birgit Pauli-Haack announced a three-month podcast hiatus for sabbatical, promising a return for the 7.2 release. Listeners were encouraged to follow GitHub tracking issues and stay current with upcoming Gutenberg releases.

    Show Notes / Transcript

    Show Notes

    Special Guest: Jessica Lyschik

    Announcements / Community contributions

    WordPress 7.1

    Gutenberg releases

    What’s discussed or in the works

    WordPress 7.2 Tracking issues

    Greyd Conversations

    Greyd Conversations #19 – How Can Product Companies Grow in WordPress Right Now

    Stay in Touch

    Transcript

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Welcome to our 134th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. In today’s episode, we will talk about Gutenberg 23.7 and 23.8, and also, of course, WordPress 7.1, which was just released, and also what’s in the pipeline. Not very detailed, but we’ll see. I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and a full-time core contributor for the WordPress open source project sponsored by Automattic. It’s again a special treat for me to have Jessica Lyschik to join me on the show again. Jessica is a senior developer at Greyd, which is a German WordPress company that builds Greyd.Suite, an all-in-one toolkit for building and managing professional WordPress sites. Welcome to the show, Jessica. How are you today?

    Jessica Lyschik: Thank you. I’m very good today. And thanks for having me yet again. I don’t know how often have I been here now?

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: I think it’s either the 6th.

    Jessica Lyschik: 3rd, 4th?

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, I think we’re coming up to 6 or 7.

    Jessica Lyschik: Is there like an ongoing list of people how often they have been on the show?

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Of course. Of course there is a list.

    Jessica Lyschik: Probably I’m very at the top.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: It feels like. Absolutely. Yeah, you are. Top producer here.

    Jessica Lyschik: Nice.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So Jessica, you are not only working on Greyd, you also work co-organizer on the WordPress Germany, and you also are a co-organizer for the German-speaking DACH Online WordPress Meetup. DACH, for those who don’t know it, is Deutsch, Austrian, also Österreich and Schweiz, Länderkennung.

    Jessica Lyschik: Yes.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: And the meetup comes together every other month, right?

    Jessica Lyschik: Yes.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: The 3rd Wednesday in a month in odd months. Yeah.

    Jessica Lyschik: Correct. Yes.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So what are you doing there? What’s coming over next?

    Jessica Lyschik: So our next meetup is, well, it is all in German. So for those listeners who are not speaking German, it’s unfortunately not for you, but you can try and come over and practice and listen. But we mainly held a whole day meetup in German. So for the German, Austrian, and Swiss communities. And yeah, the next meetup is in September and it is, yes, on the 16th. And we are talking about WordPress 7.0 and 7.1 as the latest releases. We will have Benjamin Sekavica with us who was also the, I think, release coordinator for 7.1, if I’m not mistaken.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes.

    Jessica Lyschik: So he will share a bit more because he has been fairly involved into the last past 2 releases and he will share a few insights and everyone can share their experiences. We can answer each other’s questions. And yeah, that’s what we are going to do. So we aim for more of a professional audience with the online meetup.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: You mean developers and agencies?

    Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, or also anyone who is working professionally with WordPress. And we are not focusing too much on like beginners, but this is our area where we have our target audience, basically.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. Awesome.

    Announcements

    Well, thanks for letting us know about that. We’re coming to some announcements. I only got one that I wanted to share with you, dear listeners. Jeff Paul opened the call for volunteers for WordPress 7.2 release squad, and the release is scheduled for December 9th. So that’s kind of the timeframe that you’re looking at. December 9th means there’s 4 weeks beforehand is release candidate, and 6 weeks and 7 weeks is beta before that. So by October, you’re probably gonna be part of the— ongoing work to get this release over the finish line 2 months later.

    Jessica Lyschik: Yeah.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: So experience being on the release squad, you had experience with that and I had too. I don’t think that’s a job for someone who hasn’t been part of core for a while because it’s a very fast-moving process and you need to know a lot about how WordPress is actually managed, developed, and released.

    Jessica Lyschik: Mm-hmm.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: There are quite a few release squads from previous releases that could come up and volunteer again. Yeah.

    Community Contributions

    So speaking of first-time contributors to core, there is a new WordPress Contributor Toolkit that has been tested quite a bit, and it’s out in the first version. The first contribution does not start again with installing Git, Node.js, and Docker, and kind of takes the whole Contributor Day morning or in the afternoon when you start doing that. So this is a desktop …

    Jessica Lyschik: I remember this.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And not everybody has their computer set up so it all goes smoothly. Yeah. So I have always had trouble with all the installations because my computer is not on the latest stuff. Yeah. So this desktop app handles it all. And after you run the setup wizard, Contributors can link to a track ticket and apply or test existing patches on the running site. It’s also based on Playground. And then open a pull request or attach a patch or hand their work to a mentor or— yeah, there’s quite a few features in there. And Juan Margarito is the project manager, so to speak, but he had input from quite a few core contributors. And I have not heard yet how it all went on WordCamp US, but I think the next version for WordCamp Asia is already in the works. So yeah, test it out. Then if you see something that needs to be fixed or that doesn’t work, yeah, find your way into the GitHub repo so you can leave an issue or, yeah, have some discussion there.

    Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, that sounds actually very promising to speed up the process. As I said, I remember like being on Contributor Day and now you have to install this, now you have to install Docker. Now you have to do this. Docker doesn’t work properly. What is the issue? It was a never-ending story. And having a setup that is like ready to go, I think this is very interesting. Yeah, I have not been at WordCamp US either, so I don’t know how this worked out, but I heard only good vibes so far from Contributor Day. Right.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: They published quite a few.

    Jessica Lyschik: I think it will speed up the process.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, WordCamp US was, the Contributor Day were about 400 people out of 1,000. So that’s a phenomenal ratio there. And they changed the format a little bit from what I read, that they actually were project-oriented. So they actually were able to finish a few projects. And it’s more like a hackathon rather than kind of everybody picks something up and works on things. And that’s what I heard from a lot of people that were at the contributor day.

    Jessica Lyschik: Yeah.

    What’s Released – WordPress 7.1

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: And on August 19th, WordPress 7.1 was released called Mary Lou. After the jazz musician Mary Lou Williams, who has over 100 records. So she was very prolific in producing her music. And I’m glad that we found another woman to be part of the jazz naming for a WordPress version.

    We talked quite a bit on this show about the various features. Just a reminder, there’s a lot packed into new styling tools. Updated media flows, added notes functionality, some changes to the new capabilities for AI, other tools and workflows. Anne McCarthy was the first-time release lead for it, and I must say she did a fantastic job, probably better than any other of the release leads because her communication style was very upfront, and it was also always kind of keeping everybody in the loop, and it was really nice to see. And for me, working on the source of truth, truth, it was really helpful that she was the release lead and I could bounce off some things like, how does it work? Or did I get this right? Or yeah, what is missing? What are your most favorite features from 7.1? Or what is it that tripped you up as a developer? Kind of, we can have both ways of talking about things.

    Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, we can, we can do it. There’s, uh, some things that have happened. So what I’m really happy about is the pseudo states. So hover, focus, active on buttons. For when I saw that, I went in there and during the release candidate phase and was like, hmm, I read something about navigation and if in the source of truth, what is going on? So I figured out that navigation links do have on the individual navigation links, you can toggle it on. But then I thought like, hey, for navigation, it would just make so much more sense if you would do that in the global styles. But it was not there. So there was nothing in the global styles to change these states. And I was a bit confused about that. But glad we figured it out in the outreach channel. I think I posted it on Slack. And it was actually not done yet because there’s one more addition coming to it, which is the, the active state.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Mm-hmm.

    Jessica Lyschik: So it’s not the, it’s not the pseudo state active, but when you have in WordPress, when you click on a navigation item, then this specific navigation item on the page you’re on gets the class current menu item as of now. I don’t think this is going to change in the future, but then what’s being worked on is that this also can be, this color can also be changed or this settings for when this state is actually happening.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Mm-hmm.

    Jessica Lyschik: And now for the navigation items, you would have then 3 states. So you have the responsive styles, you would have the pseudo styles, and you would have this active style. And because these are kind of intertwined, this was the reason why it has not been coming into 7.1 yet, but it’s being worked on for 7.2. So Maggie is on it. Maggie Cabrera, who I did the Twenty Twenty-Four theme with, she’s working on that. So that’s very cool. And yeah, that’s something to look forward because I just remember like the last week been talking about it with someone and it was in Torino Twenty Twenty-Four on my talk when at Workcamp Europe where I think it was Rich Tabor who asked the question what I would like to see, and I was like, pseudo styles would be great.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

    Jessica Lyschik: So 2 years later, we are finally here. Of course, it’s not everywhere yet, but I think it’s a very good start. We have it on buttons now, and it can only extend to other blocks as we have seen it with many features before. They start out on one very specific area and then got released to the rest of the items that are there. So yeah, I’m very much looking forward to that. The new icon API is also something that’s very interesting. And I just had an email from a client today saying, hey, there’s this new icon API. What’s, what’s the matter? So I was curious too, of course, can I just do this in the editor? Because this was probably most people are going to ask. And no, you cannot, but you technically can through a plugin. There’s also an article from Justin Tadlock on the developer blog about this, right? I saw that this week.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

    Jessica Lyschik: I have not tested it out yet. I had not had the time with this, but it definitely looks promising to— we’re getting there to like all these little changes that are kind of not just nice to have, but kind of sort of life improvements to how you would otherwise work that. I mean, there’s the icon block, of course, from Nick Diego, who is like the base for all what is in Core now, but you still can do a lot more in terms of customization with it. But yeah, we’re getting there. So yeah, we’re looking forward to that.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So when you say it’s not there yet for the navigation link, it’s also not there. Well, you can do it in the theme.json. So it’s just the UI or the interface wasn’t finished. But the feature is there for theme builders that use the theme.json to style their stuff. They don’t have to rely on the global styles interface.

    Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, but that’s always the first route you go. So you go first in the editor. Can I see it? Is it there? And it was like, eh, disappointment. Yeah, but that’s what I forgot to mention. You can use it through theme.json, but then it’s like a bit of a, how to say, it’s, yeah, like you need to have your own theme.json. You just cannot go into any default theme or any existing theme that is from another author and then change it there because with the next theme update, your changes will be gone. So this is something you have to watch out for. And then for most people, it’s like also the feedback I often get from clients, from colleagues, it’s like, is it in the editor? No, sorry.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Not yet. Still have to code. Not yet.

    Jessica Lyschik: Not yet.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: But that’s pretty much the cadence of any of the styling things, that they are first coming into theme.json for theme builders, because that’s the basis of it. That’s kind of the API. That’s the— yeah, how it all fits in with the rest of it. And then it’s a whole different mindset to figure out how the interface is going to work, because the interface also needs to kind of figure out not only for those that are advanced builders, but also for those that are actually beginners or don’t know what a pseudo-state is. Yeah, so you have a language issue there, and it’s a whole different mindset to get this right for the interface. And I’m really glad that we finally have it in the theme.json and people can work with it from there. But yeah, you’re right, it’s not for one of the default themes where you can change the theme.json. Yeah, but it’s your own. Yeah, like I did for the Gutenberg Times. I have my own theme and I can kind of change things there.

    Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, it just depends how comfortable people are with using it. So if some are just, give me an existing theme that does get updates every now and then to do changes. And some just code their own because they feel comfortable with it. So It’s, it’s just that as long as we communicate, hey, that’s the current state of this. You can use it there, here and there, but here, watch out. This is the catch. Then I think it’s all fine because the more you know, the more you can adjust to your needs.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: And some who are longer in the WordPress space than just 4 years or so, so since it’s block themes, there is also the idea of a child theme that a lot of people go that route, which has its own theme.json. that is then combined with the parent theme and the global style. It gets a little bit unwieldy. Yeah, kind of figuring out where things are changed and how do you revert something and where does it go? Because you also have the additional CSS and then the block-level CSS. So yeah, there’s a lot of things that you can change and confuse everybody.

    Jessica Lyschik: Or even yourself. So it does happen that you change something somewhere, then forget about it and come back like 6 months later and be like, Why does this not change when I change the setting here? Now I can change the setting, but nothing happens. And I’ve been there. Don’t worry. It happens to the best. So it’s a tough one, but yeah, you just have to find your way in how you approach things. And again, everyone’s different. Everyone has different knowledge, different base on it. Child themes, definitely you can use them. Some people say child themes are dead. Well, it depends.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: It depends. Yeah.

    Jessica Lyschik: I mean, the most cases are slowly like, for example, if you wanted to use fonts, special fonts, then a child theme was always the best option to just have the files there, implement them and queue them correctly and so on. Well, now we have the font library. So. With a little exception, if you cannot upload certain fonts or do not want to use Google Fonts, for example, like there’s Adobe and like Adobe Fonts and another font places. where we, where you can get fonts from, you still need to implement them in a sort of hacky way. It does work. It’s not perfect, but it’s one of those things where a child theme would, or is still useful in my opinion.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

    Jessica Lyschik: And yeah, there’s just so much variety around it. So yeah, everyone will find its way or their way too.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: I made the decision to not go with child theme, although the Gutenberg Times theme is based on Twenty Twenty-Five. Okay. I don’t, I don’t wanna kind of have this whole mental load, like figuring out where my patterns live or what are the theme.json settings that I need to override. And so I said, okay, I will make a copy and delete everything else that I need— don’t need, and then take it from there. It’s so robust that I don’t think I’m running into any problems that I didn’t make myself. Yeah.

    What else? 7.1, I wanted to interject that with— so 7.2 is of course coming. We talked about it on December 9th. There is not a roadmap out yet, but what’s already in the works is what you mentioned is that we get ourselves confused when we don’t know where things are in styling. There’s actually an effort to have in the inheritance of styles be marked in the interface. There is a discussion on how to make that, and the designers are still kind of figuring it out. But you get an indicator in either the global styles or in the block settings in the sidebar if that’s a changed style. So it’s not the global style, but it’s kind of an individual style. So you can at least manage that.

    Jessica Lyschik: Yeah.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Or at least recognize it. How far it goes, we don’t know, but the discussions are there. And I will link that particular issue in the show notes so you can kind of check it out if you want to and kind of see how that’s gonna come out. So anything else you wanna kind of say what you like about 7.1? What about the responsive styles? Do you like them?

    Jessica Lyschik: They look promising. I have not tried them out yet. I mean, it’s been just 2 days. I have been very busy with keeping up and, well, not having things break for great customers. We did have a little release. I was doing a little release yesterday for a little fix. No fatal errors or anything.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

    Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, you are on your tippy toes when a new release is out. And of course, I have had it running on my local environment for quite some time, the release candidate, just to make sure that if I work or test things that I do not run into any issues. No, no deep dive yet, but what I noticed is that quite a few things moved around. For example, I was just made aware of yesterday that at the group block, you now have these settings that were usually the first thing. It’s like the blocks should inherit the site width or content width or something like that.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh yeah.

    Jessica Lyschik: This, this, the layout. Yeah. The layout part, it has now been moved from the settings to the styles. And I think this was because of the responsiveness, because then you have everything together in one go and do not have to switch the tabs back and forth for this.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yep.

    Jessica Lyschik: I mean, there is some refinement in the, in the UI of how things look. I think the notices got quite an update. They are looking different now. And it’s just like the little details from what I noticed in working on it, but I did not do yet, unfortunately, but I hope I can. Yeah. Dive a bit more deeper in this weekend. What’s new? I’ve been just reading on, just checking technically if there’s anything. I mean, one big thing is definitely the enforced iframe in the editor.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I was about to ask you about that, if you had any issues there with your—

    Jessica Lyschik: We actually prepared for 7.0 already because it was first said, hey, we are doing this for 7.0, and then it was rolled back. It’s like, okay, we are not doing this for 7.0, but we are doing this for 7.1. So we were kind of prepared.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Mm-hmm.

    Jessica Lyschik: We just had to catch up with, I think, 2 blocks that we offer, but all, all works fine. So we are, we are good now there. And we did this ahead of time. So we were aware of these changes. And this is what I’m looking out specifically. Sometimes the fancy details as well, because I have to know, because most people come to me in my company saying, hey, why is that? What, what, what have, what has changed here? Tell me. And then I have to go to deep dive. I did it. I did this yesterday to say, why did things move? Ah, things move because of the responsive styles. Okay. So then you have the train of thought and know what’s happening, like kind of reverse engineering it, if you will.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Mm-hmm.

    Jessica Lyschik: But yeah, I will have a deeper dive into 7.1 and testing out a few things because I’m curious myself. I mean, of course we still work in, in and with WordPress, so we need to be aware of what’s happening.

    Gutenberg 23.7

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right. Yeah. So Gutenberg 23.7 was released and it has a few enhancements that we can talk about. Some of them actually made it into 7.1, which is actually a little bit unusual because normally after beta there are no enhancements. But if that’s a blessed, so to speak, feature, then still enhancement can make it into beta. And even if a release candidate, if it’s important and it needs to be fixed.

    Enhancements

    So there were not a whole lot of things that I would point out, but the first one was the responsive editing enabled setting.

    Jessica Lyschik: Yeah.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: With that, you can actually turn off the responsive styles option, and that made it into 7.1. It’s just a setting in your, in your block.json file, there, I think there’s also a filter where you can do that.

    Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, you can use a filter in the functions.php of your theme or child theme, preferably child theme in this case.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

    Jessica Lyschik: Just where we had it. So you can, but then it’s, I think it removes it completely if I’m not mistaken, because the way the filter looks to me looks like it would disable it for everything.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right.

    Jessica Lyschik: When you use it on the block itself in the block.json, then it’s just for that one block.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right, right. The filters goes for everything. And it could be custom blocks, yeah, that you don’t want the responsive editing to come in, or you want them enabled. You know, it’s kind of the other thing. What is not turned off is the styling that you already put in. Yeah. So those are not affected by that filter. So if you come from a theme that already has them in the global styles or in the theme.json, they’re not turned off. It only turns off.

    Jessica Lyschik: Yeah. So it’s just basically in the user interface that you do not have this option anymore. You cannot access it anymore. Yeah.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: So it, it came out of the feedback loop from a lot of agencies that kind of said, okay, can I have my user not use that? So, which is pretty common for WordPress. Yeah. If you have a new feature that you also need to implement a turnoff thing for a lot of people.

    The next one. is to extract— well, I’m reading that— to extract the preset management from shadows and font sizes. To implement those presets for shadows, so you have your own shadow configuration or your own font size configuration in the global styles or in the theme.json, those are actually handled pretty similar. And the developers said, okay, we don’t want to have too many same-looking files in our codebase. So let’s unify things and make it available so we can actually add additional presets with the same management kind of system. It’s a codebase and it’s on Gutenberg behind the scenes, but I think it will actually change a little bit how you code that for your custom blocks if you want to also have preset management enabled with that. So I wanted to point that out. I don’t know if that makes any sense to you.

    Jessica Lyschik: I have to deep— deeper dive into it because I actually don’t— it was not on my radar, to be honest, but it sounds fairly interesting. Yeah.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Do you wanna take the next one?

    Jessica Lyschik: Reflect inherited global styles values and block inspector controls. This was what you were just talking about, right?

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right.

    Jessica Lyschik: Yeah.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: So it is already in 23.7. Yeah.

    Jessica Lyschik: Yeah. I think when you scroll down further, I think this is with the kind of, how do you say, flipped squares or diamond sort of shape. I wonder if this is maybe not too— it’s not too visible. It’s like very hidden and kind of very much blends in. I would be curious to see what that actually looks like. So, okay, I do not have only 7.1 tasks for me for this weekend, but also Gutenberg tasks. Coming from the, what you just described before, that you don’t know where things are coming from, if things have changed locally, I think this is a very interesting user interface change that I assume will be kind of helpful for people to figure out, okay, apparently this is not the global style. Something has changed here. The question is then where?

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

    Jessica Lyschik: It will be interesting to see how good this particular style or sort of indication will be, will be kind of recognized because I find it very, it blends in too much from, in my opinion.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

    Jessica Lyschik: I think there needs to be a pop of color because we have this purple color as well for certain things in editor. And I think because if it’s just black and white, it’s kind of, it blends in too much because you have the, there’s screenshots from the typography panel when you choose the font size, when it’s You have only 5 options, S, M, L, XL, and XXL. And then it’s just a little dot or an outlined dot sort of, because it’s fairly small and it kind of blends in with the toggle next to it where you can toggle the Preset selection. Yeah, the sizes. So yeah, you’re right to see what other people will think about this.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it will come with a tooltip definitely for that. And it also will open a modal or will open the same modal that you have where you can reset a setting. So if somebody says, okay, we changed the theme update and you didn’t see— that’s the case where it really makes sense is, oh, and you don’t see the new styles or new things is because you have an override in the database and you can reset that to theme style and then you get the new new stuff in there. So that’s kind of the use case that I can think of. And I think it makes fairly sense. And once you know what that little diamond or whatever does, but you’re right, it’s not in your face and it’s not very …

    Jessica Lyschik: I mean, it shouldn’t be like in your face, like kind of be like a giant billboard, you have made a change here, but it should be like a bit more coming out a bit more because right now I think it blends in too much. And I would probably be wondering if this is maybe a bug or if that neighboring icon may be having some sort of display issue or something because it’s too— not distinct enough, I think is the right term.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s very subtle. Subtle, yeah. Yeah, I— when I first looked at it, was it a scratch on my screen or something like that?

    Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, exactly, exactly. So I was like, It looks a bit small, so I have to check it out on, on like on an actual installation and see what happens. If I notice it or if I just wonder where I did the change and it did not happen for whatever reason.

    But Fixes

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, the next item is, it’s one of those quality of life things that you mentioned. It’s that the COVID and accordion blocks have now an exit on enter. So you hit enter once, you get to the next one, and then enter twice and you’re out of that whole container block. I only want to mention it because it’s— I found it missing on quite a few ones, except especially one of the cover and accordions. But it’s also when you— if you’re a developer and you want to learn how to do this, this is also a PR where you can actually check out how that’s going to work because it’s actually just a block support, yeah, that you need to put in there. It’s an experimental API, but it has been around for I think about 2 years now. And as long as Core is using it, it’s probably gonna stay there. So it could be also a good way for the block developers to kind of learn that little quality of life feature that you give the user out on the, on the block without having to do after and before kind of thing. Yeah. That I have to refer to once in a while.

    Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, but I didn’t know about it. I learned something today.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: So, yeah.

    Jessica Lyschik: Mission accomplished.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes.

    Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, but it’s actually, yeah, I can totally get it for the COVID block because like what I am, I’m hon— I wanna be honest here. I am very much, I click away. I click somewhere outside because it does not work in, quote, in air quotes that, uh, you can exit a block and go up the next level outside of the block. So yeah, that’s good to know.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right, great. Yeah. Do you want to take the next one?

    Jessica Lyschik: Yeah. Dynamic gallery. Rename toolbar button to detach and add a modal explaining what will happen.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: The dynamic gallery is the one where you can have a gallery automatically created from your attached images. And that’s especially interesting for those that have been blogging for a long time and have been there. Photos all over the place. And now they can, you can, you don’t have to take one image at a time. You can do it all in one swoop. But the problem is when you want to add an image that’s not attached to it, or if you want to delete one, you need to break that dynamic thing.

    Jessica Lyschik: Oh yeah.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So you can do singular image things with a gallery. So you need to detach it. And then the modal explains that particular context. Kind of comes up and say, you say okay, and then be done with it. That detached image also comes, and we see it probably in 23.8 when we talk about it later. That’s also the same method how you can, for the page list in the navigation, that’s at first a dynamic one, but once you change things and add another link in there, it’s kind of not dynamic anymore. So it will, new things will not be added is also a downside of that. And it’s the same thing for the table of content block has instead of the, it had a long time convert to a static list. So it’s also not dynamic anymore. It’s now also called detach. I don’t know if it’s the same modal. I haven’t tested that yet, but it’s kind of a switch in. How, how we teach people about the attach and detach kind of thing, kind of the, the context of this is a dynamic block that you can actually free from the, from that automation.

    Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, we actually have the similar wording in the Grid plugin. So it’s, it’s very familiar to see here, detach this. Because we also have sort of like these dynamic features and you can detach stuff from these dynamic features to make them static. Basically what you just explained. It’s interesting to see that even though I don’t think anyone has ever, like I was not involved in this, but seeing this basically turning out exactly what we’ve been doing in a product already, it’s kind of interesting. So it’s, I guess, not the worst idea to do.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. But like, especially when it’s kind of already done by you.

    Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like, it’s like to have a— not really consenting, but like to have a general understanding of that, this wording of detaching stuff and like having it dynamic is like universal, sort of. So, and this is kind of the language where we are going to. Yeah, it’s just great to see that there is not much that you have to reteach people because plugins have it done this way, but now core is like kind of catching up and you can use that knowledge that, okay, if I detach this, it’s no longer connected to it. And if it’s kind of dynamic, then okay, maybe there is some sort of connection. I mean, in a very broad sense now.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. Glad we can kind of continue in the consistency that you brought to your product in core.

    Jessica Lyschik: Yeah.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

    Jessica Lyschik: It’s really, it’s my, And I was not involved. I just want to say that I was not involved in this one.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Don’t blame me. Yeah. So, so what’s next? I don’t know why I looked at that.

    Jessica Lyschik: Dynamic mode conversion, a single undo level. I think this was also part of that.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I tested this dynamic gallery quite a bit because I couldn’t get my head around why that was important because I don’t— every time I’m in my block editor on a post, I upload images and I know they’re automatically attached, but I wouldn’t upload images in bulk in my editor. And then I kind of, it flipped for me that, okay, in the media library I can upload images in bulk and I can also in bulk attach it to a post. There’s a column there where you can attach it. And I said, okay, when you do that, then you really appreciate that you can have a gallery with that. So It took me a while to kind of get that because it’s a, it wasn’t a workflow that I wasn’t familiar with and I wouldn’t, wouldn’t have used. So what’s the dynamic mode conversion thingy? Undo?

    Jessica Lyschik: I think it’s just a sort of small life improvement that you, when you undo, so you have a dynamic gallery, then you kind of make it detached to stay with the, with the wording here. And then when I go back and said I made a mistake, Then you only have to press undo once instead of 15 times, twice, or multiple times for every image. Now the entire gallery gets basically back to the state it was in.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Pretty neat. Yes, I like it. So there were quite a few changes to the background image and to the global styles, but they are also minor. Yeah, there’s one thing that theme builders that use theme.json probably need to know about that is that the level block level preset class specificity has been changed through the :where command. So that is certainly something when you— that you might come across when you have a custom theme and you have some custom CSS and try to work with that.

    Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, I think we had this kind of big thing last year when things got changed with the :where selector, and then you had to redo stuff because things were not applying or Again, applying to things depending on what it was. So yeah, that’s something we have to look out for to see. Because every time core is like changing something like this, you just need to double check that your stuff still works. Because I think, I wouldn’t say a lot, but I know it from the Greyd WP theme. We do use quite some extra styles to make the theme happen and have the blocks styled the way we would, we imagine it in our theme. And yeah, it’s just like revisiting your theme again to make sure things still work. To-do for the theme developers, definitely.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right, right. Absolutely. And that is actually in 7.1. This was patched back to core during the release. Yeah. So that’s why I’m pointing that out.

    Experiments

    And then the last thing I think is in the experiment section that the inheritance UI that we talked about quite a bit in this show is actually now only visible through the Gutenberg experiment screen. Yeah. So you need to switch it on to actually test it for yourself.

    Jessica Lyschik: Good to know because, and I would’ve been very confused again if I just went, oh, let’s update to Gutenberg plugin. Why does this not show? Okay, let’s do a deep dive once again.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right. Yeah. So now you know.

    Jessica Lyschik: But that’s why it’s so helpful to have all these What’s New in Gutenberg blog posts, I have to say. Because they highlight everything and then you can go back and just like yesterday I was searching for something, why did this thing change? And that’s how I got back into like, okay, this was the change. Then obviously whatever is in the pull request is quite a kind of technical. And if you do not have technical people asking you the question, you kind of need to translate, okay, this happened because of that. And this is the reason for it because you just cannot send them a link to the pull request and here is it. And then they go back, what is it about?

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: So yeah, well, it’s always— There’s one step that I use now is I share that URL with Claude and say, explain it to me like an 8-year-old or something like that. And then it kind of tells me what’s this about. I mean, and that’s when I know.

    Jessica Lyschik: It does work. But if the person is already with you and like, Jessica, what is—

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, no, of course.

    Jessica Lyschik: What is going on here? Then you’re like, Yeah.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s how I get smarter.

    Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, it’s definitely, it, it helps me also. So I’m not just saying that this is, I did not use it in that case. I probably should have done this yesterday, but I like to search for things and find, figure things out, why, why things change and how they work. AI is like the shortcut to it.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

    Jessica Lyschik: And I do use it sometimes. Yeah, definitely. And, but I still like to. tinker and figure things out myself because that’s what I enjoy.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that’s one thing. That’s also when you learn, you know, if an AI kind of gets you something back, you have it for the moment, but it’s harder to retain that information for a longer period of time. You know, that’s how our brains work.

    Jessica Lyschik: That’s true.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. If we, we need the challenges to overcome to actually learn something. Yeah. All right. That was our fast go through 23.7.

    Gutenberg 23.8

    23.8 came out just this week. This week was the whole release week. Yeah. With, or last week with 7.0.4, 7.1, Gutenberg released 23.8.

    Jessica Lyschik: Yeah.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s kind of a lot of information to disseminate. And I have found that the Gutenberg releases have more PRs in them than previous. Last year or something like that. So there are a lot of, a lot more people or the same people pushing more PRs into the release. It’s really interesting to go through all the changelogs and all that. So we might miss something. So in terms of collaboration, the notes feature got a new method, that is the email— that it emails users now that are mentioned in a note. So you have now— you can now mention people that are on the blog with an @ sign. And then once you save the note, it emails those users that they were mentioned and that there was a note for them to do or to look at, which is quite nice because not everybody goes to every site every time.

    Jessica Lyschik: So, yeah, or this specific blog post, because if you do not, are not working on that because you don’t know that your attention is needed there, then this is definitely a way that you can actually get to know that people are waiting for a reply for you.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

    Jessica Lyschik: Of you.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I’m still looking for that place where I can see all my comments on posts in one swoosh and not have to go into the post. I don’t know if it’s coming, but it’s definitely plugin territory. So if you want to have a good plugin, that’s definitely a feature request for me. Let me know if you start it out. Do you want to do the next one?

    Enhancements

    Jessica Lyschik: Visual revisions, add shareable URLs. Ooh, this is interesting. Yeah, I have been quite a fan of the visual revisions so far. I mean, I have not used them too much yet, but—

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Me too.

    Jessica Lyschik: It’s like, it’s just a whole new experience. And now you can actually get a shareable URL of that. So you can basically say, hey, here’s the URL to that specific change set. Here’s what I’m having trouble with, dealing with, whatever it is. This is actually kind of cool.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s the one thing. And what I also can see is that you say, okay, this was the version before and this is it now. Yeah. So people say, what changed? Or wasn’t it better before kind of thing? Yeah. And then you can actually see it side by side or you say, okay, I have 2 versions of it. This is one version, this is the other one version. Which do you like? Yeah, kind of. So you don’t have to do the staging site just for little changes. You can actually put it on site, but you always have a main version there. So a live version. So yeah, be careful with that.

    Jessica Lyschik: And that’s why you have revisions. So whenever you do something wrong, you can go back if you have revisions. So it’s that custom post types sometimes do not have revisions.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

    Jessica Lyschik: And you have to turn that on when you register the post type. I think most plugins let you do that. And if you do not do it and you have no revisions.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yep.

    Jessica Lyschik: And it’s a bad thing.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I also learned that some of the shared hosting providers actually turn revisions off or just limit them to 3 revisions or 10 revisions. And then, yeah, I would be doomed because some of my posts have 100 revisions. For especially the source of truth. Yeah. So. Yeah.

    Jessica Lyschik: Yeah. You need to be aware of that sometimes. So there are different ways, not different ways. The way to limit the post revisions is through the, a constant in the wp-config file.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yep.

    Jessica Lyschik: And yeah, it’s true that shared hosts, they limit it probably because they do not want the data, the databases to blow up because every time a new revision is added, it is basically like a post in a database. You just do not see it, but it’s connected to the post. I think it’s, the post type should be revision or something. It’s not post. Yeah, it’s post type revision. So that’s why it’s filterable. And yeah, so yeah, if you have 100 revisions, you have like this blog post 100 times essentially in your database. If you just have a few blog posts, no one cares. But if you have a very huge site with a lot of posts and a lot of pages and maybe even WooCommerce running, for example, then your database goes whoosh and everything is huge. And yeah, so there is a good reason for it.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

    And the next thing we actually talked about it, that the rename of the edit action to detach for page list and table of contents, that’s now in 23.8. So you can see that in your interface. Oh, and here it is also the opt-out for block style state controls. We talked about the opting out of the responsive styles. And in 23.8, you also find an opt-out method from the state controls, which is, I think, going through the same— no, it says block states enabled opt-out. So there is another variable filter for that on the block editor settings.

    Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, it basically follows the other one for the responsive styles. Yeah.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So it’s responsive styles editing enabled is the variable. And the other one is block states enabled. And setting that to false. What else is next?

    Jessica Lyschik: Oh, more revisions. Add a code diff view inside the editor. Ooh, is it what it is? I think. Yeah, it is. It is actually what I think it is. So it’s kind of bringing back the old view that we had for revisions where it was just like this, like you know it from, if you’re a developer, you know how diffs look like. And now that we have the new visual revisions, now we can actually go back to that specific thing and maybe see if, I don’t know, any HTML tags have changed or any settings in there have changed, which is true that these are not as visible. With the visual revisions. So the visual revisions are great for like scanning the content and making sure like the content is as you wish or wanna go back or whatever. But yeah, I think this is actually a very good change to bring this kind of view back. Because if you need to go a bit more technical and see, okay, have block settings changed, for example, it’s not easy to see on the, on the visual.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right. And they have tried to make this also available in this, in the inspector controls in the sidebar, if there are any block attributes changed. But I think it’s helpful to see it in a, in a code edit view better than just to name the block attribute how that changed. So it’s, yeah, I think it’s a good, good feature set to bring back.

    Oh, and there was, I didn’t highlight that, but it’s, we talked about Presets management in 23.7. Now the— in 23.8, there’s also that font size presets and the shadow presets actually use this new preset management layer. So that’s actually already implemented and is now— it’s a code change in the background, but it’s actually streamlining the whole thing and makes it available for extensibility later on.

    Yeah, that was 23.8, and we are also almost coming up on the end of the show. It’s not the end of the changelog. This changelog was also really huge.

    Jessica Lyschik: The lists are endless for both 23.7 and 23.8. It’s probably also because of AI, I guess, has accelerated it quite a bit to get the pull requests done and finding things, fixing things, doing things. So it’s a lot. There’s a lot to go through, definitely.

    What’s in Active Development or Discussed

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. So I have 2 things that are for active development and what’s discussed, and they’re both for 7.2. So Ella van Durpe has a tracking issue of block editor paper cuts, which means to, to list all the small annoyances that she could find that people have issues with and put them all in a list to be fixed.

    So it might be big tasks like rethinking the appenders and inserters, how they actually behave, or writing flow, writing flow improvements, or even longstanding bugs that have been passing Excel to in the block editor, or selection quirks with Safari, or multi-block selections on iOS, or yeah, these kind of things. She found 48 issues to be fixed. If you have one that is not listed, feel free to put it in the issue and have it also on the list. She already fixed 9 items when I was putting this together. There might be even more now. So she definitely needs help with testing and commenting on those issues. So yeah, it’s a nice little literature for you if you have been working with the block editor for years and years and years, what you see that comes up. So I will share, of course, the link in the show notes.

    And then, Anne McCarthy for 7.1 had actually said, the release lead, that it would be great to have, because it’s hard to follow which feature comes in and what are the plans and all that. And she needs it for roadmap. And other people like Jessica and I, we need to kind of see what’s going up, ongoing issues or features that are in the works so we can test them and we can kind of figure out things. So she asked the teams that are working on features to actually put tracking issues together for the certain versions.

    So quite a few actually have already put in the tracking issues for 7.2, and I will share the search link. I haven’t gone through them yet to study them, but there’s an iteration issue for the notes features, for the dynamic galleries, for the media editor modal, for the pattern editing. Also how to extend the site editor. I’m really very happy to see that. Then of course for the responsive styles. And so all the ongoing things. Or Maggie’s custom states for blocks tracking issue. So you can follow along on the things because then they have sub-issues and you see which ones have already been merged and which ones are already in the works and are in review or these kinds of things. So it’s really good to follow along. It’s not for everybody because GitHub is not for everybody, but it’s definitely something to go there. And if you want, I haven’t mentioned it yet.

    Dear listeners, this will be the last episode on the Gutenberg changelog until December. There will be a break. And I’m very grateful for the break because Automattic, after a 5-year anniversary, allows you to go on sabbatical for 3 months. And I’m starting mine next week. So this is the last episode of the Gutenberg changelog.

    There will be a Gutenberg Weekend Edition, certainly not every weekend, but Justin Tadlock is going to take that on and he will do it either biweekly or monthly. It’s not quite sure yet because he has other duties, but he’s definitely looking forward to writing those weekend editions.

    So, dear listeners, take the link to the tracking issue as your homework for the next 3 months on my break. And of course, study every Gutenberg release in the meantime. I think I checked it out. So this was 23.8. And in November, when I get back, we will already beony 24.4 Gutenberg releases. So there are quite a few releases in there. 6 exactly. I will not catch up on those, but I will catch up on the 7.1— 7.2 again, 7.2 release, because it’s only about 10 days away when I get back. So that’s definitely the first episode that we are going to do in December. Yeah. Anything that you wanna talk about here that we haven’t covered yet?

    Jessica Lyschik: No, I think, I think you made a very good thing. I didn’t know about editor paper cuts PR. Well, my homework is getting longer and longer for the weekend. Definitely.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

    Jessica Lyschik: I mean, it will be sad to not have a Gutenberg changelog for the next couple weeks, but I guess it’s well deserved that you go on a sabbatical.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, thank you.

    Jessica Lyschik: And I feel very honored that I have been on the last show for now. And yeah, let’s see. If we can catch up.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Just to make sure it’s not a couple of weeks, it’s 12 weeks. So a long couple weeks, 6 couple of weeks. So, and yeah, I will share how you can reach Jessica on all the interwebs with the show notes so she doesn’t have to repeat it here. But I want to also point out she’s sometimes on the Greyd podcast with the Greyd conversations. And there are quite a few interesting episodes there. I’ll send, put also the link into the— is there one that you wanna point out about block editor or block themes or so that you had?

    Jessica Lyschik: Oh, I have not been on the show in quite a while.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay.

    Jessica Lyschik: I have been very busy in the background. So, but we do have very interesting shows. I think the latest ones were with Katie Keith and Matt Cromwell about products and, and stuff. I think there was one more person on there. I know this is horribly bad for me.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, no worries. No, I put you on the spot there, so don’t worry about it. But I mean, I can— I was trying to look it up. It’s about product companies and—

    Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, it’s about a product business. And maybe just— I think we redo that and I would just like to correctly say it.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. It’s How Can Product Companies Grow in WordPress Space Right Now? And it was with Katie Keith, as you said, and Aurelio Volle. He’s the founder.

    Jessica Lyschik: Oh, Aurelio. Yeah. WP Umbrella.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: WP Umbrella and Matt Crumbrall, founder of Roots and Fruits. Roots and Fruits.

    Jessica Lyschik: Yes.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: And they are, they’re talking about product companies and how they can be successful in the WordPress space, especially now. With or without AI and with the abundance of plugins now. So it’s gonna be interesting to see how you can build a business there. All right.

    Jessica Lyschik: Yep.

    Birgit Pauli-Haack: As always, the show notes will be published on gutenberg-times.com/podcast. This is episode 134. And if you have questions, suggestions that can wait until December, send me an email to changelog@gutenberg-times.com. That’s changelog@gutenberg-times.com. Caveat there, I’m not gonna pick up email during sabbatical on the Gutenbergtimes.com or on Automattic and very, very sporadically on my Gmail account. But yeah, send me things and you will see what happens.

    Thanks, Jessica, for being with me on the show. Thank you all for listening. And this is goodbye.

    Jessica Lyschik: Bye.

  • Gutenberg Times: Icons, Tabs, and responsive styles: the community gets to work on WordPress 7.1 — Weekend Edition 374

    Gutenberg Times: Icons, Tabs, and responsive styles: the community gets to work on WordPress 7.1 — Weekend Edition 374

    Howdy,

    It has been another evenful week for sure! WordCamp US came to an end and WordPress 7.1 was released.

    Your WordPress profile now has a shortcut w.org/@[yourusername]. If you want to check out mine w.org/@bph (don’t forget the @ sign) . Mullenweg mentioned in his closing fire side chat that this could actually work without the redirect in the future. Now that would be cool, right?

    Another cool and rather weird thing Mullenweg mentioned are Piplets. One self-contained PHP-file for your notes, no database, no hosting needed, for tinkerers who live in the Terminal window. If that’s you, grab the file from the GitHub repo and try it out. (64-bit PHP 8.1 or newer is required.) There will be 🐲. To be honest, it’s not my idea of simplicity, though. I am firm in the Obsidian camp.

    Apropo WordCamp US: All Talks are already available in the Playlist on YouTube  for your on-demand viewing pleasure. Or you organize a viewing party with your local WordPress Meetup. Just a thought. 😉

    Have a great weekend!

    Yours, 💕
    Birgit


    Nicholas Garofalo’s recap of WordCamp US 2026 in Phoenix covers four days, 1,100 attendees, 111°F, and a Contributor Day where 425 people formed 26 teams around goals they could finish by evening. You’ll get the Showcase Day migrations of The Ankler and Daily Kos, keynotes from Bo English-Wiczling and Loyal Pyczynski on judgment in the age of AI, and Matt Mullenweg’s closing pitch for simplicity, including Piplets, a single self-modifying PHP file with no database.

    WordPress 7.1 is out!🎉

    WordPress 7.1 “Mary Lou”, names after Mary Lou Williams an American jazz pianist, arranger, and composer who recorded hundreds of records.

    The release video is fabulous. WordPress 7.1 Highlights Video

    The WordPress 7.1 micro site with the featurettes, tiny videos highlighting the main features is definitely a beauty! What a pleasure to read and experience the most important updates!

    Screenshot of the WordPress 7.1 release site.

    Release lead Anne McCarthy kept a WordPress 7.1 release lead decision log, and it reads like the other half of the release notes. You’ll see why real-time collaboration, React 19, inherited-style display, and the Classic block removal were punted, why responsive styling got an opt-out rather than a pause, and how she decided to publish the announcement when auto-updates had already reached 300K sites while Matt Mullenweg was on the WordCamp US stage. Each entry links to the thread where the call was made.


    On the WordPress Developer Blog, Justin Tadlock goes hands-on with the WordPress 7.1 Icon Registration API and builds a restaurant icon collection from scratch. You’ll register a collection with wp_register_icon_collection(), add 13 food icons via wp_register_icon(), and see why he prefers a string-backed PHP enum over arrays for naming them. He also lists what 7.1 still strips: only svg, path, and polygon elements survive, and stroke attributes are removed, so stick with fill-based icons for now.


    If Justin Tadlock’s walkthrough is more than you need right now, Ryan Welcher covers the same API in five minutes in his video on custom icons in WordPress 7.1. He registers a collection and a single icon in PHP, loads a folder of SVGs from disk the way core does, and renders one in a template with wp_get_icon(). The gotchas matter most: the sanitizer strips fill="currentColor", and a function_exists() check keeps 7.0 sites from fatal-erroring.


    The block editor’s single biggest frustration is finally addressed, Jackson argues in his tour of the new features in WordPress 7.1, and he means responsive block styles. Over twenty minutes you’ll see thirteen features in action: hover and active states for buttons and navigation, the Tabs block, the Icon block with Aki Hamano’s custom icon plugin, the Playlist block’s waveform, the in-browser media editor, and a Query Loop checkbox that stops your related posts from recommending the post you’re reading.

    Gutenberg 23.8 released

    Selecting all blocks in a 1,000-paragraph post used to take 16.8 seconds; in Gutenberg 23.8 it takes 0.4. Release lead Jon Surrell’s post on what’s new in Gutenberg 23.8 covers that List View speed-up alongside the shareable revision URLs and in-editor code diff, and email notifications when someone @-mentions you in a note. You also get a real default block on the empty canvas, Audio-to-Playlist transforms, and, for developers, inner block templates declared in registerBlockType() and public Calendar components in @wordpress/ui.

    For the Gutenberg Changelog 134 episode, Jessica Lyschik, senior developer at Greyd, joined me to discuss Gutenberg versions 23.7 and 23.8. We also chatted about WordPress 7.1 and what comes next for the December release of WordPress 7.2 As always the episode with its show notes will come to your favorite podcast app over the weekend.


    🎙 The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #133 – Gutenberg 23.6 Release and WordPress 7.1 with special guest Faith Imokol, webdeveloper from Uganda.

    Plugins and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners

    If you build with the Ollie block theme, Gina Lucia‘s WordPress 7.1 walkthrough shows where the new core features meet Ollie’s tools. Responsive styling now lives in core, so Ollie Pro’s Responsive Controls shift to handling column and grid stacking, while its Class Manager picks up where the new hover and focus states for Button and Navigation Link leave off. You’ll also see how the Tabs and Playlist blocks, gradient-over-image backgrounds, and the persistent admin bar fit your Ollie site.


    Merging cells is still missing from the core Table block, and Aki Hamano‘s Flexible Table Block plugin fills that gap on 40,000+ sites. Version 3.9.0 adds WordPress 7.1 support and announces row and column selection to screen readers. You can merge and split cells, style the table, cells, and caption separately, and set your own breakpoint for horizontal scrolling or stacking cells on mobile. It also converts to and from the core Table block with rowspan and colspan intact. Aki Hamano is a major contributor to the Gutenberg project from Japan and co-tech lead for WordPress 7.1. There is a lot of crediblity attached to this plugin. And hat tip to Daniel Kossmann, editor of the Portuguese WordPress newsletter PainelWP 374.


    The new Tabs block in WordPress 7.1 swaps panels abruptly, since the Interactivity API toggles the hidden attribute. Elliott Richmond‘s Tabs Animation plugin softens that with a fade or a slide from any of four directions, plus a duration up to 3000ms and five easing options under Settings → Tabs Animation. It’s one small inline stylesheet with no JavaScript and no theme changes, and it switches itself off for visitors who prefer reduced motion. One setting applies site-wide for now.

    “Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2026”
    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 | 2025

    Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.

    On his livestream, Ryan Welcher got back on his son’s hockey team site with WordPress Studio Code, this time handing over the single post template. The first pass got close, then navigation broke, the header came in too tall, and the content width wouldn’t match the homepage, so you’ll watch him go several rounds with Annotate, clicking and describing what’s wrong. Two hours used 2.5 percent of his monthly limit. He also covers the 7.1 iframe change and a twenty-minute custom fields tangent.

    WordPress Studio the agentic local development app is still in beta. Help make it perfect!

    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



  • Open Channels FM: Signal – AI Insights, Open Source Guidance and Commentaries.

    A focus on guiding new contributors in open source, discussing AI’s impact, and adding insightful commentary.

  • How to Connect Claude or ChatGPT to WordPress With MCP (Step by Step)

    Learn what MCP is in plain English, then connect Claude or ChatGPT to your WordPress site step by step, with the safety settings that keep you in control.

    The post How to Connect Claude or ChatGPT to WordPress With MCP (Step by Step) appeared first on Themeisle Blog.

  • Matt: Homework from WordCamp

    A few times during the WordCamp US keynote, I asked for a show of hands and got mostly blank stares back, especially on the AI questions. That’s not a criticism — it’s a reading list. If the future is going to be built on this stuff, the WordPress community should be fluent in it. Here’s the homework.

    How models are actually trained

    When I asked who knew about the reinforcement learning models go through, Robert looked out and said “I see no yeses.” Base models are trained to predict the next word across huge amounts of text; the friendly, helpful behavior comes after, in post-training, where human/AI feedback reinforces some responses over others. If you use these tools every day, understanding that pipeline changes how you prompt them and what you expect from them.

    Start with Hugging Face’s Illustrating RLHF, a visual explainer. Chip Huyen’s RLHF deep dive is the best longer read, and Anthropic’s Constitutional AI paper shows where post-training went next. If you only have time for one thing, watch Andrej Karpathy’s Deep Dive into LLMs — pretraining, fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and why models behave the way they do, all in one sitting.

    Uncensored models

    Almost nobody had tried an OBLITERATED model. Since refusal behavior is added in post-training, researchers found it can also be removed — it turns out to be, roughly, a single direction inside the model that you can subtract out. Maxime Labonne’s Uncensor any LLM with abliteration explains the technique, and the paper behind it, Refusal in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single Direction, is short and genuinely fascinating. Whatever you think of the applications, it’s worth understanding that open weights mean the community can modify these models, the same way the GPL means you can modify WordPress.

    The open-weight wave

    Only a few hands went up for Qwen 3.8. The open-weight models coming out of Chinese labs — Qwen, DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM — are at or near the frontier at a fraction of the cost, and the smaller ones run on a laptop. I demoed one from this MacBook on stage. Token costs have dropped about 20x, and that curve isn’t slowing down.

    The easiest way to feel this for yourself is to run one locally tonight: install Ollama or LM Studio, pull a small Qwen model, and talk to an intelligence that lives entirely on your own machine, no cloud required. For a community built on the four freedoms, that should feel familiar — and exciting.

    Read one, watch one, run one. Then bring what you learned to your next meetup.

    It is really important to me that WordPress community members ride this AI wave.

  • Open Channels FM: AI for the Rest of Us

    An update on Open Channels News, new fall series (including “AI for the Rest of Us”), and a preview of the Open Channels FM 5.0 release coming in September.

  • WordPress.org blog: AI Creates Opportunity While Artists Ship at WordCamp US 2026

    WordPress.org blog: AI Creates Opportunity While Artists Ship at WordCamp US 2026

    WordCamp US (WCUS) 2026 just wrapped up after 4 days at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona. Over 1,100 people from around the world registered to attend, and thousands more watched online through livestreams. Contributor Day and Showcase Day opened the week before two main conference days, featuring over 50 speaker-led sessions across 4 tracks, including multiple workshops.

    The temperature reached 111°F (44°C), but golf carts ferried travelers between the Sheraton Phoenix Downtown and the convention center. Inside, attendees moved between session rooms, the Sponsor Hall, and the Happiness Bar.

    It’s hot, but it’s not Florida hot.

    – Loyal Pyczynski

    Sessions covered artificial intelligence (AI), accessibility, publishing, business, site ownership, and the open web. Speakers in different rooms often found common ground, noting the importance of good judgment and trust-building in the age of AI.

    Real Artists Ship

    Contributor Day followed the motto “Real artists ship,” and a new format to match. The 425 participants, including 29 first-time contributors, formed 26 teams around goals they could complete that day. Experienced contributors moved between groups and helped newer participants shape goals. Then, goal owners gave 30-second pitches, and contributors could move between teams when that work caught their interest.

    By day’s end, contributors had closed tickets, opened and shipped pull requests, and reviewed themes for accessibility. One team created description-list blocks for glossaries and product details, and another added email settings, a test tool, and checks for account, password-reset, and recovery messages.

    Other teams built a Photo Directory importer and updated Notes in the WordPress dashboard and Multisite documentation. More work covered PHP, PHPUnit testing, and guidelines for AI work within the project. New contribution pathways became a course on Learn WordPress, open to people who could not be in Phoenix.

    Every team ended the day with a 30-second presentation of what it had made, tested, fixed, or moved closer to release.

    Showcase Day Put Real Sites First

    If Contributor Day was about shipping in a day, Monday’s Showcase Day was about what happens after the shipping. Sites have to keep working smoothly for the people who publish, maintain, and depend on them. The case studies came from public services, independent publishers, community platforms, training systems, and large content operations.

    Manny Costa covered the first of those: civic websites where residents find services, apply for programs, read emergency information, and report problems. In that work, accessibility, governance, and editor workflows are part of the service rather than a final check box.

    Two of the case studies were about publishers taking back ownership of their content. Both sites now appear in the WordPress Showcase.

    See The Ankler in the WordPress Showcase

    Nicola Catton’s session described how The Ankler moved 15 newsletters to WordPress and took direct control of its content, subscriber data, revenue rules, and reader experience. Nicola detailed the massive migration, the thousands of rebuilt paywall boundaries, and the site’s brand-new block theme.

    See Daily Kos in the WordPress Showcase

    The Daily Kos migration was a similarly large-scale move. Ben Greeley and Allison McHenry centered their session on a community that writes as well as reads: 1.5 million posts, 88 million comments, and 2.7 million users, with a public beta that involved more than 500 community members.

    Other sessions dealt with the people who do the publishing once a site is live. In Aviral Mittal’s session, an AI agent built a page from a Google Doc using patterns the team had already defined. Andrew Adam described a library of about 100 written and video guides, with accessibility guidance included. Shared foundations covered repeat questions, while project-specific help and tips inside the editor handled the rest.

    Human Judgment in the Loop

    Early on, Bo English-Wiczling had opened Showcase Day by addressing the gap between rapid AI adoption and trust. Her keynote covered the move in developer work toward setting intent and supplying context.

    AI doesn’t remove your work. It moves it.

    – Bo English-Wiczling

    A first draft can now arrive in seconds, but an almost-right block of code may still miss keyboard navigation, use the wrong theme styles, or bring an unsafe dependency into a project.

    The importance of good judgment is familiar to the WordPress community. Bo tied it to habits WordPress contributors already have: reading other people’s code, submitting small changes, reviewing pull requests, and accepting critique in the open.

    The next morning, Loyal Pyczynski drew on his work at Disney and Meta for a keynote about tests, time, and creative confidence. His talk returned to a phrase from an Imagineering colleague.

    We need to make sure that we make better mistakes tomorrow. Success is an iterative endeavor, and time is our most precious resource.

    – Loyal Pyczynski

    Loyal described Disney teams that paired creative and technical leads early, then brought in experts for work another team could do better or faster. The goal was not to know everything but to know what the team should own.

    Design and publishing sessions drew similar conclusions as the keynotes. Michelle Hunt framed design systems as living feedback systems that need to preserve intent as production gets faster.

    K Adam White’s session centered on moving large stores of content into block patterns, with editors staying involved where automatic conversion still needed judgment. Nik McLaughlin’s Abilities API session looked beyond AI integrations to the broader structure the API gives WordPress developers. Brian Coords made a related case through block themes: approved patterns, templates, and real content offer a starting point, and design tokens add guidance that a blank-page prompt cannot provide.

    Machine translation got the same treatment. In a multilingual WordPress multisite case study of AI translation for technical content, native-speaking colleagues found output that was correct word by word and could still miss the intended meaning. Human review covered the gap between translating language and translating intent.

    The judgment question even reached hiring. The Making of a WordPress Certification introduced a standards-based certification and covered how the credential was created, checked, governed, and delivered.

    Trust Becomes a Product Practice

    Wednesday morning took the trust question outside the WordPress world. The day opened with a fireside chat between Amanda Ventura of Waymo and David Levine on what it takes for people to trust technology that moves through their streets.

    Ventura described trust as repeated work. Teams can publish safety data and listen before arriving in a new city, and they need a path for product teams to act on feedback. Her example came from accessibility testing. Screen-reader support helped blind and low-vision riders use the Waymo app, but it did not solve the physical problem of finding the right car. Feedback led to step-by-step directions and a horn control with a distinct musical tone that was easier to identify on busy city streets.

    Other sessions applied that standard to WordPress sites. WordPress Core committer Jonathan Desrosiers focused on supply-chain safety while Robert Abela’s session explored login security. AI tools can find security flaws faster than ever. That speed raises the need for careful checks.

    The rest of Wednesday’s schedule included sessions on security, accessibility, design, AI tools, and work for site owners.

    • Kathy Zant’s session proposed an audit for AI use, covering plugins, themes, content pipelines, and client sites, and it named consent, data location, disclosure, and legal review as questions teams should settle before launch.
    • Another case-based session compared two responses to navigation problems: one client received an AI search tool, and another received a predictable interface that editors could control. The planned lesson was simple. AI can be the right choice without being the automatic choice.
    • Joseph LoPreste’s session explored accessibility work no single plugin can complete: navigation, forms, headings, images, content, and interactive elements.

    Learning With Your Laptop Open

    WordPress beginner workshops ran throughout the event for first-time builders, with no hosting account or prior WordPress experience required. Participants made pages, posts, logos, and menus, and each person left with a WordPress site, a year of hosting, and a domain. These sessions laid groundwork to work with plugins, styles, and additional features. The beginner program, office hours, and Happiness Bar gave people several places to ask questions and get hands-on experience.

    More advanced technical workshops offered even experts the chance to hone their skills.

    • Łukasz Wilczak focused on reusable WP-CLI commands. They handled bulk content changes, block and shortcode migrations, link cleanup, and safe batch processing.
    • Vedanshu Jain designed a workshop around roles and review paths for AI-only teams. The planned outputs included a plugin stub, publishable content, or another real result.
    • Rob Ruiz built his workshop around WP Rig and automatic checks for preparing block-ready themes for the Theme Directory.

    Like all WordCamps, these sessions gave attendees skills and tools to bring home to their own projects.

    Simplicity Gets the Last Word

    The closing session started with city business. Michael Hammett, Phoenix’s first Chief Innovation Officer, read a proclamation from Mayor Kate Gallego declaring August 19 Phoenix WordPress Day, and then presented the signed document to WordPress Cofounder, Matt Mullenweg. The proclamation credited WordPress with supporting the small businesses, developers, designers, educators, and creators in the city’s growing digital and creative economy.

    What followed was a dynamic presentation and conversation between Mullenweg and Robert Jacobi, ending with a traditional Q&A. Matt’s thesis was simple: Tech needs to be simpler.

    I want WordPress to be known for simplicity, not just complexity.

    – Matt Mullenweg

    After a detour through why AI models now prefer simple, self-contained HTML files, the argument became tangible with WordPress Piplets, a 2007 idea built around a single self-modifying PHP file that stores its own data, with no database and no third-party packages. One file can hold up to 25 megabytes, about four million words, and load in about 50 milliseconds. For Mullenweg, it extends the experiments that took WordPress from MySQL to SQLite to Playground, and he floated the idea of a WordPress.org directory where people could publish, fork, and remix.

    Speaking of WordPress.org, it was announced that profile links are getting shorter, with w.org/username redirects like w.org/@matt already live, with full support just a few days away.

    Midway through, release leads were called up to press the button on the WordPress 7.1 release, and were awarded with applause as “Mary Lou” received hundreds of thousands of downloads.

    On contribution, Mullenweg expressed his desire to reward impact instead of pledges. The Five for the Future directory shows two million self-sponsored hours pledged each week from 150,000 contributors, and he questioned whether that reflects reality. The project already records what actually happened (commits, posts, tickets closed, WordCamps organized), and he wants recognition built on that record. He asked the same of the plugin directory, suggesting a focus on fewer better-working things.

    Audience questions covered AI licensing, data centers, and why open source communities compete more than they collaborate. On that last one, Mullenweg invited other open source leaders to speak at WordCamp, and encouraged working together. Copying good code between projects, he said, is the entire point of open source.

    Jacobi closed by asking who was at their first WordCamp; he had met more first-timers here, he said, than in the past ten years. One of them found the event by asking an AI chatbot for the coolest thing happening in Phoenix, came to Contributor Day, and left with one of its awards.

    Beyond the Session Rooms

    So much happens outside the session rooms. At the WCUS Happiness Bar, volunteers sat with attendees and worked through plugin questions, CSS problems, ecommerce setup, and new-site questions. An AFK (Away From Keyboard) room offered a quiet place away from the crowds. In the Sponsor Hall, people painted Wapuus with a local Phoenix artist, watched screen-printing, and talked between product demonstrations.

    The Connect art installation used photographs from the WordPress Photo Directory. Forty postcards paired images by contributors who may never have met. Color, composition, or subject linked each pair. Attendees could take several cards and a blank one, then add a connection of their own.

    Lunch did something simpler. People changed tables, picked up open seats, and started conversations with one question: “What do you do with WordPress?”

    Organizers and volunteers kept four days of rooms, shuttles, meals, and livestreams moving. Thank you to them, and to the speakers, sponsors, contributors, attendees in Phoenix, and everyone watching online.

    What Comes Next

    If you missed this year’s WordCamp US, you can find recordings of sessions on us.WordCamp.org/2026/. Be sure to sign up for email notifications, so you don’t miss out next year. Next stop, State of the Word, followed by WordCamp Asia 2027 in Penang, Malaysia, and WordCamp Europe 2027 in Málaga, Spain.


    Photo credits: Jaron Quach, Emily Chan, Wini Lao, Kendra Stowe, and
    Jennifer Swisher

  • WordPress Playground Explained: Full WordPress in Your Browser (Zero Install)

    WordPress Playground runs a full WordPress site right in your browser. Here are 5 practical ways to use it, plus the honest limitations to know first!

    The post WordPress Playground Explained: Full WordPress in Your Browser (Zero Install) appeared first on Themeisle Blog.

  • What’s New in WordPress 7.1? (Features & Screenshots)

    What’s New in WordPress 7.1? (Features & Screenshots)

    WordPress 7.1 is finally here 🥳, and we have been closely following its development.

    The new version launched on August 19, 2026, timed with WordCamp US. Its focus is on how you collaborate, style, and manage media on your WordPress website, and it fixes a long list of everyday annoyances along the way.

    Whether you run a small blog or a large multi-author site, WordPress 7.1 has changes that will affect how you work every day.

    Overview of the WordPress 7.1 release

    ℹ️ Important: As always, please don’t forget to create a complete WordPress backup before updating to the new release. If you are not using managed WordPress hosting, then you will need to run the update yourself.

    Here is everything that’s new in WordPress 7.1:

    Collaborate Better With the Upgraded Notes

    The Notes feature arrived in WordPress 6.9 as a simple way to leave comments on blocks. WordPress 7.1 turns it into a proper feedback system.

    The most useful addition is @mentions. You can type ‘@’ inside a note to bring up a searchable list of collaborators and tag someone directly.

    Tag team members with @mentions

    Even better, WordPress now sends an email notification to the person you tagged. This addition landed late in the release cycle, and it completes the feature.

    Your teammate no longer needs to keep the editor open to know that feedback is waiting. The email brings them straight back to the right post.

    You can also leave inline notes. Instead of attaching a comment to an entire block, simply select a specific sentence or phrase and leave a note on just that text.

    The selection stays highlighted, so everyone can see exactly which words the note refers to. In our testing, this removed a lot of guesswork from editorial feedback.

    Other Notes improvements include:

    • Multiple threads: You can start more than one conversation on the same block.
    • Text formatting: Notes now support bold, italic, code, links, and emoji.
    • Show more / show less: Long notes collapse by default to keep the sidebar tidy.
    • Private by design: WordPress stores notes as a special comment type, and 7.1 now excludes them from your public comment feeds.

    These changes make Notes genuinely useful for teams, agencies, and multi-author blogs. It is a solid step toward a better editorial workflow inside WordPress itself.

    Share a Link to Any Revision

    Visual revisions, which were introduced in WordPress 7.0 have been improved as well. They now include a new feature to share links to individual revisions.

    Sharebale revision link

    For example, let’s say that you want to show a team member which changes were made to an article. You can now open the revisions screen, pick the exact version, and copy the link from your browser toolbar.

    You can then share that link and when opened, the link will take users to the exact revision with changes highlighted.

    Visual revisions also get a new picker layout in this release. It makes browsing your edit history easier, with color-coded changes carried over from WordPress 7.0.

    Responsive Styling Without Writing CSS

    This is the feature we are most excited about. Responsive styling has been one of the longest-standing requests in the block editor, and WordPress 7.1 finally delivers a first version.

    You can now define how a block looks at different screen sizes directly in the editor. For example, you can set a smaller font size for headings on mobile without writing a single line of CSS.

    Here is how it works: Click the device preview icon in the editor’s top toolbar and turn on the new ‘Responsive styles’ option.

    Responsive styles in WordPress 7.1

    Now, switch the preview to Tablet or Mobile. From this point, any style change you make applies only to that screen size.

    During testing, we selected a smaller font size for a button in the Tablet view, and the desktop design stayed untouched. WordPress also shows a small badge in the block settings panel, so you always know which viewport you are styling.

    Responsive design and device indicators in site editor

    It works on two levels. You can set responsive styles in Global Styles, which apply to every instance of a block across your site, or you can style an individual block on a specific page.

    The editor canvas is also more flexible. Instead of being limited to the Desktop, Tablet, and Mobile presets, you can drag the canvas to any width and watch your blocks respond in real time.

    Drag to adjust device breakpoints

    Theme developers can even define their own breakpoints in theme.json. That way, the preview widths match the theme you are actually using.

    Style Hover and Focus States for Buttons

    Alongside responsive styling, WordPress 7.1 introduces interactive state styling.

    A new ‘State’ dropdown lets you visually style how blocks respond to interaction. For example, you can set a different background color for a button’s hover, focus, or active state and preview the change live in the editor.

    Interaction styles in WordPress 7.1

    Previously, changing a button’s hover color required adding a custom CSS snippet. Now, it can be easily done inside the editor itself.

    There is also a thoughtful refinement when you apply local style changes globally. WordPress now shows a quick review step, so you can choose exactly which modified styles to apply across your site and keep the rest as local overrides.

    New Tabs Block

    WordPress 7.1 adds a Tabs block that many users have been asking for.

    Tabs let you organize content into clickable panels instead of showing everything at once. They are great for product specifications, FAQs, or comparing options without making a page feel long.

    The new Tabs block in WordPress 7.1

    The final release has also added toolbar buttons for reordering tabs, which was a rough edge we noticed during the beta. Previously, you had to add tabbed content using a plugin, so it’s great to see this functionality now available as a core WordPress block.

    We also like that accessibility was not an afterthought here. The block follows the W3C ARIA Authoring Practices Guide, which means it works properly with keyboards and screen readers out of the box.

    New Playlist Block

    The second new block in WordPress 7.1 is the Playlist block. It lets you add a collection of audio files to any post or page, complete with track metadata, artwork, and a waveform visualization.

    New playlist block in WordPress 7.1

    This is a nice upgrade for musicians, churches, educators, and anyone who publishes audio. If you run a podcast with WordPress, you can now list recent episodes in a clean player without a separate plugin.

    A New Image Editor in WordPress 7.1

    WordPress 7.1 replaces the old inline cropping tool with a dedicated Media Editor modal.

    The entry point stays familiar. You still click the Crop button on an Image block, but now a full editing modal opens with freeform cropping, aspect-ratio presets, flip and rotate controls, and metadata editing in one place.

    New image editor in WordPress 7.1

    In our testing, the magnified crop view was the standout. It makes fine adjustments much easier, and the crop handles snap cleanly to pixels.

    The new editor also works with the Cover block, so you can crop a background image right where you use it.

    This will not replace a full photo editor. However, for the basic image editing most site owners need, being able to make them directly in the editor is a big usability win.

    Smoother and Smarter Media Handling

    WordPress 7.1 continues the client-side media processing work that started in WordPress 7.0. In simple terms, your web browser does the heavy lifting of processing images before they reach your server.

    This release expands format support in a meaningful way. WordPress can now handle HEIC photos, which is the default format on iPhones, along with UltraHDR, AVIF, and WebP.

    Until now, iPhone users often needed a HEIC to JPG conversion plugin just to upload their photos. With 7.1, that friction mostly disappears.

    Uploads are also more resilient. If your internet connection drops mid-upload, then the upload queue pauses and automatically resumes when you are back online.

    There are also several tiny improvements that make everyday WordPress tasks a little easier:

    • Smarter galleries: A new dynamic Gallery mode can automatically pull in and sort media already attached to the current post.
    • Attached images in the inserter: After you upload images to a post, they appear in a new ‘Attached images’ section, so you do not have to dig through the whole Media Library.
    • Infinite scrolling: The Media Library grid now loads more items automatically as you scroll. WordPress turns this on by default, and you can bring back the old page-by-page view from your user settings if you prefer it.
    Use attached images in Gallery block

    Together, these changes mean fewer upload errors and less load on your server. That is especially good news if you are on a budget WordPress hosting plan.

    The Admin Toolbar Now Stays Visible When Editing

    WordPress 7.1 makes the admin toolbar persistent. It now remains visible in the Site Editor and the Block Editor, instead of disappearing when you start editing.

    Consistent admin bar in WordPress 7.1

    The toolbar itself has also gotten a design cleanup as part of this change:

    • A clear back button (chevron) replaces the confusing W logo that used to double as a back button.
    • Your site icon now appears in the toolbar, and your profile avatar is a circle instead of a square.
    • Modern SVG icons replace the old Dashicons.

    In our testing, this made moving between the editor and the rest of the admin feel much more predictable. Each icon now means one thing everywhere.

    The ‘Howdy’ greeting survived another release. The core team discussed removing it during this cycle, but the change did not make it into 7.1.

    If you prefer a clean writing canvas, then don’t worry. The toolbar stays hidden in Distraction Free mode.

    A More Personal And Easily Navigable Admin

    Beyond the toolbar, WordPress 7.1 includes a set of smaller admin improvements that add up.

    Command palette improvements. The Command Palette (Ctrl+K on Windows, Command+K on Mac) now groups results into Recent, Matching, and Suggestions sections. WordPress saves your recently used commands to your preferences, so they persist across sessions.

    Command palette contextual suggestions

    Your admin color scheme in the Site Editor. The Site Editor reflects your chosen admin color scheme instead of always using a fixed dark sidebar. It is a small thing, but it makes the whole admin feel consistent.

    Site color matches admin color scheme

    A dedicated Identity section. Site identity settings like your title, tagline, logo, and site icon now live in their own Design » Identity section in the Site Editor. You no longer need to hunt through Settings and templates to update these basics.

    New 'Identity' tab in site editor

    Excerpts in the Posts list. The Posts list view now shows a short excerpt for each entry, making it easier to tell similar posts apart.

    Select many items at once. In the Site Editor’s list views, you can now click one item, hold Shift, and click another to select the whole range. If you manage hundreds of pages or media files, then this saves you time on bulk actions.

    Change a comment’s parent. The Edit Comment screen adds an editable ‘In reply to’ control, so you can finally fix comments that ended up as replies in the wrong place.

    Block Improvements in WordPress 7.1

    Several existing blocks get meaningful upgrades in this release:

    • Background gradients and images work together. You can now layer a gradient over a background image on the Group block and several other blocks. This is handy for keeping text readable over hero images.
    • Text shadows in Global Styles. Themes and users can now configure text shadows through theme.json and Global Styles.
    • Editable content inside the HTML block. The HTML block supports editable nested blocks. This is especially useful when working with AI-generated layouts, which often arrive as custom HTML.
    • Mark images as decorative. A new toggle on the Image block lets you mark purely decorative images so that screen readers skip them. Decorative images with meaningless alt text are one of the most common accessibility mistakes, and this makes the fix easy.
    Mark image decorative
    • Smarter shortcode handling. Pasting or converting an embed shortcode now creates a proper Embed block instead of leaving raw shortcode text behind.
    • Icon block upgrades. The Icon block now includes controls to flip or rotate icons, starts with a sample icon instead of an empty placeholder, and includes an icon picker organized by collections. Plugins and themes can now register their own icon sets, so expect branded icon libraries from your favorite plugins.
    Icon block options
    • Grid transforms. Columns and Gallery blocks can now transform into Grid layouts while preserving their content.
    • Query Loop exclusion. The Query Loop block gets an option to exclude the current post, so your “related posts” section never recommends the post the visitor is already reading.

    Changes to Look Out for Before the Update

    Most sites can update to WordPress 7.1 without drama. However, if you run a large site with many plugins, then a few under-the-hood changes deserve your attention before you click update.

    The editor is now always iframed. WordPress 7.1 completes a multi-year effort to place the editing canvas inside an iframe, and this now applies even when plugins register older-style meta boxes.

    In simple terms, the editor content is loaded in a separate frame from the rest of the WordPress admin screen. This keeps admin styles and scripts from affecting the editing canvas as easily, which can make the editor more consistent and stable.

    Most users won’t notice the iframe itself. Instead, you’ll mainly benefit from a more predictable editing experience.

    There is a compatibility consideration, though. Older plugins that add custom scripts or styles to the editor may not work as expected with the iframe. Blocks also need to use Block API version 3 to render correctly inside the iframe.

    WordPress 7.1 updates jQuery UI to version 1.14.2. jQuery UI is a JavaScript library that many older admin plugins use for things like date pickers and drag-and-drop screens. If a plugin on your site has not seen an update in years, then test it on staging first.

    WordPress now enforces multisite upload limits everywhere. On WordPress multisite networks, space quotas now also apply when a plugin imports media from a URL (a process called sideloading). Previously, this route quietly bypassed the per-site storage limit, so network admins can expect quotas to hold from now on.

    Our advise remains the same: always create a complete backup of your website before hitting update.

    What Didn’t Make It Into WordPress 7.1?

    A few features we covered during the beta cycle did not ship in the final release.

    The core team cut the ‘On This Day’ widget. We previewed this dashboard widget in our beta coverage, and we liked it. The team decided it needs more work, so it may return in a future release.

    Real-time collaboration is still in development. Google Docs-style co-editing received a lot of testing during the 7.1 cycle, but the team held it back to keep working on conflict handling and compatibility. You can try an early version in the Gutenberg plugin.

    The Classic block stays in the inserter. The team originally planned to hide the Classic block from the block inserter in this release. After community feedback, they reverted the change, so nothing changes for sites that still rely on it.

    The team also pulled Unicode email address support during beta testing. That work continues in a community plugin for broader compatibility and security testing before it lands in core.

    We think this caution is the right call. A collaboration feature that loses someone’s work would be far worse than a delayed one.

    Under the Hood (Developer & Performance Updates)

    WordPress 7.1 also ships several technical improvements for developers and site performance:

    • Faster editor startup: WordPress now preloads the REST API requests the editor needs on load, so the editor opens faster, especially on content-heavy sites. (#65636)
    • Icons API goes public: New functions like wp_register_icon_collection(), wp_register_icon(), and wp_get_icon() let plugins and themes register custom icon sets with server-side rendering and REST API endpoints. WordPress sanitizes SVGs against a strict allowlist. (Dev note)
    • Abilities API expansion: The machine-readable registry of WordPress capabilities, introduced in WordPress 6.9, gains filtering for wp_get_abilities(), execution lifecycle hooks, a unified public exposure flag, and client-compatible JSON Schema output. These are the plumbing that AI agents and external tools use to work with your site safely. (Dev note)
    • Block Bindings for List Items: Block Bindings now extend to the List Item block, so more content can connect to dynamic data sources like custom fields. (Details)
    • Speculative loading configuration: Hosts and developers can now configure speculative loading defaults (loading pages in the background before a visitor clicks) through environment variables and constants. (#65624)
    • Accessible tooltips: Core introduces a shared mechanism for accessible tooltips, replacing pointer-only title attributes in several screens. It is part of a 46-ticket accessibility push in this release. (Dev note)
    • Design system maturity: The wordpress/theme package introduces design tokens and a stable React ThemeProvider for consistent UI theming. (Dev note)
    • Author notification control: The notify_post_author filter now has the final say on post author notifications, which makes custom editorial notification setups more predictable. (Dev note)

    For the complete list of developer changes, see the official WordPress 7.1 Field Guide.

    Final Thoughts on WordPress 7.1

    We have been following WordPress 7.1 from development to the final release. It may not have a single blockbuster feature, but it fixes a long list of everyday annoyances, and that matters more for most website owners.

    Our favorite additions are the upgraded Notes and responsive styling. Tagging a teammate on an exact sentence, and knowing they will get an email about it, makes WordPress modern collaboration tool.

    And styling blocks for mobile without touching CSS removes one of the last big reasons beginners needed custom code.

    If you haven’t updated yet, then we recommend backing up your WordPress site first. Once you are in, set aside a few minutes to explore Notes, the revisions sharing, and the responsive styling options. They are easy to miss but genuinely useful.

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    The post What’s New in WordPress 7.1? (Features & Screenshots) first appeared on WPBeginner.