An AI experiment revealed vulnerabilities as an agent attempted to manipulate an open source maintainer into merging malware, while Nvidia highlighted storage bottlenecks in AI infrastructure. Efficiency is now paramount.
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Learn how to create an online course with AI: outlines, draft lessons, and quizzes, with copy-paste prompts and a free WordPress option inside!
The post How to Create an Online Course With AI (Outlines, Quizzes, and Draft Lessons) appeared first on Themeisle Blog.
I started using WordPress because it was a practical tool for client work. One tiny patch turned it into a community, a career, and a lasting lesson about what open source makes possible.
The post My WordPress Origin Story: The One-Line Patch That Changed My Career appeared first on Aaron D. Campbell.
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Matt: OmFest Registration
Thank you to everyone who expressed interest in shaping OmFest. We’re still working out some details, but we’ve got a Luma registration page for the event up. Please join on September 29, 2026, Om’s 60th birth anniversary, for an eclectic conference curated by his different communities to celebrate the many facets of Om.
If you’re just tuning in, our dearest loved one Om Malik passed away in June. This grieving process has been a rough one for me, but it has inspired some positive life changes. I’m traveling with a real camera again! A Nikon D6. I’ve shot tens of thousands of frames on the D-series, so it feels like home, but it also has some nice new features like built-in GPS (I used to use an attachment for that) and USB-C.
I’ve also become very driven to be meticulous. I miss Om’s harsh but often true feedback, but his voice in my head is a good reminder that if you do something, it’s worth doing it well. I’m kinda a hot mess (still blessed! 
) so this will be a journey but the progress already has been rewarding. Excellence is a habit. We can always hold ourselves to a higher standard.
The Adams County Jail, just north of Denver, does not allow in-person visits. Over the course of their incarceration, people detained there will never share a visiting room with their families and children, or even sit across from them behind a plexiglass barrier.
As in nearly all county jails across Colorado’s Front Range and a growing number of county jails across the U.S., visits happen only over video – on a phone, tablet or computer – for a per-minute fee.
A group of families are now challenging the Adams County ban in court, arguing it violates their right to maintain family associations under the Colorado Constitution. The plaintiffs include children as young as 4 years old. Their lawsuit is part of a national effort targeting jails with similar policies.
Video visitation can be a lifeline for family members when distance, work schedules or travel costs make in-person visits difficult. When video visitation is run well, visitors may appreciate avoiding security screenings, long waits and the harsh correctional environment. But many still miss physical touch with their loved one.
Technological glitches, limited privacy and fees can also make video visitation less than ideal. For these reasons, best-practice guidance from criminal justice policy organizations recommends video as a supplement to in-person visitation, not a complete replacement.
Kathryn Scott Osler/The Denver Post via Getty Images
As researchers who study visitation in correctional settings, our role is not to say how the courts should rule. But the Adams County case raises an important question we’ve spent much of our careers examining: What impacts do in-person visits have on incarcerated people and their families?
The answer is not as straightforward as it might seem. Many incarcerated people receive no visits at all. For those who do, visits can be enormously beneficial for them and their loved ones. But the benefits are not the same for everyone — they depend on the environments in which visits occur, the preexisting relationships between incarcerated people and their visitors, and what happens during the visits themselves.
Temporary relief from the pain of separation
For many incarcerated people, separation from family and friends is one of the most painful aspects of life behind bars. Visits can offer temporary relief from that separation and provide a unique chance for families to connect face-to-face.
For a little while, incarcerated people can get a break from their identity as a prisoner and act as a parent, son, daughter, partner, sibling or friend again. Visits also break up the monotony of confinement and give incarcerated people something to look forward to – so much so that correctional facilities commonly use visitation as an incentive for good behavior.
Visits, and the support they provide, can help people cope better with being incarcerated. Those who are visited commit fewer serious rule violations and also report less psychological distress. Visitation is also associated with less reoffending after release, as the relationships people maintain during confinement are the ones they can rely on during reentry to help with housing, employment and staying out of trouble.
Family-friendly rooms are a rarity in US jails
Correctional settings are not designed for comfort – they are designed for security. Razor wire, steel doors, surveillance cameras and uniformed officers typically surround daily life inside, and firm rules govern nearly all aspects of in-person visitation.
For visitors, it is not uncommon to pass through metal detectors, submit to intrusive physical searches, follow strict dress codes and wait for hours within facilities. This process can be intimidating, and some visitors come away feeling disrespected or treated like prisoners themselves. These burdens can discourage families from returning and, in some cases, contribute to their decision not to visit at all.
What an in-person visit looks like varies widely from facility to facility. In some settings, families sit together in a room. In others, visits are “noncontact,” meaning families are separated by a physical barrier and must communicate through a phone or speaker. Incarcerated people and their visitors have more positive experiences when they can sit side by side, embrace and share food or games. They have more negative experiences when physical contact is not allowed.
South_agency/E+ via Getty Images
Family-friendly visiting rooms – spaces with comfortable seating, toys or activities for children and opportunities for families to interact more naturally – are rare in U.S. jails.
Unlike prisons, jails are designed for short-term detention rather than prolonged confinement. They mainly hold people who have not yet been convicted of a crime, such as those awaiting trial, along with those detained for low-level offenses or probation violations. Jail populations turn over rapidly as people are booked, released and transferred. Faced with this churn – as well as staffing, security and contraband-control concerns – many jails invest little in family visitation. When in-person visits are offered, they most commonly are noncontact, an arrangement that is easier for jails to manage.
Still, these conditions can take a toll on visitors. Partners may struggle to have meaningful conversations through glass. For children, restrictions on movement and touch can make visits difficult. Additionally, having little to keep them occupied can leave children restless and fussy.
Visits can bring comfort … or reopen old wounds
Visits are shaped by both the relationships families bring with them and what they do with their limited time together. In one of our studies, family members described highs and lows with their loved ones long before incarceration. In another, visitors described relationships ranging from “close” and “loving” to “strained” and “terrible,” with some carrying hurt, anger or mistrust into visits. Strong relationships may make it easier for visitors to offer reassurance, affection and practical support, whereas fraught relationships can make visits less comforting or reopen emotional wounds.
Jails in the U.S. have become a front-line response for people with unmet mental health and substance-use needs. Such needs often weigh on family relationships and shape what happens during visits. Some visits consist mainly of “family time,” catching up or sharing news, while others take on harder tasks. Families may voice long-held frustrations, challenge incarcerated people to “step up” to their responsibilities, talk about change and set expectations for the future. These harder visits may be more likely to cause distress for all those involved, but they can also help families address unresolved problems.
In this way, visits can serve as a makeshift form of family therapy, with families confronting problems of addiction, parenthood and mental health under conditions that are far from ideal. These conversations can be tense and emotional, but, ultimately, they can be how families repair bonds, settle the past and prepare for a loved one’s return.
Read more of our stories about Colorado.
Jillian Turanovic receives funding from the National Institute of Justice, the Bureau of Justice Assistance, and the National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research.
Melinda Tasca receives funding from the Bureau of Justice Assistance.
Politics + Society – The Conversation
AI is becoming crucial for monitoring domain abuse, enabling automated analysis and real-time detection. However, careful oversight is essential to avoid errors, especially as domain registrations surge.
Learn how to generate local SEO landing pages in WordPress from one CSV with MPG: templates, placeholders, free-tier limits, and the thin-content risks to avoid.
Do you need WooCommerce to sell courses, or is your LMS’s built-in checkout enough? Here’s how to decide, plus honest setup steps for both paths!
The post How to Sell Courses With WooCommerce (and When You Don’t Need It) appeared first on Themeisle Blog.
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Matt: Super-organized
I have so many tools for organization and management across Asana, Google Workspace, P2, and Linear, but they’re not really connected. I’m trying to get everything in one place so there’s no data duplication, a single source of truth, and everything is always linked and accessible. It feels good, like spring cleaning, to go through everything. Woo has an initiative they call Mise en place with a similar idea. Which is why you’ve also seen those bug fixes and clean-up happening. With AI, this should be easier than ever.
Hi there,
It was another busy release week: the WordPress 7.0.3 security update, WordPress 7.1 RC 1, and Gutenberg 23.7 all landed. More on each below — but before you keep reading, update all your sites to 7.0.3 now. This newsletter can wait… 
If you are traveling to Phoenix: safe travels, and pack a sweater — the AC will be cranked up high in every building! This year, I will see you on the WCUS Livestream.
Have a great weekend!
Yours, 
Birgit
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
WordPress 7.0.3 shipped as a security release fixing twelve vulnerabilities, so update your sites right away if automatic background updates aren’t already handling it for you. Release lead John Blackbourn lists the fixes, including a pre-auth XSS on the login screen that could lead to PHP code execution, several contributor-level stored XSS issues, and a multisite privilege escalation. Backports reach all supported branches down to 4.7, and 7.1 RC2 carries the fixes too.
To appreciate the huge effort by the security team to get this release out, consider the numbers: until earlier this year, there were 20 to 30 reports per month; now that number has jumped to 450 per month. Both security updates, 7.0.2 and 7.0.3, were backported not only to the two officially supported versions, 6.9 and 7.0, but all the way back to version 4.7. That’s two dozen major versions that needed updating. See also Rae Morey’s story in The Repository: WordPress 7.0.3 Patches 12 Vulnerabilities as Bug Bounty Reports Climb to 450 a Month.
August 19 is the scheduled final release date, and Benjamin Zekavica announces WordPress 7.1 Release Candidate 1 ready for your test sites. Since Beta 4, more than 145 updates landed — 57 in the Editor, 88 in Core — plus new features like the Icons API, shareable revision links, and email notifications for @mentions in Notes. Plugin and theme authors: wrap up testing and bump your “Tested up to” to 7.1. WordPress Playground lets you try it straight in the browser.
Milana Cap counts more than 310 Core Trac tickets, twenty new hooks, and roughly 600 Gutenberg enhancements in the WordPress 7.1 Field Guide, your linked index of every dev note for the August 19 release. Highlights range from client-side media processing and the always-iframed post editor to the SVG Icon API, responsive block styles, and the persistent admin bar. A candid closing section covers what didn’t make it, from the Classic block’s reprieve to real-time collaboration and React 19.
The post editor is always iframed in WordPress 7.1, and the escape hatch that let one apiVersion 2 block pull a whole post out of the iframe disappears. That’s the compatibility risk topping the developer’s audit list for WordPress 7.1 by release coordinator Benjamin Zekavica. He sorts each section by risk level, walks through the SVG Icon API’s strict sanitizer, responsive block styles, and the new DataViews filters, and closes with a checklist for your August 19 release.
The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #133 – Gutenberg 23.6 Release and WordPress 7.1
The Gallery block’s ambiguous “Convert to images” button becomes “Detach,” complete with a modal explaining what happens — one of many refinements Jonathan Bossenger walks through in what’s new in Gutenberg 23.7. You’ll also find the Global Styles inheritance UI now opt-in via the Experiments page, LaTeX errors in the Math block waiting until you leave the field, and fixes for floated blocks overlapping sticky ones and Pullquote line heights in the editor.
Plugins and Tools for #nocode site builders
Variable product pages load roughly 9 to 12 percent faster and large stores get snappier Order screens, Brent MacKinnon reports in what’s new in WooCommerce 11.0. Analytics also grows more trustworthy: refunds now count in the period they happened, session counts exclude bots, and you can rerun incomplete historical imports. Guest customers can claim past orders when they create an account, and a Checkout Recovery beta lets you test messaging before a full rollout.
Getting Site Editor changes out of the database and into version control has frustrated agency developers for years, and Brian Coords argues agents make it urgent again. His experimental agent-first approach to Create Block Theme, wp-theme-control, wraps the upcoming WP-CLI 3.0 wp block commands in bash scripts and an agent skill: a plan command lists database changes, then you dry-run, export them into your theme, and optionally clear the database copies. He’s collecting feedback ahead of his WordCamp US talk.
Clients pinning comments straight onto your live pages — no logins, no email chains, no PDF round-trips — is the pitch of Ben Elwood‘s Reviso client feedback and approvals plugin. Among other page builders it’s native to the block editor, with threaded replies, status tracking, and review links that work even in maintenance mode. Version 1.5.2 switches on Suggest mode by default, so reviewers propose wording changes like tracked changes and your team applies them with one click.
Bas Buis released Dynamic OSM Maps, a plugin that adds interactive maps without Google API keys or recurring fees. The lightweight block runs on OpenStreetMap and Leaflet: in the free version you enter addresses manually, while Pro connects your custom fields — coordinates, addresses, or repeaters — for unlimited markers and popups. That opens the door for directory and listing sites to render stored location data straight onto the map.
Emily Rapport opens with Dutch tulip mania to frame the rush of llms.txt files and AI-visibility subscriptions, then does something rarer: shares a year of her own content work with real Search Console data. Her rewritten maintenance page climbed from position 50 to 13 and collected exactly five clicks — yet three inquiries arrived saying “I asked ChatGPT.” Her takeaway: publishing consistently across real topics beats chasing one niche, and you still can’t reliably trace an AI recommendation to a page.
Building Blocks and Tools
The WooCommerce Developer Blog follows up its All Products proof of concept with the why behind it. Veronica Fasulo and co-authors lay out the value of DataViews and who it’s for: you describe a field once and it powers the list column, Quick Edit, bulk edit, and forms, instead of four hand-wired implementations. Merchants get switchable views without page reloads, extension developers get registration instead of DOM patching — and the team openly asks whether DataViews is even the right foundation.
What’s new in Playground?
A customizable Dock, auto-save, and live visual previews of your saved instances headline the new WordPress Playground UI, which Fellyph Cintra demos on WordPress.tv. The video walks through importing projects from GitHub or Zip files, previewing Core and Gutenberg pull requests, and the built-in file editor, database manager, and error logs — plus switching WordPress versions all the way back to 0.7. Feedback goes to the Make Playground blog or the #playground Slack channel.
AI in WordPress
Vercel, a major platform shipped the Vercel AI Gateway Provider plugin, by former Core AI team rep Felix Arntz. One API key unlocks hundreds of models from over 40 providers. Any AI Client plugin on your site can route text, image, and video generation through the Gateway — including the Photo to Post demo from Jonathan Bossenger’s tutorial. Automatic fallbacks kick in during provider outages, and you pay provider rates without platform fees.
Your AI agent designs a beautiful page, and Gutenberg freezes it into one uneditable Custom HTML blob. Human Made’s answer is Block Runner, now open-sourced on GitHub: a deterministic Node CLI that converts generated HTML into properly nested native blocks — wp:cover, wp:columns, wp:buttons — with real attachment IDs, and validates every result against headless Gutenberg. In the team’s benchmark, raw models writing block markup score 35 to 73; paired with Block Runner, the same models hit 93 to 99.
Readers may remember Chris Huber’s Block Format Bridge from a few months back — it tackles the same gap from inside WordPress, converting Markdown and HTML server-side at insert time, while Block Runner works the pipeline side with its validation gate and CI hooks. Two open-source answers to the same question is a good sign the agentic content problem is getting real attention.
A third piece of the puzzle: the official WordPress agent-skills repository takes the prevention route, teaching AI coding assistants to write valid block markup in the first place. For a lighter-weight approach, you can also point your AI agent straight at the updated Core Blocks Reference, where each block’s page now documents its markup, attributes, supports, and allowed nesting.
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