Faith Imokol shares her experience on a recent WordCamp Kampala panel about AI in web development, noting divided perspectives: while some Ugandans are excited about AI’s possibilities, others are concerned about job security and adaptation. She describes her personal transition into using AI as a collaborative development tool, driven by the need for faster production due to heightened competition.

Discussion moves to WordPress 7.1, covering new features such as customizable viewports via theme.json, expanded notes and commenting capabilities, enhanced SVG icon registration, and improvements to blocks like playlists and tabs. Both speakers are enthusiastic about the collaborative features and the evolving editorial workflow, particularly the granular notes system for streamlined feedback.

The episode emphasizes community feedback’s role in shaping new releases and encourages listeners to help test upcoming WordPress versions to ensure quality and translatability. The episode closes with practical tips and excitement for ongoing educational outreach and future Gutenberg advancements.

Show Notes / Transcript

• Editor: Sandy Reed
• Logo: Mark Uraine
• Production: Birgit Pauli-Haack

Show Notes

Special Guest: Faith Ruth Imokol

• WordPress profile
• LinkedIN
• Imokol Faith Ruth: Why & How to Create Gutenberg Blocks (2020)

WordPress Events in Uganda

Upcoming Events

• WordPress in Education Showcase 2026 August 7, 2026
• WordCamp Lira 2026 29+ 30 August 2026
• WordCamp is in Jinja 19th – 20th September 2026
• WordPress Campus Connect Central and Eastern Uganda Schools 2026

Past 2026 Events

• Uganda Website Projects Competition | 2026
• WordCamp Masaka
• Campus Connect in Masaka
• Campus Connect Kakumiro

WordPress 7.1

• WordPress 7.1 Beta 4
• Help Test WordPress 7.1
• WordPress 7.1 Source of Truth

More Developer Notes for WordPress 7.1

• Client-Side Media Processing
• Text shadow support in global styles
• Media library infinite scroll enabled by default
• Editable blocks inside Custom HTML block
• Editor Components updates
• Registering and rendering SVG icons
• Min width block support
• Background gradient block support

What’s new of Gutenberg 23.6

The post editor is going full iframe: what block developers need to know before WordPress 7.1

Video w/ Ryan Welcher: iframed post editor canvas

Stay in Touch

Transcript

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Welcome to our 133rd episode of the Gutenberg Changelog Podcast. In today’s episode, we will talk about Gutenberg 23.6 release and some WordPress 7.1. And that should be enough for today. I’m your host, Birgit Pauli Haag, curator at the Gutenberg Times and full-time core contributor to the WordPress Open Source Project sponsored by Automattic. And today I’m very excited that Faith Ruth Imokol joins me. She’s a web developer from Uganda, WordCamp organizer there and speaker, and a Gutenberg advocate since 2018, as long as the Gutenberg Times. And I’m glad she agreed to come on the show and talk through with this release and tell us more about the WordPress community in Uganda. Welcome to the show, Faith. How are you today?

Faith Imokol: Thank you very much, Birgit, for having me. I am okay. I’m very fine. Thank you, listeners, for having me as well. I’m excited.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Me too. Me too. It’s such wonderful to have you on the show. So, WordCamp community in Uganda is really busy this year, and it probably was last year as well because there’s a lot of experience there in doing WordCamps. So you, you were in WordCamp Kampala this year.

Faith Imokol: Yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And you were on a panel session titled AI and the Future of Web Development: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. So what were your takeaways? How are the people in Uganda kind of looking at AI and the future of the web?

Faith Imokol: Oh, well, the opinions on the future of AI in Uganda and how people view it are quite divided. Many are very hopeful, but some are also a little worried about what is going to become of them, especially when it comes to their jobs with AI. There’s a lot of talk on AI taking over. There’s a lot of talk on, okay, what do we need to do? Do we still need to continue with the way that we’ve been working or should we transition into full AI mode working with AIs? So there’s a lot of speculation around AI. And during the panel session, very many people had very many questions around that. They wanted reassurances on, especially when it comes to their jobs. Do we still have our jobs as developers? Can we still maintain the work that we are doing right now? Can we still continue using the tools that we are working with right now, or should we leave them and just take on AI and start working with AI. So it was a panel that was there to encourage people, to also highlight and offer corrections on some of the misinformation that was going, that has been spreading and going around in the community, especially in the WordPress community. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So how, you don’t have to go into details, but how are you approaching AI for your work?

Faith Imokol: Personally, I could say that I’ve been forced in some way to use AI ’cause I’m using it more as a pair working along with it in my development. And I’ve been forced to use it. Initially, I was a little hesitant. I like to do my own discoveries. I like to go through my own work and do my own troubleshooting. But with the AI coming in, it forced some of the teams that I was working in to have to increase the rate at which they produce and release applications. Why? Because the competition has now stiffened. If you’re not using AI to work faster, someone else is going to produce what you’re doing and they’re going to release it, and then you’re going to be left behind. So I kind of, at some extent, have had to take a back seat on doing my own personal investigations and leaving those to my own personal time. But when it comes to work, it’s something that I’ve fully incorporated into my day-to-day working. Yeah, still, I still apply my own knowledge as well. I don’t leave everything to AI to do it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s certainly quite prudent, yeah, to see how AI can really go wrong and you don’t know which tangent they go on. Yeah. And I have found, well, I’m using AI maybe a year now for a lot of different things and I have found that there’s no taste. Yeah. It has no feelings, of course. Yeah. And it has no empathy for anything. Yeah. So, human judgment is even more needed for anything that is released that was done by AI. And I think it becomes more and more clear the longer we practice with it. First, it’s a fantastic tool. Yeah, it kind of gets you to certain things faster, but it also is very verbose in code, in reviews, in analysis, and you really need to kind of slow it down and figure out what’s really important. And that it can’t do. It doesn’t know what’s important, what’s not important. Everything is the same.

Faith Imokol: I kind of think it’s like a very smart child who thinks they know everything, but they’ve not lived through the experience of what an adult knows.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So they still need guidance. That’s a good analogy. Yeah. It’s like a young person who just graduated high school and knows everything.

Faith Imokol: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I was that when I graduated from high school. I knew everything. But back to the Uganda community, the next WordCamp is in Jinja. Is that how you pronounce it? From the 19th to the 20th of September. It’s in the Civil Service College in Jinja. Just, just in case you dear listeners are in the region and you wanna go to a WordCamp in Uganda. But there’s also running from now to December several WordPress Campus Connect events with 25 schools, each one with at least 100 participants, 25 schools, colleges, or universities. And the program will bring practical, as it aims to, practical WordPress learning sessions to selected schools across Central and Eastern Uganda. And students will be introduced to the basics of WordPress, how websites are built, how to create and publish content and how they can use WordPress for school projects, personal portfolios, blogs, business ideas, and future technology careers. So these are the Campus Connect from the WordPress Education Program that started, I think, in the end of ’24 and has now run through ’25 and half of ’26. So, and Uganda is really taking to it and getting a lot of students involved with WordPress.

Faith Imokol: Yeah, we’re working hard to see that the future, the next generation that comes into the workforce is not too ill-equipped like the way we were. So these programs that we’re starting as the WordPress community are out to help the next, the coming, the young generations that are coming in, for them to know, to know the different skills that they can take on and to know that there are different tools that they can also learn that can help them. So it’s really a very amazing initiative that was started by Mr. Dumba and Moses.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. And they are still completely involved and totally immersed in that field. Yeah. Stephen Dumba also organized a website project competition for elementary schools, high schools, and colleges. And they had, I think, 20 teams in total there. And then each team had to create a website for a community project that is local and was very important to the community and how to communicate those problems and solutions. And that was also in June. Then there was WordCamp Osaka, Campus Connect in Osaka, and then Campus Connect in Kakumiro, if I pronounce all that right.

Faith Imokol: Yes. Yeah, you’re trying.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I’m trying. Yeah, I’m not succeeding. Okay.

Faith Imokol: Your pronunciations are very good.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So I’m really excited about what’s happening on the African continent in the various communities. Uganda is one. I think another very active one is Kenya. And there was one in Rwanda. I don’t know how active they are now. But yeah, I’m really excited about that.

Announcements

So we have a few announcements. 7.1 is coming Today is July 30th. So in about 3 weeks, we will have a final release of 7.1. August 19th is the release date. And it will be released on the last day of WordCamp US. The Source of Truth, that’s the book about things, yeah, that is published on the Gutenberg Times. This time it’s about 39 minutes to read and 7,000 words. It’s really an ebook or something like that. The table of contents, it’s very detailed. So you can jump into the sections that you want. Okay. That you need. And the developer notes are coming out for those who need more technical details. And there was one from the client-side media processing, the text shadow support for global styles.

The media library infinite scroll is coming back and is enabled by default, but there is a filter to disable it for those who need it disabled. And then there are now editable blocks inside custom HTML blocks. That’s a very interesting construction. So if you’re interested in that, we share, of course, the developer links in the show notes. There are some editor component updates that are interesting for those who are using those for development in admin as well as in block editor. And then a lot of people have been waiting for that part, registering and rendering SVG icons and icon collections. The developer note is out and it will come to 7.1. And then there’s also a mid-width block support and background gradient block support. So there are some things for the global styles that are only available through the theme.json. There is no UI yet for it because it just needs to simmer a bit and kind of brew a bit before developers are thinking about the UI. Is there anything that excites you from 7.1 from, from these developer notes yet?

Faith Imokol: Yeah, well, I really, really, really enjoy the new features that are coming in, especially the one thing that I’ve really been excited about is the collaboration tools. So I’m really looking forward to working more with those and seeing how they will help people collaborate on different WordPress projects.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, the real-time collaboration has been punted again. Or it was clear that it would not come to 7.1 because it has these underlying server technical approaches that depending on where the site is hosted, it needs to have a different approach. Or in enterprise, yeah, it’s a different approach and all that. And they haven’t narrowed down what the default value could be. But what I really like are the e-syncer. So it’s very rare that I’m sitting there and somebody else is sitting on their computer and we’re on the post or on the site at the same time. Mostly it’s because, yeah, I work remotely in Europe time zone with a lot of people in the United States that’s 6 hours behind. It’s more asynchronous. And I think the notes section is really getting some great love there that came in 6.9 and 7.0 and now has additional features. Yeah, I really like that.

Faith Imokol: Yeah. I see it growing. I see it growing into something much bigger. So I’m looking forward to whatever is coming ahead.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, I could actually see that. But the current publishing flow at the official developer blog is that the writers do a draft in Google Docs, and then 2 reviewers come in and help edit that or streamline it or shorten it or whatever, comment on it. And then the writer has to make all the changes after those feedbacks and then take the whole Google Doc and put it into a blog. So with the notes feature, we can cut out the Google section part because we can now comment on the, on writing on the blocks. Yeah, we can mention people and we can resolve issues from the notes. So it’s coming really close to streamlining that, our process. All right.

What’s Released -WordPress 7.1

What’s released? WordPress 7.1 Beta 4 came out. That’s the last release before the release candidate next week on August 5th. August 5th is also the deadline for the rest of the dev notes, the developer notes for that, and the Field Guide will come around that as well. And that’s also the time where string freeze happens. Release candidate is still 14 days away. The translators need to get into it. So string freeze means there are no new strings that come in that need to be translated. Because the WordPress ecosystem has a huge army of translators. And by the time the release comes out, it will be translated into about 70 languages, almost 100% from the new release. And that’s huge. But we need to give those translators a time on the polyglots teams to actually get it all in. And this is not a small release, although it wasn’t a long pipeline there. Yeah.

And if you want to test it, this is now the time to go to the Make/Test team and follow the Help Test WordPress 7.1. It’s also linked from the release post from the news section because it gives you an opportunity to not only dive into the new features, but it also gives you instructions and a video and you learn quite a bit about it. And if you find things that are not right, you surface that. And that is not only surfaced for yourself, but it’s also surfaced for millions of other people who are going to get this new version. And if you are fast enough and the problems are small enough, they might get the fixes in before the final release. So if you wanna help and contribute quite impactful, help test WordPress 7.1. It’s my call for action for this show. Did you get a chance to dive into some of the features yet?

Faith Imokol: Yes, I did. I did try testing them as well locally. And yeah, it’s really impressive. The work that is being put into this is very, very impressive.

Gutenberg 23.6

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right. So this brings us to the Gutenberg plugin release 23.6. And 23.6 is also the last feature release for 7.1. So everything that made it into the 23.6, almost all of it will come to 7.1. Everything that’s enhancements in the next release will not make it because we are past the beta site. But all the bug fixes that you find in your testing and you report them as issues or on the support forums have a chance to get in. Yeah. So let’s start with that.

Features

The first item that I want to point out is that you can now set the viewport for tablet and mobile values in theme.json. What does that mean? So the Gutenberg plugin editor had hardcoded viewports for what’s considered desktop, what’s considered tablet, and what’s considered mobile. And everybody had to work around those if you had a different idea about those viewports.

Faith Imokol: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: But now you can just set the setting in your theme.json for your theme and then everything will fall into place.

Faith Imokol: I think this gives us much more flexibility because initially with the default viewpoints that are set by WordPress, all sites end up having the same, could I say breakpoints?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Faith Imokol: I think personally I prefer to, I refer to them as breakpoints. for different screens that is in mobile responsiveness. And this is going to allow us to be able to customize this to our own liking so that our themes can be uniform with, uh, can have settings that have been preset by us than having the default ones that WordPress has added. And I think as I was going through the changelog, I came through the discussion because the viewports allow you to set the tablet and the mobile view. And there was a discussion of what could happen if someone set the tab view to have a smaller, should I say, breakpoint than the mobile screen. What could happen by that? And it was quite interesting that at that point we reverted back to the defaults.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Faith Imokol: Yeah. So it’s a good thing to have in the background, as I don’t think everyone will abide by the rules, but As you’re working with this and anyone who gets to work with this, I think you have to keep that in mind that you, you’re setting different breakpoints for different devices and tablets are larger than mobile devices.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. That’s the assumption that tablets are larger than mobile devices. So if someone puts a mobile breakpoint in that’s bigger than the tablet, that can probably just be a mistake or something like that. Yeah. So having a fallback to not ruin the whole site just because of a wrong value in the theme.json is probably a good measure, yes.

Faith Imokol: I’m thinking we now have these new Samsung phones that have come out, the flip phones. Does it become a tablet? I’m still trying to understand.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s a good question. So I saw a discussion, an issue that you can— that on Gutenberg to think through the consequences if you have more than 3 breakpoints. Yeah. Can we have multiple sizes? I mean, at one point it really becomes a usability issue. How would an editor or a user, keep in mind that, yes, I saw plugins that have 6 breakpoints and it’s really hard to control those because you never know where you have all the changes made. Yeah, and come back to it when you, when you start out, it’s probably easier to kind of think through it. But once you have a site and you need to make some changes, it’s very hard to figure out where all those changes have to be made. So it doesn’t become better with more breakpoints. I think that was a point why the Gutenberg developers started out with really honing in on the intrinsic designs, that there’s actually a seamless adaption to the screen sizes. And that’s where the Samsung folding phone probably will come in.

Faith Imokol: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That you’re not fixed on a breakpoint to just say, okay, yeah, it takes the space it has. Yeah. And rather do content queries rather than media queries. Yeah.

Faith Imokol: I hope we see how, what else will be added to this, cuz I think more is going to come up and shall have more settings being added to this.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: For sure. Yeah.

Faith Imokol: So, uh, notes, this is, features that I’m really excited about. It shows you how powerful Gutenberg has gotten. Being able to add notes. So the upcoming features, one of the features that we have will be auto-completing mentions. This is you’ll be able to tag an individual, a user, onto the post, and when you tag them, the prompt will be able to— will allow you to select from— it will pop up a list of the available users and you’ll be able to select the ones that you want to tag. And when they are tagged on the front end, you’ll be able to see that they are highlighted, that the tag name is— their display name is highlighted. So this is a feature that I’m really, really impressed by and hope to see how far it grows more because I’m seeing all the different possibilities that it can be used in, things like notifications. And I think this is one of the features that is being incorporated for the collaboration right. Later, even as we’re collaborating, because you can tag someone within the notes, but now you’re also doing inline, you know, you’re able to tag people within, within the context of the content that you’re creating. Yeah. So this is something that I’m really impressed by and looking forward to see how far that can be taken.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And now what a lot of people were waiting for, that you can actually highlight partial text and have those notes in the sidebar about a certain portion of a text and not just a whole paragraph block. And now you can also have multiple notes per block as well. So if you have here, the paragraph is, I don’t know, 10 lines long and you have something you want to note about the first line or the first 6 words or so, and then in the middle is something, and you could have notes for each one of them that then show up in the section. So it makes it much easier to streamline the conversation and to be really granular in what the notes are about or the comments are about. Yeah. And it now has a resolved divider. And so when you check a note that is resolved, it pushes it further down and has a little divider in the sidebar. So yeah, it really comes well together, this note section. Yeah. It really starts growing up.

Faith Imokol: Yeah, I’m seeing lots and lots of ways that this is going to, because I’m thinking with the resolver, adding the resolved divider, I’m seeing this going into something like project management and we’re able to add even more other statuses possibly besides just the resolved divider. Very impressive.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I can see some plugin opportunities there to kind of collect all those and have a separate kind of setup for a whole editorial workflow where the main editor just kind of looks through what are the posts and what are the comments. And you can see, okay, or you come in as an editor and see, oh, I need to go through all the comments where I’m tagged. Yeah. So these kinds of things, I think that would be an interesting feature set to add to it. Not sure that core is actually gonna aim for it. So that might be plugin territory because, territory, because it’s a very finite use case for that.

Faith Imokol: Yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: The next item is by default, the admin bar is now shown for post and site editor as well. Once you’re logged in, you see a black bar on your website on top of it with some links where you can jump in different places, and that is coming to 7.1 as well. And now that admin bar has been streamlined and kind of combines the site editor navigation as well with the admin bar. And it’s really, it’s a nice feeling. It kind of feels now a little bit more consistent, and you can access the things that you could access before. Yeah, you have your site icon. You also have the big W, and that was in there before, but the header of the site editor is now smaller or the block editor. And it’s all coming together quite nicely.

Faith Imokol: Yes. Coming in version 7.1, we are having, I could say there’s a kind of more a mix of both dynamic and static content blocks, block content, where we are going to be able to have what WordPress offers. I don’t know if this is the right way to present this, but currently WordPress offers you a way of providing or creating content that is you’re either working with blocks or you’re working with your default static HTML. And this new feature of adding inner content is going to allow us to be able to add dynamic content within static content. So you’ll be able to work with your HTML and still add editable content within your static content. that is your normal HTML, but within it you have an editable, let me say, paragraph block within there. So the other content remains static, but within it you have your inner content. And we’ve been provided a new feature called inner content that we can use to set this up.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Mm-hmm.

Faith Imokol: That is, if you’re working with if you’re creating your own code, you’ll be able to add this inner content feature and we’ll be able to allow you to create static content that has HTML blocks within it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. No, very well described. Yeah, I can see how that is really helpful, especially for patterns that you have editable sections and you say static, I say hardcoded. Yeah, don’t touch things as an editor. You’re right. This comes to 7.1 as well. And there are developer notes out. So it will be in the show notes so you can see the technical implementations for that in 7.1.

Faith Imokol: Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s quite a powerful tool, I think, because it’s— I see it becoming also— it’s some— one of those features that I feel can be added onto in different ways because you’re now not just building something that is strict, but you can modify it to appeal to different scenarios and different use cases. As current cases, either you have one block that is doing one particular thing, but now here you’re able to work with blocks and also normal HTML. So it gives, as a developer, I feel it gives me some power. I’m not just leaving everything to the blocks to be doing everything, but it gives me some power to be able to add different content styles. Yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Nice.

Faith Imokol: Yeah. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: The next one is part of the Icons API. Now 23.6 Gutenberg plugin now has PHP methods To render inline SVG icons from the registry. So that can also be used in PHP-only blocks or in other templates and all that. So that also comes in 7.1, is a new API for registering icons in WordPress, SVG icons and icons collections that came in with 23.6.

Faith Imokol: I can take the next one.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Mm-hmm.

Enhancements

Faith Imokol: Coming in 7.1. So we had some issues with the backgrounds in some of the blocks, that is the accordion, the post content block, the quotes block, the verse block. And in this, there were issues with the way the images were being handled, that is in the CSS, in the blocks, in the block CSS, which ended up blocking the gradient. It ended up breaking the gradient. So kind of could say that there was a conflict. In how the background images and the gradients were being handled. So it was causing a bug with our gradients. So this has been fixed in how the background images and the gradients are handled. And so you’ll not be able to see conflicts when you apply a gradient onto any of your blocks, especially the blocks that we have stated, that is the block quotes accordion, the pull quotes, the verses and post content blocks.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And actually, this fix also gives you a totally new feature. Now you can overlay the gradient onto the background image, and that gives a whole new way of designing things. And if you look at some of the PRs that are coming through and with a screen share there, it’s actually quite nice that the image kind of feels a little bit more lively when there’s a gradient on top of them. So it’s really good.

Yeah, the latest post block received layout and block spacing support. The latest post block was historically just a re-rendering as a block from the widget section of WordPress prior to that, and hasn’t gotten a whole lot of love after that because the query block is kind of also a latest block kind of thing. But it now has layout and block spacing support so you can fit it in other places quite nicely. Speaking of the query block, it now has an option to exclude the current post from the query block, from the list of blocks, so to speak. So this gives a better feel for your single post template where you can say, okay, so this is the post with the post content, but then underneath you can add a list of blocks from either the same category or for the same taxonomy and exclude the current block. Up until now, it would always also render the current block if it had the same taxonomy. So I think that’s a feature that a lot of people actually were waiting for. It sounds so minuscule. Yeah, but it’s actually pretty powerful.

Faith Imokol: So we have a new feature that has been added to the cover block. And this will allow users to restrict the kind of videos that they want to be added to their cover blocks. Initially, currently what we have is that WordPress has a variety of different video providers that you can embed into your cover block, but this will allow you to restrict. So if you only want to display only YouTube videos, you can add a restriction that we only need YouTube videos being uploaded in our cover block. While you can switch this up to any that you want, as opposed to just allowing it to have any video embedded provider adding the videos. So this is one of those features. I think it gives us more control over what you want. Could I say, when it comes to different service providers, they provide a whole different interface and layout for how their videos play out, and this will allow something like uniformity.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Faith Imokol: Because I think it can be a little strange when you have your website on— some videos are playing like YouTube content and then it switches into another format and it’s maybe Vimeo and it all looks so different. I see this creating a better display, a better feel, but it also gives you more control on what kind of content is acceptable.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Absolutely. So from the history, this comes after 7.0 allowed to actually use a video URL as a background for a cover. And after that was installed, there was quite some feedback from the community, especially the agency community and the enterprise level where they say, okay, I don’t want people just have video embeds from outside of, especially those that are in restricted industries, they’re regulated industries, they cannot just have willy-nilly URLs playing on their website. So they needed a way to restrict the video providers or even restrict that feature altogether. So this is a reaction of all the community feedback that came in to provide that.

Faith Imokol: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Speaking of video, the new client-side processing now also has a way to convert the GIF, an uploaded animated GIF. We know them from the ’90s, right? But some of the Screen recording features also do animated GIFs. And when they have one problem. It’s nice for smaller things, yeah, for 1 second or something like that. But if you have a longer GIF, you cannot control it. You cannot stop it. You cannot do anything. So some people want to convert that to a video. And now that feature is coming to 7.1, but it’s also made opt-in. So people have to say, okay, I wanna do this. And then it shows up in the block transform dropdown from a block toolbar. And then you can automatically have the GIFs converted to a video. It really depends on the video and the frame size and a lot of other things to get this right. But it’s a really nice feature.

Faith Imokol: Yeah, it’s a very nice feature in that I think now we have still, one has the ability to choose what they want, if they want to maintain the image GIF or to have it as a video. Whereby if it was a video, it could be lightweight and loads much faster than when it’s a normal GIF. GIFs tend to be quite heavy.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes.

Faith Imokol: On websites. Yeah. Just a funny scenario. I went on a website that had— was literally littered with GIFs everywhere. And I’m just imagining having to work with that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Faith Imokol: How resource intensive that can be and how the performance of the website. So I think this resolves a problem that was there previously that they had tried to resolve previously. That is by allowing the conversion of the GIF into a video. So now one can choose, they can either maintain using the GIF or they can choose to go with the video.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Faith Imokol: We had 2 blocks that were initially still, should I say, in production. That is the playlist block and the tab block. And these are coming out in version 7.1. The playlist block will allow you to add a playlist. If you’ve worked with any podcasting and different— if you’re doing any music playlists on your website, this block will allow you to be able to add a list of music that you want and you’re able to play it as well in one after the other. So it’s a very powerful block coming out in version 7.1. And I’m also talking about the tab— the tabs block. This will allow you to be able to organize content into tabs on your website. So it will allow you to group, literally to group different content onto your website. It’s also a very, very powerful block that I think will make a whole sense on how different content can be added onto our site. So maybe you can add on to that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, there were right from the beginning when Gutenberg came out, there were quite a few block collections that had tabs blocks in there. So finally it comes into core. I have a question for a developer. I don’t know how you feel about that, but doesn’t it seem that the details block, the accordion block, and the tabs block, they all kind of have the same metaphor kind of thing? Yeah, kind of. Yeah, you check something and something opens, and then you have a collection of check something and the tabs are there, or accordions kind of I mean, they behave a little bit differently, but aren’t they just a variation of the same idea?

Faith Imokol: I think it’s kind of a similar idea, especially when you see how accordions work. But they— I think it comes down to what kind of display is someone looking forward to. They may all be doing the same kind of similar thing, but someone wants their content to work differently. The tabs block, I think, gives us kind of more— I find it to be superior, should I say superior, to the accordion block in the sense that it allows you to actually group content that you’re displaying.

So an accordion can be used for things— I could say the most common example that I’ve seen where they’re mostly applied is something like FAQs, right, where you group questions and answers. But now looking at a tab, imagine you have something like a WooCommerce site and you have all this different content that is in line with that product. You have the details, then you have the, uh, should I say specifications, then you have the pricing. So all these things can be grouped into different tabs and it can allow someone to navigate through them while providing more concrete details within them. You can do the same with accordions. But I find that this provides a better way of navigating, you know, of navigating through content. Accordions, if the content is quite a lot, they may become, I think, kind of very bulky and they create a lot. You have a lot within one thing while tabs allow you to break down that thing. And I think also, I don’t know right now, I don’t know how far this this feature is, but I think tabs can also allow you to also add different other blocks, should allow you to add different blocks within it. So you can do a lot more within, within it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So, and I feel it’s a little bit of a— the metaphor that tabs do is kind of more like in an office setting where you have files, folders, and then files in them that are kind of— you pull them out of the register and then you have the writers on top that are your tabs and then you can— that metaphor is kind of in a website now. And I think people can navigate that better than figuring out how an accordion works.

Faith Imokol: Yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I think you’re right there. Yeah. Well, that was actually kind of a tricky question because that question should go to the WC3 body that does the standards for HTML because that’s what these 3 blocks do, details, accordion, and tabs. They put the HTML that’s available into a block setting and then offer that as a tool to design pages and lay out the pages. So the question is actually for the WC3 standards body. Why did you come up with these different standards there and HTML tags for that?

So I think, yeah, we have a few, 2 more updates on the visual revisions page. There is now a label for autosaves. Because the revisions historically only saved what you did, what was there when you hit the save button. And now it also adds the autosaves as separate line items to the revisions timeline. It might get a little crowded now, but you can collapse them quite a bit. And so when you leave a post that was autosaved and then come back to it again, you get a notification on top of the screen that says there is a newer version in autosave. And when you clicked on the link there, you were going back to the old revisions screen, and that has been solved too. So now this screen also goes to the new block-based visual revision screen.

Faith Imokol: I think this is one of the things— revisions is one of the things that I’m actually impressed by and excited about. I don’t know how many times I just could come back to my site trying to look through my content and going through the revisions, I’ll just give up and be like, you know, no need to go back. But I think this helps us to be able to track and actually know where in time we ended, what changed, and also being able to go through what the different revisions are.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Faith Imokol: And it’s quite also funny that the person who reported this was a first-time contributor.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Faith Imokol: The person who caught this. Yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Faith Imokol: So with the new settings that we have for the viewpoints, this is a buildup on what we had, we had talked about previously. That is being able to remember what we have, we now have a new feature that allows us to add our own custom viewpoints. in our theme that is in the theme.json.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: With the new states being for either the viewport states or the pseudo states, which is kind of hover and action on that and active, what didn’t work was that when you changed the color, you didn’t get a notification that your color choices didn’t adhere to the contrast for accessible websites. So, and normally when you change the color for the background and for the text, you get a little warning that this is not contrast-rich. You better check your color settings. This feature wasn’t working for the viewports for the mobile or tablet or for the pseudo-states. So when you change the styling for those states, you didn’t get the warning. So, and that has been rectified with 23.6 Gutenberg. And it is actually a nice, I would say bug fix, but it’s an enhancement because it was something that wasn’t there before. And I think the next one, we already talked about the inner blocks and the custom HTML block. I think we’re gonna skip through that.

Faith Imokol:

This is just, I think, adding up to what we had previously.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right.

Faith Imokol: Because now you can add this as when you’re developing, writing your own blocks, you can add the inner blocks feature in your blocks as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. And feedback was for the block visibility. Now you actually have a setting in the theme.json to opt out so your editors wouldn’t be able to change the block visibility on any of your blocks. There’s a new theme.json property there. I think some people wanted to kind of look at that and have that available.

Faith Imokol: The next issue we have, enabling text alignment to be set by viewpoint state. So this will allow you in your, when you’re setting up your text and you’re aligning it, you can have different alignments based on different viewpoints. You can choose to, let me say, left align on the desktop and then right align on your mobile or on your tablet. So this new feature will allow you to be able to set up different alignments for different viewpoints.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes, I really like that because sometimes you have a text that’s in— oh, I’m— that might be nice centered on a mobile, but it’s on this, on the big screen, you just can’t read it. Yeah. So you want it left aligned or something like that. The next one is an enhancement to the grid block. Sometimes we use the same terminology for different things. I just need to make sure that I’m looking at the same thing here, that it’s actually— it’s about the grid block. So there’s now an option to stretch the columns with an autofit for better layout flexibility. So it’s adapting to the screen.

If you wanted to, or you can say I have a fixed column width or fixed relationship to the other columns, but now there’s also that option to stretch the column with autofit.

Faith Imokol: So with the new icons feature, we now can group, should I say, we can group the different icons into different collections. WordPress is offering us a way of doing this and they’ve given us new tools, developers especially, to be able to create different groups for icons. So you can group your icons, maybe these are WordPress icons, these are Font Awesome icons, these are whatsoever different, uh, places where you’re picking your icons from. So you can group your icons. This is a very nice feature, I think, to be able to allow you to streamline so you can pick from one collection over the other. But this is one of the features that is coming in together with the updates that are being done to the icons.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Exactly. Yeah. In the same vein now, developers are really happy about that, that they can now use digits and underscores in icon slugs. That was part of— it’s part of the registry API. And in 23.6, those things were added to the API for coming into 7.1.

Faith Imokol: Yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So I think when I go through the rest of the changelog, I think we are through with that, what we talked about. But 23.6 again had about 400 PRs in there. And I’m really happy that the show is not more than an hour or so because we could kind of go on and on about a lot of things in there.

For listeners, when we do the rundown, it has 38 pages and we’re kind of skipping over over 30 of those. So there’s a lot of work getting into WordPress 7.1, especially because the 3.6 release of Gutenberg was the last one. So everybody wanted to kind of get stuff in. That’s why it’s so exploded. But it’s mostly bug fixes from things that were in before. So we are not talking about those here. But make sure that you read the release notes that are on the Make blog and then, yeah, there’s a lot of information coming at you for 7.1. So carve out the time to study some of those that are really important for you.

Tools

One of them I wanted to highlight is on the Gutenberg Times. There is a blog post about how to approach the iframe editor for the post editor. So the iframe that every block editor is now going to be loaded in an iframe. That has the advantages that other designs and artifacts from the admin page do not creep into the editor. And that has been done in the site editor, template editor, and the pattern editor since 2021. Only the post editor, who was— that was the first one that was a block editor, was still loaded in an admin page. And now with 7.1, the post editor will also go into an iframe. But with the history of older blocks and older block collections, there might be some quirks there.

The rule of thumb is if you load your block in the site editor in a template or something like that and it works, then it will also work in the post editor with no problem with the post editor iframe. If you see quirks, you probably— and the article is for developers and it goes through, okay, what were other people doing with the post editor that might not work with the iframe. And it goes through all the different scenarios and how to fix them or how to alleviate them. But there’s a lot of anxiety, but I have yet to see blocks that break in the iframe. But I only have a certain viewpoint there. I only use certain things. I’m gonna put the livestream YouTube video as well as the link to the article on the Gutenberg Times into the show notes so you can all follow up on it.

All right, so you made it, Faith! Yay, congratulations!

Faith Imokol: Thank you.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right, dear listeners, as always, the show notes will be published on gutenbergtimes.com/podcast. This is the 133rd episode; 133 is the episode number. And if you have questions, suggestions, or news, just send them to us in the changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. That’s changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. And thank you, Faith, for joining me for the first time. You did an awesome job. Thank you so much. And I hope you come back. I didn’t scare you away.

Faith Imokol: Thank you too. Thank you too. Thank you for having me.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, absolutely.

Faith Imokol: Absolutely.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: We have fun. Yeah. Thank you for listening, dear listeners, and goodbye and to the next time. Bye-bye.

I noticed my Model X was uploading ~2.6gb of something to Tesla when it parked and connected to WiFi.

Hopefully turning all these settings off stops it; otherwise, I might need a new car. But are any good?

Hi there,

This week I realized, I have been building websites for 30 years. from Notepad and hand-coded HTML to HomeSiteX over Coldfusion to WordPress, Nodejs and ReactJS to Python and Claude. It’s been a fantastic journey. It never gets old. I still learn new things every single day. I cherish most the friends I made along the way. I also found my notes about the WordCamps I attended, spoke at and organized. The first one was WordCamp Tampa in 2014. In 2026, I will probably attended my 30th WordCamp as well, Athens in December 2026. It’s a bit out, so let’s see if it works out.

Back to the here and now: It’s finally here the WordPress 7.1 Source of Truth with all the big and small changes coming to a WordPress instance near you. It’s again more like a book. Digest in small dosis.

Have a fabulous weekend!

Yours,
Birgit

WordPress 7.1 updates

• WordPress 7.1 Beta 4 was release this week.
• It’s still time to Help Test WordPress 7.1
• The WordPress 7.1 Source of Truth is out.

On the WPBuilds podcast series At the Core, Anne McCarthy and I talked with Nathan Wrigley about WordPress 7.1. We cover responsive styling, the persistent admin bar, and richer inline notes, plus why the new image crop modal and customisable viewports change your day-to-day editing. You’ll also hear how community feedback saved the Classic Block, where the collaborative editing outreach stands, and which developer changes to test now.

Responsive styling finally lands in the block editor, and The WP Minute+ podcast has release lead Anne McCarthy demoing it with Eric Karkovack. You’ll also get the reasoning behind what didn’t make 7.1, including collaborative editing, plus how Classic Block deprecation is being paced. Anne talks about her first turn as release lead and points out hidden gems like the ‘On This Day’ widget and custom icon registration for the Icon block. The episode Why WordPress 7.1 Will Improve Your Workflow is also available as video.

More Devnotes:

• Filtering Site Editor Screens in WordPress 7.1
• New Block Support: Minimum Width
• New Block Support: Background Gradient (background.gradient)
• Design System Theming in WordPress 7.1
• JSON Schema preparation for client compatibility in WordPress 7.1

There are still more to come and they will be published next week, together with the WordPress 7.1 Field Guide.

A list of all the dev notes can be reviewed from the Make Core blog

Anne McCarthy gives a candid account of the punted inherited styles indicator and its design dead ends. If you’ve ever watched someone style a template expecting it to apply site-wide, that’s the problem she’s chased since the FSE Outreach Program. Blue dots, diamonds, tooltips versus infotips, two competing reset paths — none settled, and summer holidays thinned the reviewer pool. She’s aiming at 7.2.

Gutenberg 23.6 released

Last week, Gutenberg 23.6 was already released. The WordPress 7.1 tech co-lead. Aki Hamano highlighted in his post What’s new in Gutenberg 23.6? (July 22, 2026)

• The Playlist and Tabs blocks are now stable
• Enhancements to Notes
• A dynamic mode for the Gallery block
• Icon collections and a custom icon registration API

This week on the Gutenberg Changelog podcast, my guest was Faith Imokol from Uganda. We began with the wonderful work of the WordPress community there, who have put together a series of events — WordCamps, Campus Connect, and a website competition — bringing WordPress to schools, colleges, and universities, and to thousands of students and users. Then we turned to the latest release and had a great time going through the details. As always, the episode drops in your favorite podcast app over the weekend.

The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #132 – Proposals for Core, Calls for Testing, WordPress 7.1 and Gutenberg 23.4 and 23.5

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

No PHP template, no shortcode, no custom block — Meta Box fields can now feed core blocks directly through block bindings for custom fields. Lua Nguyen shows the setup: select a Paragraph, Heading, Image, or Button, open Attributes in the sidebar, pick a Meta Box source, choose your field. Sources cover post, term, author, and settings-page fields, and an image field binds URL, alt, title, and caption separately. WordPress 6.5+, though the Attributes panel needs 6.9.

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

Coming to the Site Editor from Elementor or Divi means learning new vocabulary, and Ollie’s ground-up guide to the WordPress Site Editor by Gina Lucia covers it: templates, template parts, patterns, global styles, navigation, the Font Library, and each toolbar button, starting at Appearance → Editor. A comparison table weighs both approaches on performance, flexibility, and portability. Ollie-specific tips sit alongside the core explanations, so you can read past them if you use another theme.

A typical Elementor page ships 200–400 KB of extra frontend assets, three to five times a native block build — the number behind Bikash Pun Magar‘s case for custom Gutenberg blocks over page builders on client sites. You get conditional per-block asset loading, HTML you control line by line, and content stored in native block grammar rather than a proprietary format. He’s fair about where Elementor still fits: prototypes and solo builders wanting pixel control without code.

The theme.json schema resolves to more than 40MB across hundreds of nested properties, which is why Sérgio Santos built a form-driven visual editor for theme.json as a VS Code extension. Fields come from the official schema rather than hand-written forms, and a weekly scan of core and Gutenberg adds experimental properties with honest badges. The feature Santos says changed his workflow: every preset shows the CSS variable name it will generate as you type the slug.

There’s also a companion WordPress plugin that mounts the same editor under Appearance. There will be dragons though: Santos flags it as an experiment as it overwrites theme.json in place with no revisions or backups.

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.

If your custom blocks touch the global window or document, WordPress 7.1 will break them. Ryan Welcher walks through the forced iframed post editor canvas, landing August 19th with no flag to check and no opt-out. Five demos cover viewport detection, click-outside handlers, editor styles, admin body-class CSS, and unmaintained third-party libraries, with fixes using ownerDocument, defaultView, useRefEffect, editorStyle in block.json, and patch-package. His demo plugin ships broken and fixed versions of each.

Welcher also published a detailed tutorial: The post editor is going full iframe: what block developers need to know before WordPress 7.1

What’s new in Playground?

Some people still assumed every Playground was temporary. Persistence, multiple sites, Blueprints, file editing — all already there, just easy to miss, which is what the new WordPress Playground interface sets out to fix. A customizable Dock gathers those tools into one bottom toolbar: New, Playgrounds, Blueprint, Site Settings, Database, Files, Logs, Export. It’s navigation, not new capability. The design came out of the Playground table at WordCamp Europe Contributor Day, after Adam Zieliński used AI to explore 400+ variations.

Point a coding agent at WordPress Playground and it reads an instruction file first. The wp-playground agent skill now splits that file into a 52-line router plus focused references, so your agent loads the CLI details only for a local run and the sharing rules only for a share link — encoding, CORS, public hosting. Fellyph Cintra‘s four-scenario benchmark scored 24/24 against 22/24 for the old version, one run per prompt. All this is explain in more details in the post One Playground, three workflows: Consistent agent guidance across surfaces in the team’s Make Blog.

In a third post, Fellyph Cintra walks you through programmatic site management in WordPress Playground: from DevTools you can list, create, save, rename, and switch sites, change PHP or networking, and run PHP inside a site to check active plugins. Order matters — temporary sites must be saved before you can rename or reconfigure them.

One caveat worth knowing if it runs alongside the other Playground item: this API belongs to playground.wordpress.net only. It isn’t in the @wp-playground/client package, the CLI, or embedded Playgrounds via /remote.html — those need the JavaScript API instead.

AI and WordPress

Carlo Daniele‘s guide to the Abilities API for plugin developers stays on fundamentals: the input schema, output schema, callback, and permission check that together form an ability’s contract, and the WP-CLI commands that let you inspect one. A fresh install ships three — site info, user info, environment info. His example registers an audio-to-blocks process from an existing plugin and triggers it over the wp-abilities/v1 REST route.

Where Carlo Daniele registers a single ability, Jonathan Bossenger composes three into your first AI-powered WordPress plugin. Two call the AI Client, a third orchestrates them via wp_get_ability() and execute(), turning an image URL into a draft post. The same ability then answers over curl, from a React settings page, and from Claude Desktop through the MCP Adapter. Gotchas included: base64 data URIs for vision providers, stray markdown fences, and request timeouts.

One rule for this stream: no hand-written code. Ryan Welcher takes a full WordPress site build with Studio Code end to end for his son’s hockey team, and you watch a custom post type, a teams taxonomy, an Advanced Query Loop roster, and junior/intermediate/senior tabs come together by direction alone. The highlight is the agent reaching for block bindings unprompted. The lowlight: rogue PHP metaboxes, and a PHP-first answer where he wanted a SlotFill.

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

The main theme of this month’s WordPress news is measurement. Most of what shipped in July shows you something that your site was already doing without telling you.

WPForms can now show which form field people abandon, and AIOSEO can tell you the day a plugin sets your homepage to noindex. On top of that, WPVibe crossed 5,000 installs, and HelpJet launched as a new AI support chatbot.

Let’s take a look at what’s new in the world of WordPress for July.

WPForms Launches Built-In Analytics to Track Form Performance

If visitors abandon your WordPress forms before submitting them, you’re usually left guessing what went wrong. Until now, there was no easy way to identify where people dropped off or why.

WPForms 2.0 changes that with WPForms Analytics, a built-in form tracking suite that lets you see where users abandon your forms right from your WordPress dashboard.

The most powerful feature is the field-level analytics. A field-by-field table shows interactions, time spent, errors, and abandonment for every part of your form. That tells you the exact point where people give up.

That might be a phone number field people do not want to fill, or an address field that throws errors. Once you know which one it is, the fix is usually simple: remove the field, reword it, or make it optional.

Your All Forms page now shows views, entries, and conversion rate for every form.

Each form also gets its own dashboard, with filters for the last 7, 30, or 90 days.

There is a built-in AI chat as well. You can ask it what is hurting your conversions, and it reads your form data and tells you what to fix first.

WPVibe Passes 6,000 Installs and Adds Page Builder Integrations, AI Code Snippets, and Memory

WPVibe, the WordPress MCP server built by SeedProd, has crossed 6,000+ active installs on WordPress.org.

WPVibe lets you manage your WordPress site by simply chatting with your favorite AI assistant. Instead of clicking through admin screens, you describe what you want, and the AI does it for you. It works with Claude, ChatGPT, Codex, Cursor, and more.

Here is what arrived in the last few weeks:

• Page builder integrations: Your AI assistant can now automate tasks in Elementor, Divi, SeedProd, and Beaver Builder.
• AI code snippets: Ask AI to write custom code for your site. That removes one of the most intimidating parts of WordPress for non-developers.
• Memory: WPVibe remembers how you like to run your site, so you don’t have to repeat yourself.
• AI recipes in your dashboard: WPVibe suggests ready-made automation ideas picked for your site.

Related: How to connect AI agents to your WordPress site

We believe that WPVibe is one of the more practical answers to the question of what AI can actually do for WordPress users. It handles the repetitive admin work, and you stay in control.

WordPress Ships Major Security Fixes

WordPress 7.0.2 came out on July 17 as a security release that fixed one critical and one high severity issue. Because of the severity, the WordPress.org team turned on forced updates for affected sites, so many sites are already patched.

The two security issues allow code to run on a default install without anyone logging in. Both are now in CISA’s catalog of known exploited vulnerabilities, so it is worth confirming your version rather than assuming.

Head over to Dashboard » Updates and check the version you are on. If it reads 7.0.2, 6.9.5, or 6.8.6, then your website is fine. Otherwise, we recommend updating your website now.

7.0.2 also includes the earlier 7.0.1 maintenance release and its 31 bug fixes across Core and the Block Editor, so a single update gets you both.

HelpJet: The AI Chatbot That Answers Your Customers’ Questions in Seconds

HelpJet is a new AI support chatbot built by the team at HeroThemes, a WPBeginner Growth Fund company. It learns your help documentation and answers customer questions from it, 24/7, without needing anyone on your team to be online.

Setup is simple. You add your help articles, URLs, and even private standard operating procedures, and the chatbot is ready in about five minutes.

From there, it takes the repetitive questions off your team’s queue. Anything it cannot answer is passed to a human. HelpJet then learns from that reply, so it can handle the same question next time.

On a WooCommerce store, it can also read your product data, including variations, stock levels, and shipping and tax rules. So a shopper asking about a specific product gets a real answer, not a link to your policy page.

You can customize the chatbot and display it with no code required. It also runs on Shopify and Squarespace.

For more details, see our HelpJet announcement post.

AIOSEO Introduces SEO Alerts: An Early Warning System for Site Issues

Serious SEO problems rarely announce themselves.

For example, a plugin update can quietly set your homepage to noindex, which tells search engines not to list it. Or your robots.txt file may stop responding after a server migration, and Google pauses crawling until it can read the file again.

To solve this, All in One SEO, one of the most popular WordPress SEO plugins, has introduced SEO Alerts, which checks three things every hour: whether your homepage is set to noindex, whether your robots.txt file is reachable, and whether your XML sitemap is loading.

You can receive alerts by email or Slack. You configure it once, and AIOSEO monitors your site from there, so you hear about a problem within the hour instead of weeks later. SEO Alerts is free on every plan, including the free AIOSEO Lite version.

AIOSEO has also introduced Event and Job posting schema, available in all paid plans, starting with Basic. This schema is code that helps search engines show your events and job listings directly in search results.

ActiveLayer Launches for Easy Digital Downloads

ActiveLayer, the new AI spam protection service, has launched its Easy Digital Downloads integration. It checks product reviews and new customer registrations as they are submitted, and blocks the ones it scores as spam.

That matters most for reviews, since spam ones drag down the star rating shoppers see in Google. Reviewers who already bought the product skip the check, and checkout is not affected.

ActiveLayer also covers WordPress comments, the major form plugins, and signups on WooCommerce and membership platforms.

In Other News

• 404 to 301 is a complete and free redirect manager and 404 error monitor for WordPress. You can build custom redirects with exact, prefix, or pattern-based (regex) matching, send every remaining 404 to a page you choose, and keep a full log of broken links hitting your site. Optional email alerts tell you the moment a URL starts getting hit.
• WooCommerce 11.0 is now scheduled for release on August 4. The team postponed the original July 28 date after finding a fatal error during release-candidate testing. The update brings performance improvements for larger stores, better customer account and email flows, and improved reporting.
• SearchWP improves WordPress faceted search through a new WPFilters integration. Filtering now happens before ranking, so visitors can narrow results by category or post type while SearchWP keeps its relevance ordering intact.
• Advanced Coupons adds WordPress Abilities API support in version 4.7.4. You can connect an AI assistant like Claude Desktop and manage your WooCommerce coupons with plain-language requests, and the integration is included in the free plugin.
• WordPress.tv is now on Apple TV. Automattic released a free app that brings thousands of WordCamp talks, tutorials, and community sessions to the big screen. It is a relaxed way to learn WordPress from the people who built it.
• AIOSEO’s Broken Link Checker now detects dead YouTube and Vimeo videos on its paid plans, not just broken URLs. A deleted video still returns a healthy status code, so standard link checkers never notice, while your visitors see a black box where a tutorial used to be.
• WordCamp US 2026 is heading to Phoenix, Arizona, on August 16-19. Tickets include Contributor Day, Showcase Day, and two conference days with more than 50 talks and workshops.
• SaveTo Wishlist added a WooCommerce Gift Registry extension, so shoppers can turn any wishlist into a shareable registry for weddings and baby showers. A separate update brings default wishlists for new customers, Abilities API support, and on-demand analytics syncing.
• WooCommerce shared its plans to focus most of its product and engineering teams on the core plugin for the next three months. The team is re-reviewing a backlog of over 2,300 open issues and 500 pull requests, most of them filed by merchants and developers.
• WordPress 7.1 Beta 4 is ready for download and testing. As always, use a staging or local site rather than a production website. The final release is expected on August 19 at WordCamp US. For a detailed overview, see our article What’s coming in WordPress 7.1.

New Tools & Plugins

• HelpJet: An AI support chatbot that trains on your docs and answers customer questions 24/7. Works with WordPress, WooCommerce, Shopify, and more.
• ActiveLayer: AI-powered, server-side spam protection, now with native support for Easy Digital Downloads reviews and registrations. No CAPTCHAs required.
• WPVibe: Connect your WordPress site to Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and other AI assistants. Now with page builder integrations, AI code snippets, and memory.
• LedgerPort: A QuickBooks connector for WooCommerce and Shopify stores that matches your books to the payouts that actually hit your bank account.

That’s everything for this month. A security update to install, smarter analytics to explore, and a few new AI tools worth testing on a staging site.

If there is a story or a plugin you think we should cover in the next issue, then we would love to hear about it. Reply and let us know, and we will see you in the next Spotlight.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post WPBeginner Spotlight 26: Form Analytics, More AI Tools, and Smarter SEO Monitoring first appeared on WPBeginner.

There’s also a #ceo Slack channel where anyone can drop in and request a meeting, which my esteemed colleague Damianne President did, and this morning we had an interesting chat that set my mind racing about how we might engineer happiness in the future.

One overriding assumption: Personal agents will trounce company agents in most cases.

Your personal agent can — or soon will — know all your history, your calendar, your email, your preferences, and your photos, and it speaks your language. So much time is wasted in traditional support trying to see through the customer’s eyes, or authenticate them. That goes away, but watch your thinking! It’s so easy to fall into the mental model trap of legacy chatbots and data models.

As a company, your website, your WordPress, documentation, tutorials, menus, manuals need to be amazing and up to date. That’s the source of truth, and an agent will read all of it!

The interface and APIs remain because that’s useful to both human visitors and the agents.

Whenever possible, make support public. More blogs and bbPress. I actually weep a little when I think of how many beautiful words are written by our Happiness Engineers that are only ever seen once in a chat box or email thread.

My goal with our products is that support is radically available, and you almost never have to use it.

If you’re in a support role, I think you can pick a lane based on where you get energy.

If you love looking at screens, I think there’s a future where customer service wizards are watching over an Iron Man-like interface, armies of chat bots talking to people, where they can see how they’re going and intervene or nudge them as needed. There’s a ton of work in tuning agents and interactions.

If people recharge you, I actually think this will be the greatest era. All of the basic, mechanical stuff will be automated, but I think human connection will be what economists call a Veblen good, more in demand even as it is more expensive.

I think Happiness Engineering in the future will look a lot more like community building. A bot can’t host a meetup or a WordCamp.

I was the biggest Waymo fanboy, but this year with lots of trips to and from hospitals with Om I found myself craving human connection and used Uber more than ever. (It also gave me a chance to practice the one repeatable way that money can buy happiness, which is keeping a couple Benjamins in your back pocket and surprising people with them.)

Welcome to the Source of Truth for WordPress 7.1!

Before you dive headfirst into all the big and small changes and pick your favorites, make sure to read these preliminary thoughts about this post and how to use it. If you have any questions, leave a comment or email me at pauli@gutenbergtimes.com.

A huge “Thank you” to Anne McCarthy, Justin Tadlock, Isabel Brison, Adam Silverstein, Ramon Dodd, Andrew Serong, Hans-Gerd Gerhards, Marin Atanasov, Krupa Nanda, Isabel Brison, Aaron Robershaw, Ben Dwyer, Brent MacKinnon, Ashar Fuadi, and a lot more. It still takes a village. Also huge respect to the whole release squad on getting WordPress 7.1 over the finish line.

Changelog

Any changes are cataloged here as the release goes on.

July 30, 2026 – First edition.

Important note/guidelines

Try not to just copy and paste what’s in this post since it’s going to be shared with plenty of folks. Use this as inspiration for your own stuff and to get the best info about this release. If you do copy and paste, just remember that others might do the same, and it could lead to some awkward moments with duplicate content floating around online.

Each item has been tagged using best guesses with different high-level labels so that you can more readily see at a glance who is likely to be most impacted.
Each item has a high-level description, visuals (if relevant), and key resources if you would like to learn more.

Overview

WordPress 7.1 rounds out the block editor’s styling controls and makes working with media noticeably smoother. Long-requested features let you style how blocks look across three screen sizes and in interactive states like hover and focus — all without writing custom CSS. The admin experience becomes more personal, too, following you with your own color scheme and toolbar across every screen.

Handling images gets a considerable upgrade, too. The new media editor modal brings free-form cropping, rotation, and metadata editing into one workflow, and client-side media processing makes uploads faster and more resilient, with broader format support and better-optimized files.

The new Playlist and Tabs blocks enrich the layout options available out of the box and make for more creative information presentation. In the same realm fall the expanded Icon API with custom icon collections, dynamic galleries, and background gradients for more blocks.

The unification of WP Admin and the block editors progresses as well: the editors now respect your admin color scheme, and the admin bar stays with you on every screen — including the editors and the front end. A new “On This Day” Widget connects you to your site’s history.

While real-time collaboration has been punted to a future WordPress version, the asynchronous collaboration in Notes took real steps forward with inline notes on partial text selections, @mentions, rich text formatting, and multiple notes per block.

Beyond the headliners, core blocks receive many quality-of-life improvements and bug fixes to make editing content in WordPress streamlined, consistent, and fast — and developers get an expanding set of APIs to build on.

Resources

• Help Test WordPress 7.1 \
• FieldGuide + Dev Notes are scheduled to be published August 5.
• Roadmap to 7.1

This release consists of features from the Gutenberg plugin version 22.7 – 23.6. Here are the release posts of those plugin releases: 22.7 | 22.8 | 22.9 | 23.0 | 23.1 | 23.2 | 23.3 | 23.4 | 23.5 | 23.6 Later Gutenberg releases contain bug fixes, backported to WordPress 7.1. release branches.

Assets

In this Google Drive folder you can view all assets in this document.

Tags

To make this document easier to navigate based on specific audiences, the following tags are used liberally:

• [end user]: end user focus.
• [theme builder]: block or classic theme author.
• [plugin author]: plugin author, whether block or otherwise.
• [developer]: catch-all term for more technical folks.
• [site admin]: this includes a “builder” type.
• [enterprise]: specific items that would be of interest to or particularly impact enterprise-level folks
• [all]: broad impact to every kind of WordPress user.

How can you use these? Use your browser’s Find capability and search for the string including the brackets. Then use the arrows to navigate through the post from one result to the next.

Priority Items for WordPress 7.1

WordPress 7.1 introduces significant enhancements to block-based design and editing. These priority features focus on responsive controls, interactive states, media management, and modernized Admin bar navigation.

Responsive styles for blocks ^{[theme builders] [site admin][end user]}

Probably the most requested improvement of the block editor: after years of pushing intrinsic design for fonts and spacing, WordPress 7.1 makes responsive design a built-in, first-class part of the editing experience. The feature builds on earlier steps in this direction — the ability to show or hide blocks by screen size and the Navigation block’s customizable mobile overlay — and extends the idea to styling itself.

The feature is available across all block editors for Posts, Pages, Templates, Patterns,template parts and Navigation. Responsive styling follows a desktop-first model, letting styles cascade to smaller screens until you customize them for specific devices.

Viewport-specific values are currently limited to block sidebar settings (like typography, spacing, and colors). The controls work in Global Styles (affecting all instances of a block) and on individual block instances, across all block editors — Posts, Pages, Templates, Patterns, template parts, and Navigation.

Any controls from the toolbar that can’t be set by viewport will be hidden when a viewport state is enabled. Among the most significant controls: viewport-level aspect ratio presets for Image, Featured Image, and Cover blocks, so each can be optimized per device (#78543). Alongside this work, the Layout controls moved from the Settings tab to the Styles tab, keeping all styling decisions together.

Follow the Call for Testing: Responsive Styling to learn how to invoke the feature and what to look out for, and find the technical details in the Dev Note: Responsive block styles and configurable viewports in WordPress 7.1.

You can find more technical details in the Dev Note: Responsive block styles and configurable viewports in WordPress 7.1

Viewport breakpoint customization

Themes can now define custom breakpoints in theme.json, so both responsive styling and per-viewport block visibility work from your design system’s breakpoints instead of WordPress’s defaults. For theme developers and designers, this provides fine-grained, device-agnostic control over responsive behavior. (79104).

"settings": {
		"viewport": {
			"mobile": "30rem",
			"tablet": "45rem"
		}
	}

"settings": {
		"viewport": {
			"mobile": "30rem",
			"tablet": "45rem"
		}
	}

Tracking: WordPress 7.1: Block visibility configurable breakpoints and theme.json integration (#75707)

Interactive states styling (hover, focus)

You can now style interactive pseudo-states (:hover:, :focus: or :active:) for two blocks: Button and Navigation Link. The styling can be applied globally and per-instance without writing any CSS. For example, Users can change a button’s color on hover directly in the editor. (76491)

The underlying mechanism allows for the styling of the current menu item in a navigation block via theme.json (75736).

"core/navigation-link": {
  "@current": {
    "color": { "text": "#ff0000" },
    "typography": { "fontWeight": "700" },
    ":hover": {
      "color": { "text": "#0000ff" }
    },
    ":focus": {
      "color": { "text": "#00aa00" }
    },
    ":active": {
      "color": { "text": "#ff6600" }
    }
  }
}

"core/navigation-link": {
  "@current": {
    "color": { "text": "#ff0000" },
    "typography": { "fontWeight": "700" },
    ":hover": {
      "color": { "text": "#0000ff" }
    },
    ":focus": {
      "color": { "text": "#00aa00" }
    },
    ":active": {
      "color": { "text": "#ff6600" }
    }
  }
}

This makes interactive design accessible to non-coders and theme builders. It eliminates the need to add custom CSS snippets for common interactions. 

Dig into the Dev Note: Responsive block styles and configurable viewports in WordPress 7.1

Media editor modal and free-form image cropper ^{[end user][site admin]}

The new media editor modal replaces the inline cropping tool, accessed via the familiar Crop button, and brings together free-form and aspect-ratio cropping, flip, fine-grained rotation with snap guides, and metadata editing in one unified workflow. (78653, 78935, 78792)

This considerably improves the editing experience in WordPress Block editor. The goal was to eliminate the need for external tools for basic image editing. You can now exercise faster, more precise control over your images—fine-tuning framing, fixing orientation, or mirroring an image to better fit your layout in just a few clicks, all without breaking your editing flow.

For the Cover Block, this new media editor modal is hooked up to the Crop background image button. The option appears whenever the Cover block uses an editable image, and the block automatically recalculates its overlay color and contrast after an edit, so text stays readable even if the crop removes the image’s brightest or darkest areas (79258 )

Tracking: Media Editor Modal task tracking (#73771)

Client-side media processing improvements ^{[developer][site admin][enterprise]}

When you upload an image in the block editor, your browser — not your server — will now handle the creation of all sub-sized images using a WebAssembly (WASM) version of libvips (wasm-vips), a high-performance image processing library. The result stored on your server is improved over what server-side processing produced until today: smaller files generated directly on your device. Server-side image processing CPU usage could decline by more than 80% on capable devices (79188)

The update also comes with broader modern image format support that includes HEIC (the default format for iPhone photos), JPEGS with HDR gain maps (used by UltraHDR and Adaptive HDR), AVIF and WebP support built in. A great performance improvement is the GIF-to-video conversion feature for lighter, more efficient files that are faster to load on the front-end. This feature is opt-in right now. Uploads are also more resilient, with a progress indicator and automatic retries if your data connectivity drops off (76765, 79307).

For content creators uploading media, this update means better support for HDR images, faster, more reliable uploads, broader format support, and better-optimized files without manual intervention.

Plugin developers should note that some server-side hooks, including `wp_generate_attachment_metadata`, `image_resize_dimensions`, and `wp_handle_upload` may not fire as before. The team is working on documentation and mitigation strategies. (74333)

More in-depth information is available in the Dev Note Client-Side Media Processing in WordPress 7.1

Icons now inherit color, and the Icons API takes shape ^{[theme builder][plugin author][developer][enterprise]}

WordPress 7.0 shipped a built-in set of SVG icons for the block editor and the Icon block. With WordPress 7.1, this grows into a proper, public API: plugins and themes can register their own icons, group them into collections, render them on the server, and read them over the REST API.

For content creators, the most visible change is the Icon block’s picker: it now groups icons by collection, with a tab per collection plus an “All” tab, and your search query carries over as you switch tabs. Custom icons from plugins and themes appear right alongside the core set. The block itself picked up several refinements: it inserts a default icon so you’re never staring at an empty placeholder, offers flip and rotate controls in the toolbar, and shows text and background color controls by default.

For developers: Registering more collections

For developers, the pieces come together on the PHP side: register a collection with wp_register_icon_collection(), add icons with wp_register_icon() — from an inline SVG string or an .svg file — and print any registered icon with wp_get_icon(), including size, CSS class, and an accessible label. Icon names get strict validation, the registry’s register method is now public, and REST API endpoints expose collections and icons to your own code. A dev note with full code examples is on its way to the Make Core blog.

One breaking change to flag: all 330 icons in @wordpress/icons v15 now declare fill="currentColor", so icons inherit the surrounding text color by default. If you’ve been tinting icons with the CSS fill property, switch to color — it’s more reliable, since an icon may use fill, stroke, or both internally. If you register your own icons, add fill=”currentColor” to their <svg> element to get the same behavior.

The Dev Note Registering and rendering SVG icons in WordPress 7.1 holds all the details.

Tracking: SVG Icon API: Iteration for WordPress 7.1 (#75715)

Admin Bar everywhere  ^[all]

With WordPress 7.1, the WordPress admin bar which sits at the top of your site’s front end and other admin pages is now displayed when using block editor by default. It stays hidden when Fullscreen mode and Distraction-free mode are both turned on.

Until now, entering the editor in its default fullscreen mode meant the admin bar disappeared, cutting you off from the rest of wp-admin. Since the admin bar now provides site context, the update also replaces the top-left W/site icon in the site editor with an explicit back button, making the navigation control more obvious (79197).

With this update also comes a design refresh:

• your site icon replaces the home icon,
• the profile avatar becomes circular, and
• the command palette keyboard shortcut moves into the Admin bar to remove visual clutter and resolve shortcut conflicts. (79060)

This keeps the familiar navigation with you on all screens again.

Dev Notes with all the details for users and developer can be found here: Consistent navigation in WordPress 7.1 with persistent toolbar.

New Blocks ^[all]

This release expands the block library with versatile new tools. These additions provide content creators with improved ways to display interactive media and organize information.

Playlist block

The new Playlist block lets you create audio playlists with waveform visualization, making it easy to showcase multiple tracks or podcast episodes in a single interactive player. Visitors can browse and play through your audio content without leaving the page. For content creators this provides a rich, modern listening experience built right into WordPress to highlight podcast episodes, track of music or talks.

Each track comes with its metadata: artwork, artist name, track number, and track length. The tracklist itself is configurable — you can set the play order and toggle artwork, artist names, track numbers, and track length individually to suit the design of your page.

The WaveformPlayer visualization comes with a visualization style selector. You can set waveform and waveform background colors for more granular theming and show the track artwork on the play button, accessible for all visitors. The Playlist and Playlist Track blocks are available in the default block library.

This is the first version and contributors are working on improvements for the next WordPress version, too looking to add more waveform styles, shuffle and skip buttons, a hover overlay for more intuitive track scrubbing, as well as performance improvements.

Tracking: Playlist Block: Iteration issue for 7.1 (#77421)

Tabs block

The new Tabs block organizes content into separate tabbed panels that visitors click through to navigate. It’s a design pattern that presents information compactly without overwhelming readers with a wall of text. It’s a common layout for FAQs, product features, or any content where you want to show options side-by-side. For editors, it’s a familiar, flexible layout pattern now available natively in WordPress.

The block family consists of a Tab List for the navigation and Tab Panels for the content. Each panel accepts any blocks you like, and the tab buttons come with their own color, typography, border, and spacing controls, so the navigation can be styled to match your theme. Using the toolbar buttons you can reorder the tabs quickly.

Under the hood, the markup and keyboard behavior follow the best practices set out in the tabs pattern from the W3C ARIA Authoring Practices Guide.

Tracking: Stabilize Tabs Blocks (#73230)

Improved Blocks and Block handling

Core blocks receive numerous quality-of-life improvements in 7.1. These updates refine existing editing workflows, simplify media handling, and provide deeper customization for layouts and design.

Block transforms: preview first, convert faster ^{[end user][site admin]}

Switching a block’s look or type is now much easier to evaluate before you commit. When you open the block switcher in the toolbar, the style options a theme provides — say, a Button’s “Outline” style — show live previews on hover, so you see exactly how your block will look with the style applied. (75889) The same previews in the inspector’s Styles panel now match the toolbar presentation, so it no longer matters where you make the switch. (75989) A small polish fix also centers the Navigation block’s preview in its preview pane. (75741)

Transforms got more capable, too: a block can now transform directly into a variation of another block. Instead of converting to a Group and then picking Row afterwards, the transform menu offers Row or Stack as direct targets — one step instead of two. (78713)

The same “one step instead of two” thinking extends to legacy content. Pasting or converting an shortcode now creates a proper Embed block instead of leaving raw shortcode text behind, so embeds from YouTube and other services display correctly right away (77937)— and if you change your mind, undo restores a paragraph with the URL rather than deleting it. (77551).

The Shortcode block joins in as well: when its content matches a registered shortcode, it now offers block-specific transforms to convert it into the equivalent block. (77944)

For anyone maintaining a site with years of shortcode-based posts, that removes a tedious cleanup step on the way to block-based editing.

Combine gradient and image backgrounds ^{[end user] [theme builder][site admin]}

More blocks now support background gradients through the new background.gradient block support, which layers a gradient on top of a background image instead of one overwriting the other — a translucent color wash over a photo, for instance, without custom CSS.

Previously, gradients lived only in the Color panel, stored as a CSS background shorthand that clashed with any image on the block. The new support adds a Gradient control to the Background panel next to the existing Image control, and the style engine combines both into a single layered background-image value on individual blocks, in Global Styles, and via theme.json. A follow-up allows modern color functions in standalone gradients, and the text and background color controls moved to the Typography and Background panels to match.

WordPress 7.1 ships with six blocks supporting the new gradients: Group, Verse, Accordion, Pullquote, Post Content, and Quote. More will follow, with a long-term plan to migrate the older color.gradient to the new system across all blocks. There’s no built-in migration path in 7.1 yet.

For extenders, opting in follows the familiar block supports pattern. Custom blocks declare it in their block.json:

"supports": {
	"background": {
		"gradient": true
	}
}

"supports": {
	"background": {
		"gradient": true
	}
}

Themes control the setting via theme.json under settings.background.gradient (it’s also included in appearanceTools), and can define gradient values in styles — at the root, per block, or in style variations:

{
	"styles": {
		"background": {
			"gradient": "linear-gradient( 135deg, #000 0%, #fff 100% )"
		},
		"blocks": {
			"core/group": {
				"background": {
					"gradient": "var:preset|gradient|vivid-cyan-blue"
				}
			}
		}
	}
}

{
	"styles": {
		"background": {
			"gradient": "linear-gradient( 135deg, #000 0%, #fff 100% )"
		},
		"blocks": {
			"core/group": {
				"background": {
					"gradient": "var:preset|gradient|vivid-cyan-blue"
				}
			}
		}
	}
}

All the salient details in this Dev Note New Block Support in WordPress 7.1: Background Gradient (background.gradient)

Cover Block: control video embed providers ^{[theme builder][plugin author][enterprise][developer]}

Besides gaining the new media editor modal for background images, the Cover block addresses a request from community feedback. When the block’s “Embed video from URL” feature shipped in WordPress 7.0, site builders asked for a way to curate or disable it. WordPress 7.1 adds a new allowedVideoProviders attribute to restrict which video providers are offered, or to remove the URL-embed option entirely by allowing none (#80092). Existing embeds keep working; only new URL input in the editor is restricted.

The details are already reflected in the Cover block’s documentation.

Gallery and the attached images workflow in the Media Library ^{[end user][site admin]}

Images you upload while writing a post have always been “attached” to that post. This specifically true for older sites, pre-Block editor. Attached images where no accessible as an cluster and need to be added the block editor canvas one at a time. WordPress 7.1 finally puts that relationship to work in the editor, via an additional filter drop-down item Uploaded to this post in the Media Library Inserter modal. Photos and other media you’ve uploaded stay within reach for reuse instead of disappearing into the media library.

The Gallery block is the showcase: instead of hand-picking every image, a single Use attached images button populates a dynamic gallery from all media attached to the current post (#78796). For content creators, this makes assembling image galleries faster and more flexible. It also helps reorganize image on older posts. The Source panel provides options for sorting the images. This brings the block editor handling of Gallery’s up to par with some features of the















shortcode

To have entire freedom to control the Gallery block, the Detach feature comes in handy. A Detach button in the toolbar and in the sidebar’s Source panel, makes out a stand-alone Gallery without the dynamic connetion to the post’s image. Using it help user to edit/upate the gallery block.

Below video visualizes the connection between a list of image attached to a post from the Media Library and the gallery block with the new feature.

Tracking: WordPress 7.1: dynamic galleries and post-attached media iteration issue (#77117)

It’s a step back toward the simplicity of dropping photos into a post and having WordPress do the arranging. It’s the first visible piece of a larger effort around dynamic galleries and post-attached media, with dynamic queries by date and eventually categories or tags ahead.

Image Block: Mark as decorative toggle ^{[end user][site admin]}

Screen readers announce every image to their users — but some images, like dividers and design flourishes, carry no information worth announcing. The Image block’s new “Mark as decorative” checkbox tells assistive technologies to skip such an image entirely on the front end, by rendering it with role=”none” in the published post. It now eliminates the question, did we forget an alt=text or was it a deliberate decision to leave the alt-text empty?

There is further processing to come with the checked box. Marking an image decorative clears its alt text and disables captions and links, since an image that links somewhere or explains something isn’t decorative by definition. Until now, the accessible route was knowing the empty-alt-text convention; the checkbox makes the intent explicit, machine-readable, and available to every content creator. (78064)

Login/out Block Improvements ^{[theme builder][site admin][developer]}

The Login/Logout block has an option to display a full login form instead of a simple link — but until now, that form’s submit button ignored your theme entirely, rendering with plain browser-default styles that stuck out next to every other button on the site. With a block theme active, the submit button now carries the standard button classes (wp-block-button__link and wp-element-button), so it automatically picks up the button styling your theme defines in theme.json — colors, border radius, and all — with no custom CSS required. The block follows the same approach the Comments form already uses, resolving a mismatch first reported back in 2023. (76746)

Navigation Block and Link Creation ^{[theme builder] [site admin][end user]}

The Navigation block picks up several improvements that give site builders more freedom in what a menu can contain and where it can be edited. The Login/Logout block can now be nested inside submenus (#75497), handy for tucking account actions into a “My Account” dropdown instead of spending a top-level slot on them. New links can be created directly from the sidebar List View in the Site Editor (#75918), so building out a menu no longer requires clicking into each item on the canvas. And the Home Link block gains previously missing controls (#76672), bringing it up to par with its navigation siblings.

Search block Styling^{[theme builder] [site admin][end user]}

A styling gap is closed in the release for the Search block: color settings now apply to the search input field even when the search button is disabled (77219), so your search boxes match your design system regardless of which display options you choose.

The block also embraces modern HTML: it can now render inside the native <search> landmark element, which carries search semantics for browsers and assistive technologies without the manual role=”search” attribute. Because dropping that attribute could break existing theme CSS, the feature is opt-in — per block via a new HTML element selector in the Advanced panel, or site-wide with add_theme_support( ‘search-element’ ) (#78485). Default output is unchanged, with a path to making the modern markup the default in a future release.(78485)

Query block ^{[theme builder] [site admin][end user]}

The Query block received an additional filter to control the list of blocks: You can now exclude the current post from a list of posts. This is useful when you want to add a list of posts with related posts. (64916).

General quality of life improvements.

Pattern editing experience improvements ^{[theme builder] [site admin] [developer]}

WordPress 7.0 shifted pattern editing to focus on content changes rather than exposing every tool, treating patterns more like single blocks. In 7.1, work focuses on UX refinements based on feedback, bug fixes, and general maintenance. For users inserting and customizing patterns, this means a more polished, predictable experience with fewer rough edges.

Tracking: WordPress 7.1: Pattern Editing Iteration (#75717)

• Pattern Editing and Block Fields: Highlight selected block (74841)
• Pattern editing: show root block identity when editing pattern sections #79417

 Block Width and Layout Controls ^{[theme builder] [site admin] [developer]}

Refines spacing and layout tools to be more intuitive. The Columns block no longer shows a confusing ‘Skip’ option in its layout picker, the Button block now uses the standard width control system, and spacing controls display in a more logical order when unlinked. These changes remove friction points that tripped up editors when building complex layouts.

• Button: Migrate to width block support #74242
• Columns: Remove redundant Skip option from layout picker #78405
• Re-order spacing side controls when unlinked #66317

Link Control and Preview Enhancements ^{[theme builder] [site admin] [developer]}

When linking to pages or posts, the link picker now shows ‘Homepage’ instead of just ‘Page’ for your site’s front page, and uses the actual entity link title for previews. These small improvements make link creation feel smarter and help editors understand exactly what they’re linking to before publishing.

• Use entity link title for link control preview #77155
• Link Picker: Use Homepage badge instead of Page if Homepage #75929

Additional CSS Validation ^{[theme builder] [site admin] [developer][end user]}

Additional CSS is now validated both on mount and via a new dimension validation endpoint for sideloaded styles. These checks prevent malformed or insecure CSS from breaking your site’s appearance or introducing security risks, giving you more confidence when adding custom styles.

• Validate additional CSS on mount #78682
• Add dimension validation to sideload endpoint #74903

Block Editor Attribute Handling ^{[theme builder][developer]}

The block editor now correctly targets the right block when copying direct insert block attributes, fixing edge cases where attributes would apply to the wrong block. This fix ensures that copy-paste and duplication workflows behave as expected.

• Block Editor: Fix target block for copying direct insert block attributes #77877
• Block Editor: Allow overriding `disableContentOnlyForTemplateParts` setting #79191

Image handling improved ^{[end user][site admin]}

A set of small fixes makes working with images more predictable. If an image points to a media library item that has since been deleted, the editor no longer treats it as a local attachment, preventing confusing errors. The crop button only appears when cropping is actually available for your user role and image type, so you’re never offered a tool that can’t work.

And the featured image field now shows placeholder text making clear at a glance what goes there.

• Image block: Validate attachment ID exists before treating image as local #77178
• Image/Site Logo: hide crop toolbar when editMediaEntity is unavailable #76626
• Set placeholder to featured image field #76342

Post Template Layout Improvements ^{[theme builder][site admin]}

Ensures the Post Template block’s fallback styles only apply when appropriate, preventing layout conflicts when custom minimum column widths are defined. This fix gives editors more predictable control over query loop layouts without unexpected style overrides.

• Ensure Post Template fallback styles don’t apply when minimumColumnWidth is defined #77411

Post Title Block Enhancements^{[site admin][end user]}

The Title block gains a placeholder attribute, letting you show helpful text when no title has been entered yet. This small addition improves the editing experience for custom post types and guides content creators to fill in required fields.

• Post Title: Add placeholder attribute #7601 v22.7.0

Block Inserter Enhancements ^{[site admin][end user]}

Makes discovering and adding blocks easier with visual polish to the inserter interface. The search input now stays visible while scrolling through block options, and the inserter button animates to clearly signal when the panel is open. These small touches reduce friction when building pages and help editors stay oriented while exploring block options.

• Block Inserter: Animate inserter button icon to signal open state. #78306
• Make Block Inserter search input sticky while scrolling #77698

Editor enhancements

Beyond the block improvements, the editing experience itself picks up refinements across the board. Notes mature into a fuller commenting workflow. Visual revisions gain a more detailed timeline. And your site’s brand identity gets a dedicated home in the Site Editor.

Notes move toward a full commenting workflow ^{[end user][site admin][developer][enterprise]}

Notes, the inline editorial comments right in the editor, continue to mature, with several additions in this release that make asynchronous collaboration richer and easier to act on without leaving WordPress.

The headline feature: inline notes. You can now attach a note to a specific text selection rather than to a whole block. Select part of a paragraph, add a note, and the highlight stays anchored to that text as you keep editing around it. A single block can carry multiple inline notes, sorted by the order they appear, and none of the highlighting shows up in the published post. Also, blocks are no longer limited to a single conversation, either — you can start multiple note threads on the same block.

The conversations themselves got more expressive, too. Notes now support rich text formatting — bold, italic, links, and code. @mention autocomplete makes it quick to pull a colleague into a thread. Longer notes collapse behind a “Show more” toggle, and a “Resolved” divider in the sidebar separates finished discussions from open ones, so it’s easy to see what still needs attention.

Tracking: Notes iteration for WordPress 7.1 (#76316)

Dedicated Identity section ^{[site admin][theme builder][end user]}

A new Appearance > Editor > Identity screen consolidates your site’s logo, favicon, title, and tagline into one easy-to-find location, with inline editing so you can crop and adjust images right there. This eliminates hunting through Settings or digging into templates just to update foundational branding. For new site builders especially, it makes setting up your site’s identity quick and straightforward. Existing site owners have an intuitive place to update the data. (76264, 76116)

Visual revisions improvements ^{[site admin][end user][theme builder]}

Building on the visual revisions introduced in 7.0, the revisions screen gains a paginated timeline in the inspector with more detailed information about each revision, making it easier to understand what changed as you scrub through versions. (77333)

Changes made via autosave are now labeled in the revisions timeline and make the autosave notice work with the visual revisions UI.(79950, 79947)

Admin / Workflow updates

Updates to admin and workflow tools in 7.1 improve navigation, content management, and site administration. These changes are designed to reduce friction and help you work more efficiently within the WordPress dashboard.

Organized command palette ^[all]

The command palette, the quick-access menu you open with keyboard shortcuts, now groups results into recent, suggested, and matching sections, and remembers your recently-used commands across sessions. The visual design has also been refreshed to make scanning results easier. This helps you navigate WordPress faster by surfacing the tools you use most often right at the top. (75691)

Change a comment’s parent from the Edit Comment screen ^{[end user][site admin][enterprise]}

Ever needed to fix a comment that landed in the wrong thread? The Edit Comment screen now has an “In reply to” control in the Save box — hit Edit and you get a dropdown of the post’s other comments, listed by the author with a short excerpt. Top-level comments just show “None.”

You can’t create broken threads with it: the dropdown hides the comment itself and anything nested under it, and the server double-checks on save — the new parent has to be on the same post and can’t be the comment or one of its own replies (anything invalid gets bounced with a WP_Error). If the current parent wouldn’t normally show up in the list (a pingback, say), it’s kept in there as the selected option, so saving without touching the field changes nothing. Works without JavaScript too, and there are tests covering the validation. (65570)

See an excerpt of posts without titles ^{[end user][site admin]}

If you publish posts without titles for instance for quick status-style updates, the Posts list has been pretty useless for telling them apart: just a column of identical “(no title)” links.

Now, in Compact view, untitled posts show the first 15 words of the excerpt right after “(no title)”, so you can actually see what each post is at a glance.

The checkbox’s screen-reader label gets the same text, password-protected posts keep their content hidden, and the Extended view is unchanged since it already shows excerpts.(65022).

On This Day dashboard widget^{[end user][site admin]}

The dashboard gains a new On This Day widget. It surfaces past content you published on the same date in previous years, similar to memory features on social platforms. It’s designed to motivate you by reminding you of what you’ve accomplished and encouraging you to write more. For content creators, it’s a pleasant nudge to reflect on your archive and stay engaged with your site. (65116)

Media Library: infinite scrolling is back on by default, with a per-user opt-out ^{[end user][site admin]}

The Media Library grid now uses infinite scrolling by default, so attachments load continuously as you scroll instead of behind a “Load more” button. For anyone who prefers the previous behavior, there’s a new personal option: a “Disable infinite scrolling in the Media Library grid view” checkbox on the profile screen. The setting only appears for users who can actually upload files, since others never see the attachment grid.

For developers, the existing media_library_infinite_scrolling filter still works and now takes top precedence: a hooked filter always wins, followed by the user’s profile preference, with infinite scrolling enabled when neither is set. Note the filter’s default value has flipped from false to true as of 7.1.0, so any code relying on the old default should be reviewed. The change ships with unit tests covering the new user option and the full precedence chain (65564).

Read the Dev note: Media Library infinite scrolling is now enabled by default, with a per-user opt-out

Developer Goodies ^{[developer][theme builder][plugin author][enterprise]}

WordPress 7.1 provides developers with expanded APIs, theme.json capabilities, and system improvements. These tools offer greater control over site design, block behavior, and system integrations.

Post editor iframe now always on

Other editors in WordPress—the site editor, the template editor, and block, template, and device previews—have been unconditionally iframed for a long time, going back to the template editor’s introduction in 5.8. The post editor was the holdout: starting in 7.0, whether it ran isolated depended on the blocks actually present in a given post, so a post using only Block API v3+ blocks got the isolated canvas, while a post containing even one older block (API v1 or v2) dropped out of it entirely. That meant the same site, even the same author, could see the editor behave differently from post to post. In 7.1, that condition is removed: every post editor is always iframed, regardless of theme type or block API version.

For most people writing and editing content, this is good news—no more switching behavior depending on which blocks happen to be inserted. Block developers have a bit of homework, though: the iframe has its own document and window, separate from the admin page where editor scripts run, so any code that reaches for the global document or window to touch the canvas will now be looking at the wrong place. The usual fix is to get the canvas’s document from an element inside it (via ownerDocument and its defaultView) rather than the global object, and to use useRefEffect for attaching and cleaning up canvas event listeners.

Read the dev note on the 7.1 changes (once public), the dev note on the 7.0 changes, and the block migration guide for more details.

Ryan Welcher published a guide and a demo plugin. The post editor is going full iframe: what block developers need to know before WordPress 7.1 with code examples and instructions how to fix things if necessary.

Global Styles and theme.json

Text Shadow support for theme.json

Theme authors can now define text shadows directly in theme.json via a new textShadow property under styles.typography. It works everywhere you’d expect: at the root level, per-block (say, a shadow on paragraphs only), via style variations, and on elements — including pseudo-selectors like a link’s :hover state. Any valid CSS text-shadow value is accepted, including stacked multi-shadow definitions. Block placeholder text in the editor resets the shadow so it stays readable regardless of what the theme sets.

"styles": {
		"typography": {
			"textShadow": "1px 1px 2px red, 0 0 1em blue, 0 0 0.2em blue;"
		},
		"blocks": {
			"core/paragraph": {
				"typography": {
					"textShadow": "1px 1px 2px red, 0 0 1em red, 0 0 0.2em red;"
				}
			}
		},
		"elements": {
			"link": {
				":hover": {
					"typography": {
						"textShadow": "none"

"styles": {
		"typography": {
			"textShadow": "1px 1px 2px red, 0 0 1em blue, 0 0 0.2em blue;"
		},
		"blocks": {
			"core/paragraph": {
				"typography": {
					"textShadow": "1px 1px 2px red, 0 0 1em red, 0 0 0.2em red;"
				}
			}
		},
		"elements": {
			"link": {
				":hover": {
					"typography": {
						"textShadow": "none"

More details in the Dev Note: Text Shadow Support in Global Styles

Text-Align Block Support Migration

Eight more core blocks (Post Date, Post Excerpt, Post Navigation Link, Post Title, Query Title, Site Tagline, Site Title, Pullquote and Term Name) now use WordPress’s standardized text-align system. As part of a larger migration effort this update ensures consistent alignment controls across the editor and makes these blocks behave predictably alongside newer blocks.

WordPress EndUser are not supposed to see any changes and existing blocks continue to work. Theme designers are now able to style any of these blocks text align via theme.json property. The code example shows how to set the center as the site-wide TextAlign default. And `”textAlign”: false` disables the feature for this block

{
	"version": 3,
	"styles": {
		"blocks": {
			"core/pullquote": {
				"typography": {
					"textAlign": "center"
				}
			}
		}
	}
}

{
	"version": 3,
	"styles": {
		"blocks": {
			"core/pullquote": {
				"typography": {
					"textAlign": "center"
				}
			}
		}
	}
}

Block Visibility

Adds settings.blockVisibility.allowEditing to theme.json, allowing themes to disable the block visibility feature entirely.

{
  "settings": {
    "blockVisibility": {
      "allowEditing": false
    }
  }
}

{
  "settings": {
    "blockVisibility": {
      "allowEditing": false
    }
  }
}

When set to false, the toolbar button and block options menu item are hidden. In this regard, it makes this block support consistent with color, typography etc.

blockVisibility.allowEditing follows the layout flag. The reason is the two-fold nature of blockVisibility at the block supports level: a bool means don’t render the block at all, but viewport settings allow users to control visibility per viewport.

The object shape also leaves the door open to extending block visibility to triggers, not only blockVisibility.viewports but others like post type or whatever. (76559).

Block Supports: CSS variables by feature selector

Block Supports now generates CSS custom properties based on a block’s feature-specific selectors, not just its root selector. Some blocks—the Button block is the example given—define their outer wrapper and an inner styling target as different elements, and previously there was no way to output a preset variable (like a dimension size) onto that inner element specifically. Theme and plugin authors building design systems now have a way to target the right element per feature, without needing custom CSS to work around the mismatch.

A minimum-width option for block dimensions

Blocks already supported height, minHeight, and width. What was missing was a way to stop something from shrinking too far—so a layout element wouldn’t collapse into an unusable sliver on a narrow screen. Minimum-width closes that gap, mirroring how minimum-height already works.

It’s opt-in at the block level: the control stays hidden in the inspector until a block explicitly enables it, though it shows by default in the global styles panel. Theme-defined dimension presets carry over automatically, so existing spacing scales just work. The Group block is the first to adopt it.

You’ll find more details in the Dev Note New Block Support in WordPress 7.1: Minimum Width

Design System Theme Provider

The first version of the design system’s theme component arrives in WordPress 7.1. It consists of standardized CSS custom properties that follow the W3C Design Tokens specification. You probably won’t spot the difference right away — the default theme was deliberately built to match existing styles — but this is the machinery that will power the admin color scheme in the Site Editor. You can read more details on the future direction in the Merge Proposal: Design System Theming

Admin color schemes in Site Editor

The Site Editor’s sidebar and interface now respect your chosen WordPress admin color scheme instead of always showing a dark background. This brings visual consistency across the post editor, Site Editor, and admin dashboard. If you’ve personalized WordPress with a color scheme you prefer, that choice now carries through everywhere you work. 78397

Mix static HTML with editable blocks

A new innerContent block support lets a block keep static HTML fragments interleaved with editable inner blocks as the canonical source of its own markup. In practice, this means a hand-written HTML structure can have just a piece of it—a paragraph, an image—editable in place, while the rest stays fixed and can’t be moved, removed, or rearranged.

The Custom HTML block is the first adopter: pasting HTML with a block comment delimiter embedded in it (for example, a <!– wp:paragraph –> block inside a larger static <div>) makes that inner piece editable directly in the canvas, while the surrounding markup remains locked in place. It’s a narrow, developer-facing capability for now—the HTML block is the only place it’s wired up—but it opens the door for custom blocks to offer the same kind of “mostly static, partly editable” experience going forward. (79115)

The dev note can be found on the Make Core Blog: Editable blocks inside the Custom HTML block

Block Bindings for list-items and inner blocks

The List Item block has gained Block Bindings support. A List Item’s content can now be connected to a data source—a custom field, a pattern override, or another registered source—so individual entries in a list can be populated dynamically rather than typed in by hand. The change registers content as a bindable attribute for core/list-item.

A related fix rounds out the feature: previously, if a bound List Item also contained a nested sub-list, that nested list was dropped when the binding was rendered. Now a List Item can carry a bound value and a nested list beneath it at the same time. In practice, this means multi-level lists—say, a team member’s name pulled from a custom field, with a nested list of their current projects underneath—can now be fully dynamic without losing structure.

Tracking: Block Bindings in WordPress 7.1 (#77199)

Connectors authentication improvements

The Connectors framework, which manages WordPress’s connections to external services like AI providers, now supports username and application password authentication as an alternative to API keys. A merged pull request adds a default connector form for this method, along with the underlying authentication type, mirroring the equivalent API already available in WordPress Core.

The change also handles the practical details: saved passwords are masked in the UI and over REST, credentials can be set via constants or environment variables instead of the database, and a companion Core patch keeps the two in sync. For connectors that require an account login rather than a bare API key, this removes the need for a custom settings screen.

This lands alongside a broader open proposal for a PHP-side field registry that would let connector authors declare arbitrary settings—model choice, temperature, custom URLs, and more—the way register_setting() works elsewhere in WordPress. That registry isn’t built yet; the application password work is a first, concrete step (new auth method, not new field types), addressing one of the two gaps the proposal identified rather than the full vision.

Tracking: Connectors: proposal for a PHP-side field registry for connector configuration (#78647)

Blocks package stabilizes two experimental functions

The Blocks package stabilizes cloneSanitizedBlock and sanitizeBlockAttributes, dropping their __experimental prefixes now that the functions have been stable in practice for some time. The old __experimental-prefixed names still work but will log a deprecation notice, so plugins or themes importing them directly should switch to the new names.

Accessible tooltips and toggle tips API

WordPress adds a core mechanism for accessible tooltips (51006), offering an alternative to the title attribute, which is not available to keyboard and touch users. Two new functions cover different use cases: wp_get_tooltip() exposes an accessible name when a control has focus or hover, such as for icon-only buttons, and wp_get_toggletip() implements a popover disclosure with extended help information that stays open until dismissed. Both generate accessible markup that avoids excess verbosity for screen readers and follows best practices for voice command users.

The first toggle tip in core explains the “Remember Me” option on the login screen (55343). Plugin developers can use the functions for their own settings screens and metaboxes. (62741)

A list of all the dev notes can be reviewed from the Make Core blog