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Hi there!

What a week! WordPress 7.1 Beta 1 (and Beta 2) arrived with a huge array of updates. We’ll unpack them together over the next four weeks, right up to the final release on August 19, 2026.

One thing shouldn’t wait, though: the security release WordPress 7.0.2. Go update your production sites now — this newsletter will still be here when you’re back.

In this edition, you’ll also find the first speaker lineup for WordCamp US, a fourth page-builder migration story, WooCommerce 11.0 on the horizon, and plenty of block development goodness: from iframed editors to on-brand maintenance pages.

Grab your favorite Saturday beverage and dig in.

Yours,
Birgit

WordCamp US 2026: Four Tracks, Three Workshops, 33 Speakers

The first wave of WCUS 2026 speakers is live — and it reads like a who’s-who of WordPress in practice.

WordCamp US just published its opening lineup for August 16–19 in Phoenix: 34 confirmed speakers so far, including K Adam White, Brian Coords, Jamie Marsland, Kathy Zant, Miriam Schwab, and Robert Abela, all experienced developers, educators, security specialists, community builders.

The program runs four tracks.

AI in Action leads with sessions on agentic workflows, AI search, and guardrails for AI-assisted development.
Honing Your Skills covers the practical side: maintenance, privacy compliance, creator commerce, security.
Technical WordPress digs into block migrations at scale, WP-CLI automation, and plugin pipelines.
Beginning WP101 is the on-ramp for newcomers — or for clients you’re bringing along.
Three hands-on workshops round out the program, where you build something real in the room and leave with it.

The full session schedule isn’t out yet, but the speaker list alone is a useful signal. If someone on that page is a voice you follow, a tool you depend on, or a corner of WordPress you’re actively navigating, you now have a specific reason to be in the room.

us.wordcamp.org/2026/tickets — $100 General Admission · $750 Micro-Sponsor (includes listing on the sponsors page) Full speaker list →

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

WordPress 7.1 Beta 1 was release on July 15, 2026. is now available for testing. The release post offers instructions how to sent up a test side and shows an extensive list of new features.

The security team released WordPress 7.0.2 with the urgent appeal to update right away. The security fixes were also backported in 6.9.5 and 6.8.6.

The security fix was also included in WordPress 7.1 Beta 2, so testing sites are also protected during this release cycle.

Huzaifa Al Mesbah, from the Core Test team, published the accompanying Help Test WordPress 7.1 post.

A few WordPress 7.1 Dev Notes are already available:

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

In about 10 days, WooCommerce 11.0 release is schedule. Brain Coords has the skinny for you in what’s coming for developers in WooCommerce. Performance leads the release with 28 PRs — product object caching becomes the default for new stores, speeding up variable products by 9–12%. You’ll also find email verification connecting guest orders to accounts, new phone validation hooks, video embeds in the block email editor, and the final removal of the Product Editor beta. The beta is ready for your testing now.

Jamie Marsland followed his instincts and build Jamie’s Front-End Editor for Content Teams, a plugin that lets your editors click any paragraph or heading on the live page and start typing — no block editor required. With the latest updates, you can now edit text, links, buttons and images right on the live page. No wp-admin, no block editor, just click and change it in place.

Built on the Interactivity API with no build step, it preserves block markup on save, records edits as native block notes for an audit trail, and lets you restrict chosen roles to front-end-only editing. Let Marsland what you think.

Last week, I shared three migration stories from page builders to the Core block editor and block themes. Here’s a fourth perspective: The team at WP Expert, an Ottawa agency founded by Frederic Sune, put together a comprehensive post on migrating agency sites from page builders to Gutenberg, should you go on that journey, too. You’ll find the strategic arguments (better Core Web Vitals, smaller attack surface, less technical debt) alongside a practical playbook covering backups, staging, block theme selection, pattern development, and SEO safeguards. The post also explores what block-based architectures mean for an agency’s business model, from premium modernization packages to fewer layout-related support tickets. An FAQ rounds it out.

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

Brian Coords tackles a common WooCommerce pain point: custom product templates for block themes. He combines two core WordPress features — the plugin template registration API from 6.7 and the venerable single_template_hierarchy filter — to serve custom templates for product collections, like all products in a category. His example plugin falls back to your Single Product template unless you override it. Clone the repo and give it a try; custom Product fields are next on his list.

On the WordPress Developer Blog, Troy Chaplin shows you how to build an on-brand maintenance mode for block themes. You add one small hook to your theme’s functions.php once, then design and manage the maintenance page entirely in the Site Editor with full access to your Global Styles. Renaming or deleting the template toggles maintenance mode on and off, no code needed. An SEO-friendly variant adds 503 headers so crawlers know the downtime is temporary.

“Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2026”
A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test, and Meta team from Jan. 2024 on. Updated by yours truly.

The previous years are also available:
2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025

Building Blocks and Tools

On WP Mayor, Jean Galea untangles when to reach for WP-CLI, the REST API, or the Abilities API. His mental model: they’re layers, not rivals. WP-CLI lives on the server for bulk work, REST serves off-server callers like headless front ends, and the Abilities API tells AI agents what they’re allowed to do, complete with schemas and permission checks. Galea also shares how his own sites lean on all three at once.

Get up to speed how to make your custom blocks plugin work in the iframed post editor, if you haven’t yet. After five years of ruminating and communicating the switch is coming to WordPress 7.1. In his post, Ryan Welcher explains why the post editor is going full iframe in WordPress 7.1 and what that means for your custom blocks. You’ll find the fixes for the most common breakage — global window and document references, editor styles enqueued into the wrong document, stale admin-scoped CSS, and third-party libraries — plus a companion demo plugin with broken/fixed block pairs, Playground blueprints for testing both states, and a handy pre-flight checklist.

The video volunteers at WordCamp Portugal uploaded all recordings to WordPressTV and two of the talks caught my eye:

Imran Sayed walks you through the fastest way to build Gutenberg blocks with modern tools, scripts, and AI. If custom block development has felt complex or time-consuming, you’ll appreciate his focus on practical, real-world workflows you can adopt immediately — moving fast without over-engineering. The recording is available on WordPress.tv, and the presentation slides are linked below the video for easy reference.

Jorge Costa shows you how to use the AI building blocks already shipped in WordPress core (the WP AI Client, the Abilities API, and the MCP adapter) to bring AI-powered features into your own plugins, themes, and sites. He also tackles the bigger question: when agents can spin up entire projects on any stack, why is WordPress still the right bet? Slides are linked alongside the recording.

Check out the not so new any more Talk Devy to Me series on Ryan Welchers YouTube Channel! In the latest epsiode, Antonio Sejas demos Studio Code, the agentic AI assistant built into WordPress Studio’s desktop app and CLI. You can spin up sites, run performance audits, add content, and install plugins and themes through natural language conversation — all locally, so nothing you break goes public. Sejas explains how it works under the hood before building something live with the host. Studio Code is free while in beta, so now’s a good time to experiment.

If you rather want to read about the updates in WordPress Studio, Fredrik Rombach Ekelund shares three big updates to WordPress Studio: a new default Native PHP runtime makes your local sites load 30–50% faster while using a third of the memory, the Studio CLI now installs with one dependency-free command — no Node.js or npm required — and Claude Sonnet 5 is the new default model in Studio Code, improving multi-step work like tracing bugs across files. A Sandbox runtime remains available for testing untrusted code.

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

Featured Image:

WordPress Planet

WordPress 7.0.2 went out today with two important security updates. One is a type of pre-authorization RCE we (fortunately!) have only seen a few times in WordPress’ 23-year history; the last, I believe, in the PHPMailer class five years ago.

Major kudos to Adam Kues of Searchlight Cyber for finding the batch REST API RCE, to TF1T, dtro, and haongo on the facilitated SQL injection!

Thanks to responsible disclosure, the WordPress.org Security team was able to coordinate with hosts and CDNs to mitigate the attack at the network layer. Please upgrade anyway! But it’s a huge relief to know the vast majority of WordPress sites were protected by defense-in-depth even before the updates went out.

I really appreciate how people and organizations that otherwise might not be on the best of terms come together in times like this. (Full credits in the release post.) Everyone buries the hatchet to protect as many people as possible as quickly as possible.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: security is going to be a big topic this year as the technology industry digests the incredible advances in AI models. It’s a good time to review your plans and processes, sweat the details, invest in maintenance, and hug a sysadmin.