The team preparing WordPress 7.1 is already in place, and at the same time a clear roadmap of what the version will include has been revealed.

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Program transcript

Hello, I’m Alicia Ireland, and you’re listening to WPpodcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.

In this episode, you’ll find the information from June 15 to 21, 2026.

We have a date and team for WordPress 7.1. The release is scheduled for August 19, 2026, coinciding with WordCamp US, and Anne McCarthy will lead the entire cycle as Release Lead. It’s not a casual choice: Anne has spent years being the person who gathers and prepares information for each new WordPress version, the one who writes the roadmaps, organizes the updates, and connects the work of dozens of teams into a coherent narrative for the entire community. If you’ve ever wanted to know what was coming in a WordPress version before it shipped, you’ve probably read something written or coordinated by her. Having her now lead a full cycle is simply the natural continuation of that work, and few people know the project’s pulse better. The team follows the reduced squad model that’s been used in recent cycles, relying heavily on the representatives of each Make team to distribute the workload.

As for the version’s content, the thread running through WordPress 7.1 is collaboration — both among people and between people and artificial intelligence. Notes make a big leap with a suggestions mode, emoji reactions, reply threads with notifications, and the ability to apply suggestions directly from a reply in a thread. Real-time collaboration continues to advance, though there are still open strategic questions about what exactly will arrive in this version — the full feature or just the underlying architecture — and what storage mechanism will ultimately be used, though there’s now a clear winner from performance testing. Closely tied to all this comes a new feature called Guidelines, a persistent and structured way to define editorial rules, brand voice, and content standards directly in WordPress, designed so that when you collaborate with AI, it maintains your voice and preferences instead of generating generic content.

On the admin side, the command palette reorganizes with clear sections for recent, suggested, and matching commands, and remembers your most-used commands between sessions. The Site Editor continues gaining visual consistency by respecting the admin’s color scheme. A new Identity section arrives in Design to manage logo, favicon, title, and site tagline from one place, and a new dashboard widget called “On This Day” retrieves content published on past dates for inspiration for new posts. The admin bar, known internally as the omnibar, integrates persistently within editors, eliminating the “Howdy” greeting and modernizing its icons.

On the APIs front, the Abilities API expands its query and filtering capabilities with a curated set of native Core abilities. Block Bindings gain support for list-items and inner blocks. The editor moves toward forcing iframe mode in block themes, leaving extension to all themes for a future version. Unicode support expansion continues for emails, usernames, and slugs as we’ve seen, and of course the React 19 migration.

For blocks, WordPress 7.1 points to three new additions: a Playlist block with waveform visualization, a Table of Contents block that automatically generates navigable links to headings, and a Tabs block for organizing content in panels. The Classic block, for its part, enters a deprecation process, ceasing to load TinyMCE by default when unnecessary, lightening the editor for sites that don’t depend on it.

In design and customization, responsive styles directly from the editor stand out, without needing to touch CSS, along with support for interactive states like hover and focus both globally and per block instance. You’ll also be able to see clearly where a specific block inherits its styles from — the theme, a parent, or global styles.

In media, client-side image processing continues expanding supported formats and improving resilience to connection failures, and the media editor modal continues receiving usability improvements.

Finally, regarding the AI client, the Core AI team has detailed its two big bets for 7.1. The first is generation streaming — having AI responses display in real time rather than waiting for the entire response to complete. This is more complicated than it sounds in WordPress because servers normally cut requests at 30 seconds. For that reason, this capability will arrive first in the PHP AI Client, the foundation underlying the AI client that doesn’t depend directly on WordPress, leaving the ground prepared for hosts and developers to start building real support in a future version. The second bet is embeddings, a way to represent content as numerical vectors to enable meaning-based search rather than just word matching — something already being tested experimentally in the AI plugin with a vector search system, leveraging native support that MySQL and MariaDB have recently added for this type of data.

Gutenberg 23.4 has arrived after the React 19 turnaround, and precisely resumes that migration much more cautiously: instead of imposing the new version by default, an experimental flag is added that allows activating it optionally from the Experiments page, giving plugin, theme, and block developers a safe way to test their integrations against React 19 without affecting anyone else until it’s ready.

The Site Editor also receives an important appearance change: the sidebar and general container now respect the color scheme each user has configured in the admin, instead of always displaying a fixed dark background, which visually unifies the experience with the rest of the admin panel.

The media editor modal continues polishing with several usability improvements: editable attachment fields now appear at the top of the details panel, the mobile toolbar incorporates aspect ratio control, and zoom now uses plus and minus buttons instead of a slider. Support for UltraHDR images also arrives, automatically detected on upload while preserving the HDR gain map in generated thumbnails. Another notable update is that Columns and Gallery blocks can now transform directly into a Grid variation, preserving content but changing the layout type. And on the real-time collaboration front — still exclusive to the Gutenberg plugin — there’s a good number of reliability fixes: a separate endpoint for document persistence, polling improvements, forbidden room management, and several undo system fixes.

The Developer Blog has published a tutorial that solves a classic problem for block themes: how to load a different template part depending on context — for example, showing a different sidebar based on the post category. In classic themes this was trivial, just some PHP logic within the template itself. In block themes, though, the typical solution has been creating a whole new template for each variant, even if only a small fragment of the page changes, ultimately generating a collection of nearly identical templates.

The alternative the article proposes goes through a filter that runs just before rendering each block and lets you intercept and modify its data on the fly. What’s interesting about the approach is that it’s resilient by design: if a specific template part doesn’t exist for a category, the original simply stays in place without needing additional logic, and you only need to create files for cases where something truly different is needed.

The Plugins team has published a balance showing that their call for volunteers in March has worked. Three new people have completed their roughly two-month training and are already actively reviewing plugins every week.

The impact on the review queue has been spectacular: in April it peaked at approximately 1,050 pending plugins, and within weeks dropped nearly to zero, despite submission requests continuing to break records. In May, with the queue under control, the team completed close to 3,000 initial reviews in a single month — roughly five percent of the entire directory — versus approximately 1,100 the same month the prior year.

Submission growth illustrates the magnitude of the problem they were solving: May hit a new record of around 700 weekly requests — 2.7 times more than 2025 and five times more than 2024. The team openly acknowledges that AI tools have been key to sustaining this pace, but insists they don’t replace human judgment: judgment calls, conversations with plugin authors, and managing policy violations still depend on experienced reviewers.

The Community team has opened an interesting debate about something that hasn’t been questioned in a while: whether the money spent on WordCamp advertising actually works. Organizers can request up to 400 dollars for marketing and advertising through the Global Sponsorship grant, with the goal of attracting new attendees and giving the event visibility in the local community. The problem is that today there’s no reliable way to know if that spending is delivering results — whether a social media campaign attracts new faces or just reaches people who were going to attend anyway, or whether a mention in a local tech newsletter is worth more than a Facebook ad.

Among the ideas being evaluated are adding a simple, required question at ticket purchase like “How did you hear about this event?” with options like social media, someone’s recommendation, organizer newsletter, or local community group; incorporating a similar question in the post-event survey that organizers already fill out if they used the marketing budget; and, longer term, improving tools to measure this consistently across events.

And finally, this podcast is distributed under a Creative Commons license as a derivative version of the podcast in Spanish; you can find all the links for more information, and the podcast in other languages, at WPpodcast .org.

Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!