The release of WordPress 7.1 is happening any moment now, so now is the time to familiarize yourself with what 7.1 enables us to do. WordPress 7.1 expands block styling with responsive and interactive (hover/focus) controls, no custom CSS needed, and carries your color scheme and toolbar across the admin.
Media tools are smoother too: we have a revamped editor modal that adds free-form cropping, rotation, and metadata editing, while faster client-side processing improves uploads, format support, and file optimization.
New Playlist and Tabs blocks, plus an expanded Icon API, dynamic galleries, and more background gradients, add richer layout options. Lots to explore, so let’s dive into this week’s Within WordPress newsletter.
Also, I’m told Gindermania was a hit. So… naturally, I had to do that again. Hope you enjoy it!
🎓 From The Guild
I thought I’d give you an example of what The Guild will be about. Below you’ll find numerous resources related to our next major WordPress release, 7.1. Inside
Sounds interesting?
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening:
- WordPress 7.1 is upon us. Lots of new and interesting things you should check out:
What’s new for developers, August 2026 . Then, catch up with the WordPress 7.1 Field Guide , and then… work your way down this list: - The
Abilities API keeps growing , adding custom input/output validation, lifecycle hooks, richer user details, selective response fields, and tighter, more consistent schemas. - The post editor
now always loads within an iframe , so plugins that hook into the editor should verify compatibility, especially any JavaScript or CSS that assumes the editor canvas shares the admin page’s document or window. - We have a
public SVG icon API available now. The Icon Registration API lets you register custom icon collections and reuse them across PHP, the REST API, and the editor. Learn more about it via Justin Tadlock‘s hands-on tutorial . - With client-side media processing, supported browsers can resize, compress, convert, rotate, and create thumbnails before uploads ever hit the server; plugins touching image workflows should
recheck what this changes for compatibility @wordpress/components has picked up a handful of updates, including a 40px default height for form controls, retiring the deprecated Navigation component in favor of Navigator, and tweaks to certain emotion-specific styling behavior - The WordPress toolbar is now shown persistently in the post and site editors, so plugins that add to or alter toolbar items
should confirm everything still behaves correctly in those contexts - jQuery UI has
moved from 1.13.3 to 1.14.2 ; legacy API compatibility remains on, but plugins relying on jQuery UI should test for any removed methods or properties.
- The
- And as a reminder, we
now have responsive block styles and configurable viewports in WordPress 7.1 .
- One of my favorite plugin, Admin Columns, created by fellow Dutchmen, also launched their 7.1 version recently. I had missed this, but it’s a really cool update. Version 7.1 holds a super
cool feature called Custom List Tables . It allows you to manage a MySQL/MariaDB table inside WordPress as if it were a native WordPress list table. With a few lines of code, you’ll get a sortable, filterable, exportable, and editable interface to any database table within the WordPress (list table) UI.
How cool is that?
- The official
WordPress Browser Extension is finally here. It started as an idea by Jake Goldman, but now it is fully adopted by WordPress.org. This was a nice birthday present, ngl.
Build your first AI-powered WordPress plugin . An excellent tutorial by fellow smooth operator (of the scalp variety) Jonathan Bossenger published on the WordPress Developer blog.
- PressConf, one of my favorite WordPress-related events, is crossing the pond! In October of this year, Raquel Manriquez will
host PressConf Europe in Barcelona . Four days of connecting with your peers who are also driving the WordPress economy.
- David Pérez, part of the WordPress.org Plugins Team, announced the next version of the Plugin Check plugin. That’s hella meta, I know, but bear with me. That is, if you’re releasing plugins on the WordPress repo.
Check out his thread and start preparing your next plugin release accordingly.
- Sidenote: remember
WP.md ? That was created by my friend Pavel Ciorici. And he launched his new personal website . And I love it.
- If we’re talking about “being on fire”, I have to mention Austin Ginder again. The man is burning through his tokens faster than they can provide him with new ones. He released
Cove.run , v1.13. Cove is “The calmest way to run local WordPress”, he claims. Cove is a tiny CLI that spins up local sites in seconds. Automatic HTTPS, one-click admin login, zero Docker. - But… he also found time to improve
Minn Admin . It’s his interpretation on what the WordPress admin could/should look like and act. It’s a very modern, minimal dashboard served at /minn-admin/: a single-page app on the WordPress REST API. No React, no build step, one vanilla-JS file. It lives right alongside classic wp-admin. And he made it available in Frisian as well 🥰
- Justin Tadlock explored the concept of building an event dispatcher for WordPress following the
PSR-14 standard . You may be asking why he would even attempt that when WordPress already has its own system that dispatches events, called actions , but it’s a very interesting read on Rethinking do_action(): Events as objects, hooks as class names.
- Anne McCarthy shows
how she is using WordPress Studio to speed up testing 7.1.
- Check out the latest version of Gutenberg,
released today , which shows us the future of what revisions are going to look like inside the editor. MAJOR improvement.
- LoopConf‘s next edition is
next month in Grand Rapids, Michigan . The premier event for developers and engineers who build with WordPress. I highly recommend it.
- Nick Hamze, another most excellent token burner, has launched
OpenStation . The pitch is this: “OpenStation is a WordPress plugin that gives wp-admin real windows, a dock, and virtual desktops. Put the editor, the media library, and any other admin screen side by side, arranged how you like”. And it’s a really fresh look at what WordPress can look like.
- It’s very tempting to think we have no need for Child Themes anymore, but I challenge that thought. I think
we do need them, and you’ll want to know why
🔆 Within WordPress Highlight
- Another very meta plugin, but again, very cool if you need it. Jake Goldman, the man is on fire!, released
Auto Release Posts for GitHub . This is what it does:
Auto Release Posts for GitHub monitors GitHub repositories for new releases and uses AI to research each release and generate a human-readable blog post about it. Posts can be automatically published or held as drafts for review, with email notifications when new posts are ready.
Built on the AI Client API and Connectors introduced in WordPress 7.0 — configure your AI provider (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, or any other connector) once under Settings → Connectors, and this plugin uses whatever you’ve set up. No AI API keys to manage in the plugin itself.
Some of my favorite WordPress tools:
- My two favorite forms for WordPress:
Gravity Forms and WS Form - These are the themes I use:
Ollie , Rockbase and GeneratePress - And, obviously,
Scanfully for all my Site Health & Performance monitoring
💡 Interesting Finds
- Cloudflare had yet another one of these “releasing everything in one week” type of weeks. This time
it was focused on Agents . In the context of AI, not real estate. 🤓. Also noticed they moved away their blog from WordPress to EmDash. Guess that was a logical move, huh. - Zeldman shared this mandatory reading find for anyone building sites:
Matuzo’s 2026 HTML boilerplate . The complete starter skeleton world‑class front‑end developer, author, a11y auditor, and web standards speaker Manuel Matuzo actually ships every tag, and every choice, clearly explained. A modern refresh of his legendary 2021 version, because HTML didn’t sit still. - Automattic released an interesting microsite-type of solution called
Spacefast . Very tight integration with your AI Agent. - Cursor saw GitHub’s outages these past 8 months and figured it was time for them to offer Git repositories as well. Check out
Cursor Origin . Between Cloudflare’s artifacts, Cursor, and of course all the classical hosted Git solutions, we’re really starting to have smart options. I like it. - Truly enjoyed Danny Postma‘s walkthrough how he
set up his “Agent OS” over on YouTube . A worthy related mention is Ian Nuttall‘s prompt you can give your agent to build your own AgentOS .
🛒 WooCommerce News
- WooCommerce 11.1 is close to being released as well. The folks at Woo published an extensive “
What’s Coming for Developers “. One of the things that stands out is the inclusion of the complete order withdrawal flow for shoppers, mandatory in the EU (see Tom’s demo on X ). But lots more as well . - If you’re not following
Rodolfo Melogli on X yet, you’re missing out. He shared his entire journey of releasing his first (WooCommerce) plugin on the repo, and it’s live now. It’s called CartRules One Category in Cart for WooCommerce .
🔎 Scanfully Updates
We’re getting close to releasing our next big feature for
That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading!
Best, Remkus
Leave a Reply