I’ve just arrived at Belgrade for WordCamp Belgrade in Serbia (I’ll be on a panel this time). A city that brings many good memories, like the 2018 WordCamp Europe edition.
I’m looking forward to connecting with many friends here again, but not before I send out this week’s Within WordPress newsletter to you all. Like, a new simpler starting point for a WordPress site, better context for your AI assistant, and a WooCommerce theme you can get your hands on. Quite a useful mix this week!
Hope you enjoy it!
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening:
- There are many plugins out there allowing you access to WordPress via your favorite LLM; I
blogged about that recently , btw. I’ve been playing around with Albert specifically this past week, which Mark Jansen’s recently updated to version 1.4, making it a useful update if you’re connecting Claude or ChatGPT to WordPress!
- Meet
Ipsum, the proposed default theme for WordPress 7.2 . It’s a deliberately minimal starting point for a blog, and a move away from naming default themes after the year. It’s also very much going to be “considering doing a more minimalist, agent-friendly default theme”, says Matt Mullenweg . The design is available to try, with development review still ahead; Henrique Iamarino explains the direction and where feedback would help.
- Andy Peatling, creator of
Miles , wants WordPress to commit to complete agent workflows and test how well those workflows actually work . Creating a site, choosing a theme, publishing, and getting it hosted is one example. His proposals include public benchmarks, clearer permissions, and recovery checkpoints. A useful argument to read alongside all the individual AI releases.
- AI-generated HTML is only so useful if it lands in WordPress as one big Custom HTML block.
Human Made’s Block Runner converts it into native, editable blocks and checks the result against Gutenberg. It can carry styling into block settings and reuse your theme presets; anything without a native equivalent falls back to Custom HTML with a warning. Worth inspecting the examples if you’re building with agents!
Incredibly interesting project. Make sure you see this one!
- A conversation at WordCamp Europe turned into a feature! Shahjahan Jewel credits our chat in Kraków for
Pages for Spaces in FluentCommunity 2.10 . Welcome guides, rules, and resource lists can now live in a dedicated tab inside each space, instead of competing with the discussion feed. You’ll need Pro for this one. I used to ride the BuddyPress wave hard, I’ve built probably around a 100 BuddyPress sites for clients, in fact, but I’m very much team FluentCommunity now!
- Fellyph Cintra shows
how Playground works with WebMCP : a compatible agent can run PHP, edit files, and build pages in your browser session. Plenty of potential for plugin demos and experiments while you watch and steer! WebMCP is still a draft specification, btw, and browser support varies. Jamie Marsland also has a walkthrough for trying it yourself .
- Preparing a theme switch? Austin Ginder’s
WP Shipyard lets an administrator configure another installed theme against the site’s actual content while visitors keep seeing the live theme. The switch stays in that one browser until you activate the theme for everyone. Posts, media, and plugin data are still shared, so content edits affect the live site. Mind that distinction!
- Gotta mention Andy Peatling again, as he is
showing examples of the v2 design agent for Miles : branding boards, generated icons, and website designs based on DESIGN.md. The connection from brand board to whole website is worth a look. It’s a preview, btw; these capabilities aren’t all in the current product.
- Years of meeting agendas and minutes attached to a page?
BoardScribe , from Equalize Digital , gives those documents a meeting library with a block or shortcode to display it. It’s free on WordPress.org . The table structure and descriptive links help with accessibility; the PDFs still need to be accessible too.
WordPress 7.1.1 RC1 is ready for testing , ahead of the expected September 17 (today-ish) release. The fixes address bugs from 7.1, including image handling, block styles, and missing content reassignment when deleting a Multisite user. If you maintain sites on 7.1, give the candidate a run in a test environment.
- Lance Willett is
back contributing to WordPress core after eleven years, focusing on build and test tooling. Very much related: the PHPUnit test cleanup for WordPress 7.2 needs help with isolation, clearer assertions, and slow tests. If you enjoy this sort of work, there are patches to write and review.
- Core contributors:
WordPress development now requires Node.js 24.18.0 and npm 11.16.0 or newer , including trunk and the 7.1 branches in both repositories. Manzoor Wani explains the local updates and why older pull requests need the latest trunk changes to pick up the required checks.
- Marcus Burnette has been building
WordCamp World , a little adventure set at a WordCamp, complete with conference rooms, community characters, and contribution activities.
Ryan Welcher is already in it. And Marcus
- If your custom blocks use
<InnerBlocks>templates, Justin Tadlock hasa migration worth checking in September’s developer roundup . Gutenberg 23.8 moved templateandtemplateInsertUpdatesSelectioninto block settings so collaborators don’t each insert another copy. The old props still work but are deprecated; the article includes the replacement code. One to sort before WordPress 7.2.
🚀 Performance & Security
- Worrying about a hack and knowing how to recover from one are quite different things. In
Melapress’s 2026 security survey , concern averaged 7.85 out of 10, but only 27.9% reported a breach recovery plan and 26% reported team security training. Those are results from 319 respondents, not a measurement of every WordPress site. The report is a useful prompt to check who would do what if a client site were compromised.
Cloudflare’s security-audit skill gives coding agents a structured way to investigate a codebase, then has separate verification passes challenge the findings. Reports distinguish confirmed issues from claims that still need validation, with a record of what was inspected. Worth reading the workflow if you’re already asking agents to review code; a generated report still needs scrutiny.
- John Blackbourn’s
chart of PHP versions running WordPress , shared by Jonny Harris, puts PHP 8.2 and 8.3 at roughly a quarter each in the September 1 snapshot. Useful context for minimum-version discussions! The historical data comes from manually collected WordPress.org snapshots; the projected months at the end are estimates.
🔆 Within WordPress Highlight
Happy customers, barely any new business. That’s the situation my friend Carl Alexander brings to
Jason doesn’t let a vague answer sit for long. Watch the discussion work through pricing, customers’ concerns about a business run by one person, and who would actually buy it. The direction that emerges: help agencies bring WordPress hosting onto AWS, with Carl training the team alongside the software.
A fascinating podcast to follow along as see how it relates to you!
💡 Interesting Finds
- Before spending another afternoon on an AI SEO checklist, read
Sybre Waaijer’s analysis of AI crawler traffic . He separates training crawlers, search crawlers, and user-triggered fetches, then compares popular advice with his own server logs. No ChatGPT, Claude, or Grok requests for llms.txtappeared in that dataset. A useful reality check, with the usual qualification that one dataset can’t describe every website.
- Running a podcast comes with a surprising amount of work around the recording. Two friends of mine, Nathan Wrigley and certified lookalike Dan Maybe, are inviting early adopters to
show.fm , which brings guest booking, show notes, hosting, and publishing workflows together. Have a look at WP Builds’ own podcast page for an example of the hosted site.
Early days, but an interesting one for fellow podcasters.
- Searching FreeScout for a customer’s name and “invoice” shouldn’t fail because the words sit in different fields. Daniele Besana pointed me to
Semantic Search for FreeScout : multi-word search works without an AI key, while adding your own provider enables search by meaning and similar conversations. It’s a separate module from the makers of ReplyRabbit; you don’t need ReplyRabbit installed.
- MCP servers can offer tools, but an agent also needs to know how to use those tools together. The
Skills Extension, SEP-2640 , now defines how a server can expose that workflow knowledge for discovery and loading when needed. The specification was merged on September 13; that doesn’t mean every MCP client supports it yet.
- Repeating project decisions every time you switch AI tools gets old quickly.
AutoMem , by Jack Arturo, is an open-source memory service that lets connected assistants store and retrieve the same context through MCP. It combines a graph of relationships with search by meaning, and you can host it yourself. The repository explains the setup ; this is a service to run, not just a prompt file.
- Tired of copying prompts between AI tools?
Mark Jaquith keeps reusable prompts in Espanso , a free text expander. Type a shortcut wherever you’re talking to an agent, and in goes the prompt. Simple, and the prompts you invoke yourself stay independent of the tool.
Transitions.dev , by Jakub Antalik, is a lovely collection of small interface animations: opening a modal, moving a tab indicator, or turning a spinner into a checkmark. CSS and React examples you can copy, plus an agent skill. Some effects sit behind Pro.
🛒 WooCommerce News
- Brian Coords has
opened Purple for beta testing , WooCommerce’s block starter theme. Shop templates, ecommerce patterns, and ten color palettes give you quite a bit to explore before adding your own design. Try the demo, or install the GitHub build on a test site; this beta doesn’t receive automatic updates from WordPress.org yet.
- Want to see how a shopping assistant could hand a cart back to your own checkout? WooCommerce has
reference code built on Claude’s commerce agents , plus a merchant assistant that stages changes for approval. It’s experimental, unsupported code for developers to study and test: the services have no built-in authentication, durable activity log, or undo. Start with the supplied test store and read the limitations before connecting anything else.
- Fancy contributing to WooCommerce but keep putting off that first pull request? James Kemp will walk Rodolfo Melogli through
a real contribution on September 24 , from planning and coding through testing, review, and submission. The live session starts at 16:00 Amsterdam time. A practical way to see the whole process, including where AI fits.
Darren Ethier highlights ten changes headed for WooCommerce 11.2.
Back in Stock Notifications is moving into core , with a My Account tab where customers can view and cancel alerts. Still experimental, btw. At block checkout, changing the country immediately recalculates shipping instead of leaving the previous country’s rates on screen. And if one package’s shipping request fails, successful selections stay put and the failed rate can be retried . - A couple of welcome product-editing fixes too:
variations without an image keep inheriting the parent product’s image , so changing that image later still updates the variation. Moving the short-description box will no longer leave its Visual editor blank and unusable. Automated refunds get labeled “System” when nobody is logged in, instead of being attributed to user #1. If your integration reads refund authors through the API, check the changed return values. - For extension developers, there’s a
native date field for additional checkout fields , using the browser’s date picker. The new Settings UI preserves other controls and custom save handlers when an extension replaces a control. Importers also get a fix for deleting and recreating a global attribute with the same slug in one request . WIR franc (CHW) joins the supported store currencies . All ten changes are merged into trunk with an 11.2 milestone; check the release notes before treating any of this as available in a stable release.
That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!
Best, Remkus
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