Following the launch of WordPress 7.0, the largest WordPress event on the planet took place, bringing together 2,500 people from the ecosystem to review the state of WordPress and the upcoming WordPress 7.1 version.

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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 1 to 7, 2026.

WordCamp Europe 2026 took place June 4-6 in Krakow, Poland, with 2,458 attendees from 81 countries, nearly a quarter of whom were attending their first WordCamp Europe.

The event kicked off with Contributor Day, where all teams worked in parallel, with special focus on bringing new contributors on board through mentors and welcome tables.

The opening keynote was delivered by the CERN team, the European laboratory where the World Wide Web was born, which announced that home.cern is now running on WordPress, automatically migrated to production that same day, with a custom platform that provisions new sites in Kubernetes in roughly a minute and plans to release as open source.

WordPress 7.0 was the thread running through much of the program. A panel with launch contributors walked through how a version of this magnitude is coordinated, and several sessions explored in detail the possibilities opened by native AI integration: the Abilities API, the AI client, the Connectors screen, and WordPress’s positioning as a platform to build on top of them.

There were also practical sessions on the HTML API, WP_Query performance, scaling WordPress on modest servers, the Interactivity API and Full Site Editing, with hands-on workshops where attendees left with working code.

The closing talk brought together Mary Hubbard, WordPress CEO, with Matías Ventura and Rich Tabor to discuss the project’s future, the role of AI, and the importance of attracting new generations through education.

Among last-minute announcements, Cracow University of Technology will unveil in October a dedicated WordPress course — the first of its kind in Poland.

WordCamp Europe returns next year, May 27-29, 2027 in Málaga, Spain, and the next event on the calendar is WordCamp US, August 16-19 in Phoenix.

Matt Mullenweg, who ultimately was unable to attend WordCamp Europe, published a post about a new security initiative for the WordPress.org directory called “Protect The Shire”, referencing Tolkien’s universe.

The most immediate and concrete change is that starting now every new version of a plugin or theme will wait up to 24 hours before being distributed through the automatic update system, giving time to review it before it reaches the millions of sites that have automatic updates enabled.

The motivation is clear: the current system distributes any update the moment the developer hits the button, and that is a real attack vector. It already happened with Essential Plugins, where a malicious buyer acquired several well-regarded plugins and introduced malicious code that was automatically distributed to all their users.

The context Matt describes is one of tension between two opposing forces: updating as soon as possible to be safe, and not updating as soon as possible to be safe. The answer he proposes is to use AI to review each commit in the directory automatically — something that was unthinkable before due to the problem’s scale, with over 78,000 plugins and themes and over 3,000 commits to the repository every day.

The 24-hour period is temporary while processes are refined: the idea is that in the future that wait will shrink to minutes as the automated review system matures.

For plugin developers, this means an update released today won’t reach users with automatic updates immediately — something to keep in mind especially with urgent security updates.

Gutenberg 23.3 has arrived and it’s a release with several significant changes. The most visible for users is that the media editor modal becomes the default crop experience: it’s no longer an experiment you have to enable, but the standard flow when clicking the crop button on any image. The modal integrates in one space free and proportional cropping, flipping, rotation with fine control, and metadata editing like alt text and captions.

Also arriving as stable is support for responsive styles per individual block instance: if in version 23.2 you could define different styles per viewport globally from Global Styles, now you can do the same block by block, with an inspector showing only the relevant controls based on the selected screen state.

And the update plugin developers were waiting for: Gutenberg 23.3 is now, with caveats, built on React 19, making it the real testing ground for catching incompatibilities before this change arrives in WordPress 7.1.

Though there is an important update on React 19: the migration has had to be rolled back temporarily. Days after releasing Gutenberg 23.3 with React 19 integrated, the team discovered that many already-published plugins, developed with React 18, are incompatible with the new version and cause frequent errors. The problem is more subtle than expected: while API changes between React 18 and 19 are minimal, the runtimes turn out to be incompatible in unexpected ways.

Gutenberg 23.3.2 already includes the revert to React 18. The team acknowledges it needs a more gradual migration strategy, with the possibility of alternating between versions via an experimental flag and with a compatibility layer for already-published plugins. The goal of including React 19 in WordPress 7.1 still stands, but the path will require more work than anticipated.

In the experimental department, the customizable dashboard takes a big step forward: it now includes five new widgets, among them Welcome, Quick Draft, Activity, Site Status, and Site Preview, all adaptable to the size of the tile they occupy on the grid. The dashboard design system has also matured considerably, with drag-and-drop animations and widget resizing, a layout model selector between grid and masonry, and per-widget adjustments. To try it, enable the “New Dashboard experience” experiment in Gutenberg, under Settings, Experiments.

Other notable improvements: the image block adds a “Mark as decorative” toggle for accessibility, Notes now support multiple discussion threads per block, and there are several performance fixes in editor loading and in the use of shared listeners across block instances.

The Core team has published a testing call for one of the most interesting updates pointing to WordPress 7.1: client-side image processing. The idea is that when someone uploads an image from the block editor, the browser itself handles decoding it, resizing it, and generating all thumbnails using the VIPS image processing library executed in WebAssembly, before sending them to the server.

This significantly reduces server CPU and memory load during uploads, and allows offering support for modern formats like AVIF, WebP, HEIC, Ultra HDR, and JPEG XL independently of what the host has installed. Browsers that can’t handle the work automatically fall back to the server flow without the user noticing anything. The feature graduated from an experiment in Gutenberg to a stable characteristic during the WordPress 7.0 cycle, and now points to integration into WordPress Core with version 7.1.

For the 7.1 testing round, new capabilities have been added: Ultra HDR support, JPEG XL, animated GIF to video conversion, better error handling, and greater resilience in batch uploads. An important detail for anyone wanting to test it: the feature is only active in Chromium browsers, because Firefox and Safari don’t yet support the document isolation policy that the WebAssembly worker needs. A fallback mode for HEIC images does work on Safari.

Real-time collaborative editing remains the big bet for WordPress 7.1, and the team has launched a real-world testing initiative designed precisely for what was missing in the 7.0 cycle: real users editing in real conditions, not just technical tests in controlled environments.

The idea is to create a dedicated Slack channel where early adopters from different hosting environments can enable the feature through the Gutenberg plugin, use it in their daily work, and give feedback directly to developers. It’s not about following specific test scripts, but using the feature naturally and reporting what doesn’t work well. The profile they’re looking for is someone who genuinely needs to edit content with more people — whether in a small business, a newsroom, an NGO, or a marketing team.

The Hosting team has also issued a call directed at hosting providers, asking them to invite their customers to participate in the program. The reason is straightforward: the more different hosting environments represented in the tests, the better it can be guaranteed that the feature works correctly across the diversity of configurations that exist in the WordPress ecosystem.

The Playground team has published a guide on version 3 of the GitHub Action for pull request previews, which significantly simplifies the workflow compared to the previous version. When someone opens a pull request in a plugin or theme repository, the action automatically adds a preview button that opens a full WordPress Playground in the browser with the PR code already installed and activated, without the reviewer having to set anything up locally.

If you’re already using version 2 with builds, the migration is worth it: it eliminates dozens of lines of manual configuration, and the only thing to watch is ensuring that the intermediate releases the process generates are marked as prereleases and not drafts, because Playground can’t download assets from releases in draft status.

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!