That was an interesting week, wasn’t it? Three WordPress updates in the span of 24 hours. I don’t think we’ve ever seen this before.
Now, it’s easy to be negative about this, but let’s consider the hard work that’s going into these releases. Security fixes need top priority. It’s just then very unfortunate it introduces an edge case bug and requires an additional security fix. I spent my entire day testing and releasing WordPress updates, but you will not hear me complain.
In fact, I think it was a good week full of interesting things being shared. I’ve collected them for you in today’s newsletter. Hope you enjoy it!
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past week:
WordPress 7.0 beta 5 is now ready for your testing. It introduces a Command Palette shortcut in the admin bar, letting logged-in editors open the command palette from anywhere on their site. Install it in a test environment and report what you find.
- Paul Carter, yes, the WPTuts one, published a wonderful video
covering all the AI stuff entering WordPress 7.0 and beyond . I highly recommend you watch this one!
- WordPress.org announced the
Featured Plugins Experiment and it means, based on some requirements, your featured tab inside the plugins menu will be showing new and interesting plugins.
- Ajay D’Souza, famously known from WebberZone, released a cool plugin called
WebberZone Link Warnings . It provided accessible external link warnings through those modal confirmations you’ve seen before.
- If you maintain a WordPress plugin that extends the block editor or provides custom blocks, check the “
Common issues when building plugins compatible with real-time collaboration ” section of this dev note and test your plugin for real-time collaboration compatibility.
- WordPress now runs entirely in your browser.
https://my.WordPress.net gives you a complete, private WordPress environment with no sign-up and no hosting plan needed, all powered by Playground. Everything stays on your device. You can use it to write, learn, experiment, or build with preconfigured apps like a personal CRM or RSS reader. I’ve been saying for quite a while now that we’re likely to see WordPress being used in many more app contexts. This, to me, seems like a perfect start to kicking this off. This should inspire you to think outside the box of what other problems WordPress can solve. What do you think?
Related: Matt Mullenweg‘s “
- Very much related to the news item above is this article from The Repository: From Experimental Tool to AI Infrastructure: Adam Zieliński’s
Vision for WordPress Playground in 2026 .
- Team Ollie just released an eCommerce pattern collection and a whole suite of designs, blocks,
and templates for WooCommerce . Beautiful eCommerce made simple, and I’m in love!
- Caroline Nymark released a follow-up lesson for the
Introduction to the Block Bindings API with a code example of how to display the most recently sold WooCommerce product.
- In the most recent version of Gutenberg, version 22.7.0, a new experimental feature called Guidelines shipped. Based off of
this proposal , it’s “a single place in WordPress to capture site-wide content standards and context, so publishing tools can manage content that stays on-brand and consistent.” A cornerstone feature to steer AI and how it interacts with your site. Interact with them via Abilities, MCP, Rest, and everything else you want to connect.
- My buddy Brad Williams, WordPress OG, connected Claude AI directly to his live WordPress site using MCP + the new Abilities API. Create content gap analysis, auto newsletters, and real-time SEO audits, all powered by AI on your live data! And
he recorded a demo showing it all!
- Ciprian Propescu wanted to turn his WordPress sites into shareable demos without the pain of writing Blueprint JSON by hand. So he built a plugin that does exactly that, and
he’s sharing how to do that with us !
- Coen Jacobs has been on a roll with his updates for Mozart.
Version 1.2.0 now has zero configuration required, global-scope constant and function prefixing, and automatic autoloader generation, to name a few things. If you didn’t know, Mozart wraps all your project’s dependencies in your own namespace to prevent conflicts with other plugins loading the same dependencies in different versions.
- WordPress only activates one theme at a time, which gets annoying when your product pages need a different layout than your blog. Osom Studio made
a free plugin that lets you assign themes per page , post type, or URL through the admin. No multisite needed.
WordPress powers nearly a billion websites . Not all of them will update on day one, they never do. But for every site that does, AI infrastructure comes with it, built in, open, and available regardless of host, provider, or budget. No extra cost. No separate integration. Just update. – James LePage
- Ronald Huereca created a small utility plugin that leaves Core menu items alone
and alphabetizes the rest . It’s a tiny plugin, but I like plugins like this!
I don’t often use images to share a news item, but today’s an exception. I’ve been playing with
🚀 Performance & Security
- I’ve talked about this before as well, but this post is a good one to get you to understand some solid database performance optimization:
Database Indexing: The Missing Manual for WordPress .
- If you’ve made it past Module 2 of my
Make WordPress Fast course, you’ve learned all about Preload, Prefetch, and Preconnect. But… it looks like we’ll see a fourth option soon. If you think prefetch isn’t enough, but prerender is too risky for your site… Check out “ prerender until script .” It’s a new option the Chrome team is testing for the Speculation Rules API, and you can play with it now via an origin trial!
- Optimizing ad scripts and other heavy third-party scripts is one of the hardest things to do. So I wrote about
How to Control Third-Party Scripts Without Breaking Marketing and Analytics .
🔆 Within WordPress Highlight
But also time-bounded sessions, 2FA support, rate limiting, and configurable policies for REST, WP-CLI, Cron, WPGraphQL, & XML-RPC. No role escalation, no new permissions—just a gate.
💡 Interesting Finds
- Most people have thousands of saved tweets they never find again.
Siftly runs a 4-stage AI pipeline on your bookmarks and turns everything into a searchable knowledge base with a mindmap view, 100% self-hosted. Open source. Data never leaves your machine. Cloudflare introduced the new /crawl endpoint . One API call and an entire site crawled. No scripts. No browser management. Just the content in HTML, Markdown, or JSON. - Scientists put kids through 100 hours of reading, then scanned their brains. New wiring had physically grown inside the language regions. Communication between brain areas sped up by a factor of 10.
Kids who didn’t read showed zero change .
🛒 WooCommerce News
10.6.x is here ! This update introduces enhanced product collections, streamlined cart and checkout design, and improvements aimed at boosting performance and user experience. - What’s
interesting about this 10.6 release is that this is the first time Copilot is mentioned as a contributor.
🎁 Bonus
I’ve got two great podcasts lined up for you this week. The first one is with Jason Konen. A while back I saw WP Engine launch
The second Within WordPress podcast episode is with Rodolfo Melogli. We talk Business Bloomer, the impact of AI on content-led growth, and why
The TL;DR here is: you should go to CheckOut Summit next month.
That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!
Best, Remkus
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