WordPress 6.9 shipped with a very cool feature: Notes. You can leave Google Docs-style comments directly on your posts. The catch? It's really hard to find. None of the publishers we work with have discovered it yet. I'd love to change that ...

We’ve always tried to avoid releasing WordPress plugin updates on Fridays, just in case something needs fixing over the weekend. With the new 24-hour pause before updates appear in the official plugin repo, it probably makes sense to avoid Thursday releases too.

Image editing is getting much better in WordPress. Check out the latest version of the Gutenberg plugin. You'll find a new editing window with rotate, flip, zoom, aspect ration and other tools. This new version is much easier to use than the current editing tools.

Draft or Published. Those are basically the two choices you get for WordPress posts. Draft (unpublished) or Published? It's either one of the other. Have you ever wanted to label a WordPress post something else? Perhaps “In Progress”, "Assigned", “Needs Work”, or “Rejected”?

Austin Ginder has uncovered some of the biggest hacks in the WordPress ecosystem. Some of them were really, really sneaky. Austin came on the PublishPress podcast and told the story of how one hacker took over a plugin and tricked users into installing his own secret updates.

My wife always has good ideas. I'm the code monkey that implements them 😆 🐒 This week, she recommended that I add more promos to our PublishPress blog posts. Fortunately, that's really easy with the block editor. You can use the Auto-Insert Blocks feature in the PublishPress Blocks plugin:

Austin Ginder is on a heater 🔥 He's using AI to uncover security issues in WordPress plugins that have been hidden for years. On the PublishPress podcast, he revealed that a big number of the high-profile issues may be the work of one hacker, or group of hackers.

👀 You have the power to control who views your WordPress content 👀 "This page is only for logged in users" "This event is only for Accounting Department users" "This post is only for John and Jane" Enable ✅ or block ❌ viewing access

I'm going to be on This Week in WordPress in about 30 minutes, with @nathanwrigley.com. There should be a lot to talk about. I can't remember ever seeing such a busy few days in the WordPress community: www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjU4...

This Week in WordPress #373

YouTube video by WP Builds

youtube.com

I've seen big publishers with "lite" or "text-only" versions of their WordPress sites. Amber Hinds is a WordPress accessibility expert. On the PublishPress podcast, I asked Amber if these versions are a good idea. Are "text-only" versions more accessible? Are they helpful for some users?

Why does it matter what the reading level of your content is? Amber Hinds is an accessibility expert and says we should aim to write below an 9th grade level. A 9th grade level? 🤯 Yes, there's several great reasons to write simply:

I've seen many publishers adding audio playback to their articles. You can get WordPress plugins to read posts for your visitors. Amber Hinds is an accessibility expert. I asked her if these audio versions are helpful for people for disabilities. Her answer surprised me ...

Chris Ward has enjoyed a career at the intersection of publishing and advertising. In this two minute clip, Chris describes the mind-blowing changes he's seen. In the early days, he was selling 728x90 banners on the homepage. Now we're in the era of cellphones listening to our conversations:

Revisions are becoming a first class feature in WordPress. Previously Revisions were hidden away behind a tiny link in the sidebar. Install the new version of the Gutenberg plugin and you'll now see a "Revisions" tab in the sidebar. This shows the most recent revisions:

Fast sites are profitable sites. Christopher Ward runs The Publisher Desk which helps publishers increase their advertising revenue. All Chris' work is on WordPress. It gives you complete control over the speed of your site. You can build sites with excellent Core Web Vitals results.

Big improvements to the Media Library are underway for WordPress 7.1. There was a flurry of activity around media issues on the Gutenberg Github repo over the last few days. Some short term goals: - HEIC image support - Ultra HDR support - More stable uploading for large files

Will we soon be using AI tools to manage our WooCommerce stores? Yes, says @briancoords.com, who is a Developer Advocate for WooCommerce. There are AI tools available that allow you to use a chatbot to create products, analyze data, and do much more with WooCommerce.

It looks like the next step for real-time collaboration in WordPress is underway. There's a new experimental feature plugin called "Presence API". You'll be able to see what other people are doing in your WordPress site: github.com/WordPress/pr...

Will we soon see AI agents making purchases on our WooCommerce stores? @briancoords.com says that Woo is actively working on that right now with Stripe and Google

- Lightbox - Modal - Overlay - Pop-up - Dialog It seems like there's multiple ways to say the same thing, but none of them really make sense for normal people. Our plugin is literally called "MetaSlider Lightbox" but my wife had to ask me what a lightbox is 🤔

AI is now a contributor to the WooCommerce core 🤯 What does it mean that Copilot and Claude are now contributing to the WooCommerce codebase? I asked @briancoords.com:

Malcolm Peralty from Pressable has been blogging for over 20 years, since before WordPress 1.0! He was perhaps the first WordPress news blogger. He's written books. But in 2026 Malcolm isn't writing 5,000 word blog posts by himself any more. He's now the conductor, and AI is the orchestra.

Who can edit posts on your WordPress site? 1. The person who wrote the post 2. Administrators or Editors That's it. Those are normally the only two options in WordPress. What happens if you want advanced options? For example ...

In the next release of MetaSlider, we're working on better options for vertical slideshows. We find that people really like vertical for mobile displays. It feels natural to flick through with these slides with your thumb. Make your WordPress site feel like IG or TikTok.

A couple of years ago, there was a whole new approach to translating WordPress plugins. Do I know anyone who has tried to implement the new .l10n.php translation files in plugin? This approach would replace the .mo and .po files with .l10n.php files. make.wordpress.org/core/2024/02...

I18N Improvements in 6.5 (Performant Translations)

There are a number of internationalization (i18n) improvements in WordPress 6.5, which I’d like to cover in this dedicated dev note.

make.wordpress.org

We ran into a big Stripe issue today. Some Easy Digital Downloads accounts had missing data. This was on one of our smaller plugin sites so it was easier to miss. After digging in, we found that Stripe's events were often being blocked with a 403 error message.

Can you use AI to help write a book? Malcolm Peralty has been writing with WordPress for over 20 years. Malcolm's also an author and he tells us about his experience writing a book while relying heaving on AI tools. Would he do it again?

Most publishers have one-off posts, but also end up writing series of stories: - Investigations on a topic - Reviews of each episode of a TV show - Recipes from a particular cuisine - Game reports from a team's season Doing this in WordPress? You'll love PublishPress Series

Chris Reynolds has been in the WordPress community for close to 20 years. He has a new podcast called "Community + Code" that focuses on the people building our open source software. I got to be on the latest episode 😁 🎙️ communitycode.dev/episodes/epi...

Episode 23: Steve Burge - Community + Code

Steve Burge built PublishPress by reading every single support ticket. He tells us how Drupal 7 pushed the whole industry toward WordPress.

communitycode.dev

"Google Tag Manager can be a nightmare to set up and a big pain in the butt." @derekashauer.bsky.social doesn't mess around in describing his experience setting up Tag Manager on WordPress sites. It probably got the same UI designers who worked on Google Analytics 4 😜