iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 04/09/2026

We’re about to ship a simple, useful thing I don't think has ever been done in WordPress before. With PublishPress Revisions, you can already schedule post revisions for any future date. You edit a published post, pick a time, and the updates go live automatically.

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 02/09/2026

We’re killing off some of our smaller WordPress brands ☠️ Not the products: just the standalone brands. Moving forward, they are being absorbed into PublishPress. . Running multiple micro-brands in 2026 is an operational trap for us.

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 31/08/2026

A customer just gave us some blunt feedback on PublishPress: "You have too many plugins. You need to do a better job guiding users through all these options." She didn't just point out the flaw. She mocked up an entire onboarding workflow for us.

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 28/08/2026

I got curious about what was possible with the new Visual Revisions feature in WordPress. Why not have a Wikipedia-style area showing all the changes to a post? It could be very useful for any WordPress publishers who wants to build audience trust.

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 27/08/2026

Kudos to @ahsanparwez.bsky.social and Mustaasam Saleem Since 2020 they've run @wpfounders.com and have collected over 250 stories from WordPress business founders. A lot of them are fascinating. Some great stories 👇 The co-founder of Crocoblock: Anna Hurko wpfounders.com/wordpress-pl...

wpfounders.com

Anna Hurko of Crocoblock, Sharing Her Story

Anna Hurko of Crocoblock, shares insights into her life and offers valuable business advice.

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 26/08/2026

We love to support publishers, particularly in the WordPress ecosystem. But this particular publishing niche can go and jump into the sea

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 20/08/2026

This looks like a great idea from Adam Silverstein: automatically test new WordPress releases against the 100 plugins. The testing would check that the new version of WordPress can still boot with those plugins active: core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/65920

core.trac.wordpress.org

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 27/06/2026

WordPress 6.9 shipped with a very cool feature: Notes. You can leave Google Docs-style comments directly on your posts. The catch? It's really hard to find. None of the publishers we work with have discovered it yet. I'd love to change that ...

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 26/06/2026

We’ve always tried to avoid releasing WordPress plugin updates on Fridays, just in case something needs fixing over the weekend. With the new 24-hour pause before updates appear in the official plugin repo, it probably makes sense to avoid Thursday releases too.

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 19/06/2026

Image editing is getting much better in WordPress. Check out the latest version of the Gutenberg plugin. You'll find a new editing window with rotate, flip, zoom, aspect ration and other tools. This new version is much easier to use than the current editing tools.

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 19/06/2026

Draft or Published. Those are basically the two choices you get for WordPress posts. Draft (unpublished) or Published? It's either one of the other. Have you ever wanted to label a WordPress post something else? Perhaps “In Progress”, "Assigned", “Needs Work”, or “Rejected”?

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 22/05/2026

Austin Ginder has uncovered some of the biggest hacks in the WordPress ecosystem. Some of them were really, really sneaky. Austin came on the PublishPress podcast and told the story of how one hacker took over a plugin and tricked users into installing his own secret updates.

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 20/05/2026

My wife always has good ideas. I'm the code monkey that implements them 😆 🐒 This week, she recommended that I add more promos to our PublishPress blog posts. Fortunately, that's really easy with the block editor. You can use the Auto-Insert Blocks feature in the PublishPress Blocks plugin:

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 20/05/2026

Austin Ginder is on a heater 🔥 He's using AI to uncover security issues in WordPress plugins that have been hidden for years. On the PublishPress podcast, he revealed that a big number of the high-profile issues may be the work of one hacker, or group of hackers.

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 19/05/2026

👀 You have the power to control who views your WordPress content 👀 "This page is only for logged in users" "This event is only for Accounting Department users" "This post is only for John and Jane" Enable ✅ or block ❌ viewing access

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 11/05/2026

I'm going to be on This Week in WordPress in about 30 minutes, with @nathanwrigley.com. There should be a lot to talk about. I can't remember ever seeing such a busy few days in the WordPress community: www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjU4...

youtube.com

This Week in WordPress #373

YouTube video by WP Builds

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 01/05/2026

I've seen big publishers with "lite" or "text-only" versions of their WordPress sites. Amber Hinds is a WordPress accessibility expert. On the PublishPress podcast, I asked Amber if these versions are a good idea. Are "text-only" versions more accessible? Are they helpful for some users?

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 30/04/2026

Why does it matter what the reading level of your content is? Amber Hinds is an accessibility expert and says we should aim to write below an 9th grade level. A 9th grade level? 🤯 Yes, there's several great reasons to write simply:

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 29/04/2026

I've seen many publishers adding audio playback to their articles. You can get WordPress plugins to read posts for your visitors. Amber Hinds is an accessibility expert. I asked her if these audio versions are helpful for people for disabilities. Her answer surprised me ...

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 24/04/2026

Chris Ward has enjoyed a career at the intersection of publishing and advertising. In this two minute clip, Chris describes the mind-blowing changes he's seen. In the early days, he was selling 728x90 banners on the homepage. Now we're in the era of cellphones listening to our conversations:

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 22/04/2026

Revisions are becoming a first class feature in WordPress. Previously Revisions were hidden away behind a tiny link in the sidebar. Install the new version of the Gutenberg plugin and you'll now see a "Revisions" tab in the sidebar. This shows the most recent revisions:

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 22/04/2026

Fast sites are profitable sites. Christopher Ward runs The Publisher Desk which helps publishers increase their advertising revenue. All Chris' work is on WordPress. It gives you complete control over the speed of your site. You can build sites with excellent Core Web Vitals results.

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 20/04/2026

Big improvements to the Media Library are underway for WordPress 7.1. There was a flurry of activity around media issues on the Gutenberg Github repo over the last few days. Some short term goals: - HEIC image support - Ultra HDR support - More stable uploading for large files

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 17/04/2026

Will we soon be using AI tools to manage our WooCommerce stores? Yes, says @briancoords.com, who is a Developer Advocate for WooCommerce. There are AI tools available that allow you to use a chatbot to create products, analyze data, and do much more with WooCommerce.

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 14/04/2026

It looks like the next step for real-time collaboration in WordPress is underway. There's a new experimental feature plugin called "Presence API". You'll be able to see what other people are doing in your WordPress site: github.com/WordPress/pr...

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 14/04/2026

Will we soon see AI agents making purchases on our WooCommerce stores? @briancoords.com says that Woo is actively working on that right now with Stripe and Google

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 14/04/2026

- Lightbox - Modal - Overlay - Pop-up - Dialog It seems like there's multiple ways to say the same thing, but none of them really make sense for normal people. Our plugin is literally called "MetaSlider Lightbox" but my wife had to ask me what a lightbox is 🤔

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 13/04/2026

AI is now a contributor to the WooCommerce core 🤯 What does it mean that Copilot and Claude are now contributing to the WooCommerce codebase? I asked @briancoords.com:

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 09/04/2026

Malcolm Peralty from Pressable has been blogging for over 20 years, since before WordPress 1.0! He was perhaps the first WordPress news blogger. He's written books. But in 2026 Malcolm isn't writing 5,000 word blog posts by himself any more. He's now the conductor, and AI is the orchestra.

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 09/04/2026

Who can edit posts on your WordPress site? 1. The person who wrote the post 2. Administrators or Editors That's it. Those are normally the only two options in WordPress. What happens if you want advanced options? For example ...

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 08/04/2026

In the next release of MetaSlider, we're working on better options for vertical slideshows. We find that people really like vertical for mobile displays. It feels natural to flick through with these slides with your thumb. Make your WordPress site feel like IG or TikTok.

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 08/04/2026

A couple of years ago, there was a whole new approach to translating WordPress plugins. Do I know anyone who has tried to implement the new .l10n.php translation files in plugin? This approach would replace the .mo and .po files with .l10n.php files. make.wordpress.org/core/2024/02...

make.wordpress.org

I18N Improvements in 6.5 (Performant Translations)

There are a number of internationalization (i18n) improvements in WordPress 6.5, which I’d like to cover in this dedicated dev note.

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 07/04/2026

We ran into a big Stripe issue today. Some Easy Digital Downloads accounts had missing data. This was on one of our smaller plugin sites so it was easier to miss. After digging in, we found that Stripe's events were often being blocked with a 403 error message.

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 06/04/2026

Can you use AI to help write a book? Malcolm Peralty has been writing with WordPress for over 20 years. Malcolm's also an author and he tells us about his experience writing a book while relying heaving on AI tools. Would he do it again?

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 02/04/2026

Most publishers have one-off posts, but also end up writing series of stories: - Investigations on a topic - Reviews of each episode of a TV show - Recipes from a particular cuisine - Game reports from a team's season Doing this in WordPress? You'll love PublishPress Series

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 02/04/2026

Chris Reynolds has been in the WordPress community for close to 20 years. He has a new podcast called "Community + Code" that focuses on the people building our open source software. I got to be on the latest episode 😁 🎙️ communitycode.dev/episodes/epi...

communitycode.dev

Episode 23: Steve Burge - Community + Code

Steve Burge built PublishPress by reading every single support ticket. He tells us how Drupal 7 pushed the whole industry toward WordPress.

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 02/04/2026

"Google Tag Manager can be a nightmare to set up and a big pain in the butt." @derekashauer.bsky.social doesn't mess around in describing his experience setting up Tag Manager on WordPress sites. It probably got the same UI designers who worked on Google Analytics 4 😜

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 01/04/2026

Unpopular opinion: there are areas where the WordPress community could immediately lean heavily into AI. For example, why not open the door to AI-generated translations? We could have every WordPress plugin and theme available in the world's 100 most popular languages.

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 31/03/2026

This is a nice touch with the new real-time collaboration feature in WordPress 7.0. At the top of the screen is a list of all the users editing the post. If you click a name, you'll be take to exactly what the user is working on. This feature and the video are courtesy of Max Schmeling

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 31/03/2026

How do people drive paid traffic to WordPress sites? @derekashauer.bsky.social helps people optimize their ads with conversion tracking and his answer is "Google and Meta". Any other sources of paid leads are far behind.

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 30/03/2026

Looks like the delay in WordPress 7.0 is now confirmed and it's probably the right call. A lot of changes are still going on in to get 7.0 ready.

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 30/03/2026

What are alternatives to Google Analytics for WordPress users? Google Analytics 4 is hard to use. It's not privacy-friendly. @derekashauer.bsky.social runs Conversion Bridge which can connect your WordPress site to over 20 different analytics platforms. Which ones does he recommend?

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 27/03/2026

Do you have a list of words that you don't allow in WordPress posts? - Over-used words - Rude words - Common mis-spellings - Rival company or product names

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 25/03/2026

IMHO, it seems pretty likely that the WordPress 7.0 release will get moved back from April 9. This release is really now big and feature-packed, so there's a lot of edges to smooth off. Done right is better than done fast ✅

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 25/03/2026

Without looking, can you guess the most popular non-English language used for WordPress sites?

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 24/03/2026

Are any of you distributing AI-generated translations for your free plugins? With Pro plugins you can distribute them from your site. But the WordPress Ployglots team won't accept AI translations yet. Has anyone found a workaround (short of adding the files to your plugin)?

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 23/03/2026

If you're building with the WordPress block editor, you're faced with some key decisions around the user interface. Where do you put all your configuration options? Here are the 3 common choices:

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 19/03/2026

If you want to control access to single WordPress posts or pages, we've got a big update for you. - Control who can edit each post - Control who can view each post - Control who can add terms to a post - Control who can view or edit posts with a specific Tag or Category

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 12/03/2026

Do you need to lock down WordPress posts so only a few people can edit or view them? We're about to make that super-easy with the PublishPress Permissions plugin. With one click you can either enable or block access to any user or user role:

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Steve Burge @steveburge.com · 12/03/2026

WordPress 7.0 will absolutely, 100% get the new Google Docs-style editing. Authors will be able to work together in real time on a post. The discussion now is around whether it's going to be enabled by default. It's not unusual for such a major new feature to be opt-in at first.

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