YouTube video by Elliott Richmond

The core team is working hard on better release automation, including CLI scripts, AI skills, and updated documentation. Why is this work important? A minor WordPress release—including every securi…

YouTube video by Elliott Richmond

Animates the core Tabs block's panel reveal, with a settings page to choose the effect, duration, and easing.

YouTube video by Elliott Richmond

YouTube video by Elliott Richmond

WordPress 7.1 lands on 19 August 2026, and for once I don't think that's an exaggeration when I say it's a proper release. Not a "few tweaks and a new default theme" release, mind, a genuine "people have been asking for this for years" release. I sat down and went through it properly for my latest YouTube video, cherry picking 14 features to actually test rather than just read about, and a few of them are worth talking about here on their own.

I’m curious to know what WordPress developers are using for local development these days? If it’s not listed below then leave a comment…

ALT: Uploading Loading Dial Animation

YouTube video by Elliott Richmond

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.

YouTube video by Ryan Welcher Codes

You may have heard of WordPress Playground, but have you explored what it can do? WordPress developer and core contributor Elliott Richmond has some real-world examples that might surprise you. He joi...

When you launch a new website, training the client is the bit that gets neglected. The block editor is mature enough now that clients can do far more than they used to, but anything new needs teaching. So training isn't an optional extra, it's part of the job. The obvious place to do it is the staging site. You've already got one, it's running the theme, the plugins, the content.

YouTube video by Elliott Richmond

TL;DR: I rebuilt kate & tom's, a 400+ property holiday cottage site, from Advanced Custom Fields flexible content into a native WordPress block theme. The client can now build pages from patterns instead of waiting on me to code a new widget every time. The hard part was migrating 10,590 widgets out of post meta and into blocks, which I did with a purpose-built plugin re-run against fresh production snapshots throughout development.

A practical look at how WordPress Playground and Blueprints can replace a dedicated staging environment for client training sessions. Real setup, real workflow, and a use case straight from WordCamp E...

Now I'm pretty late to the table with this but I came back from WordCamp Europe this year with one thing I actually needed to go and try. Not for the sake of it. Because there was a job waiting on the other side. A client of mine is mid-migration from a classic theme to a full block theme. For years they've managed their content with a plugin that used flexible content fields, so this is a proper shift in how their site works day to day.

The Cheltenham WordPress meetup is taking a summer break. Holidays, busy schedules, the general impossibility of finding a free Wednesday in July when half your members are somewhere on the Continent. It's nothing unusual. Other meetups do it too. We'll be back. But the break has given me some time to sit with something that's been nagging at me for a while: finding speakers has become genuinely hard.

What a contrast a week can be. Last weekend I was at WordCamp, surrounded by a group of WordPress and open source enthusiasts, all buzzing about the same stuff I get excited about. The sort of weekend where you come home full of ideas and convinced you're going to change how you work. Then the dust settles, you sit down to actually turn those ideas into content, and you come back down to earth with a bump.

**Safe Edits, Local Development & Taking Over Existing Sites** Ever inherited a WordPress site and been too nervous to touch anything? Or made a “small change” that acciden

This year WordCamp Europe was truly quite special. I've attended quite a few WordCamp's - and particularly a couple in Europe - and although I've been in the WordPress community for over 20 years and run our own little WordPress meetup in my local town, I have always been that introverted, shy, and retiring attendee. My enthusiasm for WordPress has never wavered from the day I discovered it, but coming together with a community as massive as this can be daunting.

This year WordCamp Euro was truly quite special. I've attended quite a few WordCamp's - and particularly a couple in Europe - and although I've been in the WordPress community for over 20 years and run our own little WordPress meetup in my local town, I have always been that introverted, shy, and retiring attendee. My enthusiasm for WordPress has never wavered from the day I discovered it, but coming together with a community as massive as this can be daunting.

YouTube video by Elliott Richmond

Explore how Angine de Poitrine challenges music norms and makes AI-generated content seem irrelevant with their unique style.

For a long time, music followed a predictable map. Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle eight, out. It was a comfortable pattern that everyone knew how to follow. Then you get bands like Angine de Poitrine who turn up and completely wreck the floor plan. It’s refreshing, especially now we’re living in an age where everything is being "regenerated" by AI based on the same old tired patterns.

Create your site. Share your voice. Earn online.

I use AI a lot. But if I'm honest, I'm less interested in AI in general and more interested in Claude specifically and more specifically still, in the way Claude works when you actually set it up properly. Agents, skills, commands, CLAUDE.md files. It sounds fiddly. And compared to just opening a chat window and typing "build me a thing," it is at first!

YouTube video by KEXP

YouTube video by Elliott Richmond

YouTube video by Elliott Richmond

I've been using Claude Code for a while now, and something kept nagging at me. Every time I started a WordPress plugin project, I was repeating the same instructions. Don't load scripts in the header - use wp_enqueue_scripts. Sanitise your inputs. Escape your outputs. Use Yoda conditions. Tabs, not spaces. Every session, the same preamble. So I built a plugin for Claude Code that handles all of that automatically.