7.0 retro, AI Client streaming, a hall of shame for nagging plugins, and remembering WordPress’s own Om Malik.
Hello WordPressers!
Welcome to this week’s WP More roundup, WP More newsletter issue 46, where you get curated news about WordPress and the WordPress community all in one place.
This issue sits at an odd crossroads. WordPress 7.0 is closed out and 7.1 is already taking shape, with AI quietly working its way into the core release plan. There’s also a new project calling out the worst behavior in your plugin folder, and a tribute to someone most WordPress users never knew by name but whose fingerprints are all over how this community came together.
Let’s get into it.
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In this Issue:
- WordPress 7.0 wraps up, and the core team wants your feedback
- What’s coming to the AI Client in WordPress 7.1
- A new database is naming WordPress’s worst admin notice offenders
- Remembering Om Malik, the connector behind Automattic
WordPress 7.0 Wraps Up, and the Core Team Wants Your Feedback
WordPress 7.0 “Armstrong” is done, and the core team is already turning toward 7.1. But before everyone moves on, they want to hear from you, even if you only watched this release cycle from the sidelines. The retrospective survey covers process, communication, and what worked or didn’t, and contributors are treating the feedback as essential groundwork for tightening up the next cycle. You don’t need to have touched a line of code to weigh in. If you tracked the release, tested a beta, or just read the changelogs, your take counts. The form and comments stay open through July 20, so there’s a real window to make your case before the conversation closes for good.
Read the full retrospective on Make WordPress Core here.
Speaking of what’s next, the AI Client is shaping up to be one of 7.1’s bigger stories.
What’s Coming to the AI Client in WordPress 7.1
WordPress’s Core AI team has set its sights on 7.1, and the AI Client, the framework powering AI features across the plugin ecosystem, is getting two upgrades worth watching. First is generation streaming: responses will type out in real time instead of leaving you staring at a loading spinner, though full WordPress support is still a work in progress since most servers time out long before a multi-minute AI request finishes. Second is embeddings, the numerical fingerprint that lets software match “how do I reset my password” to a page titled “account recovery steps” even though the two share no words in common. Recent MySQL and MariaDB versions already support storing these natively, and an early vector search experiment is already running inside the AI plugin.
Read the full post on WordPress AI here.
If AI inside core feels careful and deliberate, the chaos happening in your plugin folder right now is anything but.
A New Database Is Naming WordPress’s Worst Admin Notice Offenders
Open any WordPress dashboard and you’ve met one of these: a banner begging for a five-star review, an upsell that won’t go away, or a license nag glued to every single screen you visit. Now there’s a public scoreboard for it. A new project is cataloging WordPress admin-notice spam plugin by plugin, pinning each offending notice to the exact line of code that fires it. The numbers are rough: thousands of notices catalogued across thousands of plugins, with roughly seven in ten configured to render on every admin screen instead of just the plugin’s own settings page, and over a quarter impossible to dismiss at all. One Instagram feed plugin currently tops the leaderboard for sheer volume of nags. If you’ve ever wondered whether your dashboard clutter was just your imagination, it wasn’t.
Read the full piece on Anchor here.
Spam notices are one kind of automation gone too far, this week’s last story is a different kind of milestone.
Remembering Om Malik, the Connector Behind Automattic
Tech journalist and GigaOm founder Om Malik has died at 59, after what his family described as a long health journey with his heart. He passed away this week at Stanford Hospital, surrounded by family and friends. His name never shows up in WordPress’s commit history, but it’s hard to overstate his role in the project’s early years. In 2004, while interviewing Toni Schneider for an unrelated story, Malik mentioned he was blogging on WordPress and offered to introduce Schneider to a 20-year-old Matt Mullenweg. That introduction led to Schneider becoming Automattic’s founding CEO. “We say all roads lead to Om,” Mullenweg told a WordCamp Europe audience in 2014. Malik was also one of just eight people who showed up to WordPress’s first-ever meetup in San Francisco in 2005.
Read the full report on The Repository here.
Other reports from The Repository you might like to read:
→ WordPress 7.1 Set to Hide Classic Block From the Inserter as Contributors Begin Phasing It Out
→ WordPress AI Team Proposes Adding Knowledge Post Type and Guidelines to Core
→ Plugin Developers and Site Maintainers Push Back on WordPress.org’s 24-Hour Update Delay
Don’t forget to subscribe & support them, they do some amazing hard-hitting WordPress journalism.
WordPress Must Read
→ All Roads Lead to Om (ma.tt) – Matt Mullenweg’s own tribute to Om Malik.
→ GoDaddy Annual Cybersecurity Report: Website Malware Threat Landscape (godaddy.com)
→ The AI & Bot Traffic Reality Check (kinsta.com)
→ How WPBeginner Lost 99% of Its Google Traffic (2.6M to 27K Clicks) (blogginc.com)
→ Why I Might Skip WordCamp Europe Next Year (jessicarisch.com)
→ Who’s Left to Build WordPress? (wpmayor.com)
→ The Kodee MCP shift: What 914,000 conversations reveal about AI-managed VPS
On Other WordPress News
→ AI Contributor Weekly Summary – 24 June 2026 (make.wordpress.org)
→ The PHP Ambassador Program Is Open (thephp.foundation)
→ Merge Proposal: Guidelines Built on Knowledge (make.wordpress.org)
→ WordPress Contributor Dashboard Gets Customizable Ladders for Make Teams in First Major Update Since Pilot Launch (therepository.email)
From WordPress Community
→ Update: The State of the Community Survey Is Open Through July 17 (thewpcommunitycollective.com)
→ Marketing WooCommerce as a Community: Our Real Strengths (dothewoo.com)
→ Destiny Kanno, Anand Upadhyay, Maciej Pilarski on How WordPress Education Programs Are Growing (wptavern.com)
→ Automattic Celebrates Graduates of University of Illinois Chicago’s AI Leaders Program (automattic.com)
→ Andrew Garcia Receives the Yoast Care Fund for His Contribution to the WordPress Community (yoast.com)
→ In Partnership With Variety: Screening of “Code for the People” Documentary (automattic.com)
→ Migrating From WordPress to Astro (billerickson.net)
→ The Enterprise WordPress Playbook (humanmade.com)
→ GoDaddy’s Adam Warner Challenges “NoDaddys” After Top Tier Benchmark Result, Company Reveals Engineering Push Behind the Numbers (therepository.email)
Conclusion
That’s it for issue 46. Between an AI client that’s learning to act instead of just advise, a database keeping plugin developers honest, and a reminder of how much WordPress owes to the people who simply showed up and made introductions, this was a week about who and what is quietly shaping the platform.
Reply and tell us what stood out to you, or pass this along to a fellow WordPresser who’d want to read it. See you next week.
Nishat, WP More
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