Author: wpnishat

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WordPress market share decoded, AI plugin 1.2.0 reviewed, fake theme installs exposed, WooCommerce 11.0 previewed, and Mullenweg breaks his silence on Active Installation data.

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Hello WordPressers!

Welcome to this week’s WP More roundup – WP More newsletter issue 49, where you get curated news about WordPress and the WordPress community all in one place.

Five stories this week, and they share a thread: who controls WordPress data, who benefits from it, and who gets left out.

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In this Issue:

• WordPress lost market share – here’s why that’s not the full story
• WordPress AI plugin 1.2.0 is out with useful new features
• Fake installs have been gaming the WordPress.org popular themes list for two years
• WooCommerce 11.0 is coming with performance and developer improvements
• Matt Mullenweg finally responded to the active install data ticket – sort of

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WordPress Lost Market Share and Got Stronger

WordPress slipped from 43.6% to 41.5% of all websites. But at the top of the web – the 10,000 most-visited sites – it holds around 58% of CMS usage. Wix and Shopify are barely present there at all.

MemberPress growth manager Curt Noble argues the dip tracks with Google’s spam crackdowns since March 2024, which wiped out thousands of made-for-SEO WordPress sites. When junk sites fall out of the measured web and aren’t replaced, headline share drops even if no real business left. Meanwhile, US search interest in WordPress just hit a five-year high, with buying-intent queries like “WordPress development company” up 450%. WordPress 7.0 shipped native AI infrastructure too – an AI Client, Abilities API, and MCP Adapter – making it the first major CMS that AI agents can operate directly.

Read more on MemberPress →

The AI infrastructure story goes deeper in the next one.

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WordPress AI Plugin 1.2.0: What’s New

Version 1.2.0 landed on July 14. The headline addition is “Suggest Reply” for comment moderation – moderators generate contextual replies from the Comments screen or Activity widget, choosing from friendly, professional, or casual tones. Each suggestion is editable before it goes live, so a human still makes the call.

Bulk content summarization is also new: select multiple posts from the list table, hit generate, and summaries are created without opening each item. Two new read-only Abilities landed – core/read-content and core/read-users – giving AI agents structured, permission-checked access to WordPress content and user data. Settings got simplified, type-ahead text got several fixes, and accessibility improved. Version 1.3.0 is already in progress, with content translations and media editor integration on the roadmap.

Read more on WordPress Make Blog →

While WordPress adds tools for legitimate publishers, some theme authors have been running a different kind of operation.

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Fake Installs Have Been Gaming the Popular Themes List for Two Years

Theme developer Pavel Ciorici has spent two years documenting something that doesn’t add up on WordPress.org: a group of themes gaining thousands of “active installs” in days while being downloaded around 20 times per day. A theme gaining 6,000 net new active sites in a week on 140 total downloads is not a measurement artifact. It’s arithmetically impossible.

Themes like Envo Royal, Envo One, and Futurio move together – gaining or losing 15 to 20 ranking positions on the same day, across accounts claiming to be separate authors. A reverse analytics lookup found several of those vendors sharing one Google Analytics ID. When Envo Royal pushed a cosmetic update, it generated 1,400 downloads against a claimed 30,000 active installs. Ciorici reported this from September 2024 onward. WordPress.org’s response: “the data looks real.” The numbers were quietly reset in May 2026. Five weeks later they were climbing again.

Read more on WP.MD →

The plugin directory has its own version of this data trust problem, and it’s been running even longer.

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WooCommerce 11.0: What Developers Should Know

WooCommerce 11.0 is in beta, with final release on July 28. Performance for larger stores is the clear focus – 28 pull requests cover performance, caching, or scalability. Product object caching is on by default for new stores, cutting variable product load times by 9 to 12% and bundle checkout processing by 6 to 12%.

Customer-side, 11.0 adds an email verification path so logged-in customers can connect past guest orders to their account. Analytics imports now show failed jobs with a retry option, and the v3 sales report gains a refunds field per date bucket for more accurate net-sales figures. Developers: the Product Editor beta is being retired here – return to the classic editor and audit your code for removed packages. Two new phone hooks also land: woocommerce_validate_phone and woocommerce_format_phone_number.

Read more on WooCommerce Developer Blog →

Speaking of data developers can’t see – the plugin directory fight over active install charts finally got a response.

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Mullenweg Responds to Plugin Data Ticket – After Four Years

In September 2022, WordPress.org removed the active install growth charts from the plugin directory. These were the only tool developers had for tracking whether their plugins were gaining or losing users between coarse install milestones like “10,000+”. Four years and 178 ticket comments later, Matt Mullenweg posted his first response.

He cited “competing interests” and the long-term incentives of commercial versus community plugins. No timeline, no commitment to restore the data. Developers noticed the reasoning had shifted: in 2022, it was framed as a privacy issue; now it reads as a policy decision. Former Automattic employee Mark Riley put it plainly – Automattic sees the install data, plugin developers don’t, and that asymmetry shapes product decisions. Meanwhile, the community built wp-rankings.com to reconstruct the missing charts from four years of API snapshots. The site drew 72,000 unique visitors in 24 hours after launching V2. Mullenweg has not followed up.

Read more on The Repository →

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WordPress Must Read

→ Security Researcher Used OpenAI’s Sol Ultra to Find WordPress’s Worst Vulnerability in Years (therepository.email)

→ The ACF Annual Survey 2026 is here (advancedcustomfields.com) – Share your feedback and help shape the future of ACF.

→ Help Shape the Future of PHP: Take the State of PHP Survey (thephp.foundation)

→ Ecommerce platform market share 2026: WooCommerce leads the web, Shopify leads the top tier (gravitykit.com)

→ The WordPress plugin install boom is over (linkedin.com)

→ Most installed plugin list from plugin data from 80,000 WordPress sites managed by agencies on WP Umbrella (linkedin.com)

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On Other WordPress News

→ WordPress 7.1 Beta 3 is ready for download and testing! (wordpress.org)

→ Help shape the next chapter of WP Credits: a developer track, and a pilot opportunity (make.wordpress.org)

→ What’s new in Gutenberg 23.6? (July 22, 2026) (make.wordpress.org)

→ Accessibility-ready Theme Reviews: Extending the Deadline (make.wordpress.org)

→ React 19: punted beyond WordPress 7.1, experiment in Gutenberg (make.wordpress.org)

→ Consistent navigation in WordPress 7.1 with persistent toolbar (make.wordpress.org)

→ Introducing the “Made on WordPress” Marketplace at WCUS (us.wordcamp.org)

→ WordCamp US 2026 Publishes Schedule With Expanded AI Programming and New Beginner Track (therepository.email)

→ WordPress Playground Team Calls for Testers as New Dock-Based UI Aims to Fix Feature Discoverability (therepository.email)

→ WordPress 7.1 Beta 3 Now Available, Punts Unicode Email Support Over Security Concerns (therepository.email)

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From WordPress Community

→ The WP World Just Got Friendlier (thewp.world)

→ The WP Community Collective Rebrands as The WPOCC After WordPress Foundation Files Trademark Application for ‘WPCC’ (therepository.email)

→ “WooCommerce Days” Could Reignite Local Meetups (businessbloomer.com)

→ What’s actually in your WordPress maintenance retainer? (x.com)

→ Patience Nekesa receives the Yoast Care fund for her contribution to the WordPress community (yoast.com)

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Until Next Week

That’s issue 49 for this week.

If something here sparked a thought, hit reply and let me know. And if you found this useful, sharing it with a fellow WordPresser is always the best way to say thanks.

Nishat, WP More

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The WordPress business is changing. Here’s what the data actually says.

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Hello WordPressers!

Welcome to this week’s WP More roundup, WP More newsletter issue 47, where you get curated news about WordPress and the WordPress community all in one place.

This week is a meaty one. We have a sharp business argument about what WordPress actually is for product makers, a hard look at plugin sales data from founders who are living through the numbers, a full breakdown of the theme directory’s uncomfortable truths, a promising update from the WP Credits student program, and the latest move in the WP Engine vs. WordPress Foundation trademark fight. Pour a coffee.

There’s a lot to dig into.

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In this Issue:

• WordPress Is a Channel, Not Your Product
• Are Declining Plugin Sales the Canary in WordPress’ Coalmine?
• The State of WordPress Themes: An Analysis of 14,800 WordPress.org Themes
• WordPress Credits Updates
• WP Engine Opposes WordPress Foundation’s Trademark Bids in the U.S. and Canada

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WordPress Is a Channel, Not Your Product

Katie Keith, CEO of Barn2, sat down to figure out who actually uses her Document Library Pro plugin. What she found surprised her: the organizations that need a tool like hers (nonprofits, clinics, councils, membership bodies) are spread across platforms. Many aren’t on WordPress at all.

That landed at the same moment others were saying the same thing out loud. Matt Cromwell told PressConf attendees to stop thinking of themselves as WordPress plugin builders. Justin Ferriman, who built and sold LearnDash, was more blunt: the glory days of WordPress plugin businesses are behind us.

Katie’s response wasn’t to walk away from WordPress. She built a hosted version of Document Library Pro that works on any platform. Her point: WordPress is how you reach customers, not the thing you’re selling. Once you believe that, the decisions get easier. Keep WordPress as a channel. Find the version of your product that lives beyond it.

Read more on WP Product Talk →

The plugin sales picture backs this thinking up, and the next article has the data.

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Are Declining Plugin Sales the Canary in WordPress’ Coalmine?

Matt Cromwell’s op-ed for The Repository cuts through the noise around plugin sales. Founders are venting, shops are closing, and commenters are declaring WordPress dead. Matt argues the reality is more specific, and more actionable, than either camp admits.

The data is real. A survey of 33 plugin companies found around 80% reported flat or lower new sales in 2025. One seller went from a €70,000 month to €15,000 MRR. Others are winding down entirely. But shops with platform-critical products or strong marketing have still grown, with some reaching past $110,000 MRR.

The common threads in struggling shops: over-reliance on organic search, selling utility plugins that are easy to replicate, lifetime pricing that doesn’t fund ongoing maintenance, and WordPress.org directory crowding now driven by AI-assisted submissions running at 700+ per week.

Matt’s advice: get closer to your customers’ revenue, diversify acquisition channels, double down on what isn’t a commodity, and fix your pricing before the market does it for you.

Read more on The Repository →

The themes side of the WordPress product world tells a similar story of concentration and quiet abandonment.

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The State of WordPress Themes: An Analysis of 14,800 WordPress.org Themes

Pavel Ciorici pulled every theme in the WordPress.org directory through the API and ran the numbers. The picture isn’t what the headline install counts suggest.

The top 20 themes hold 61.7% of all active installs across nearly 15,000 themes. Fewer than 80 have crossed 10,000 active installs. And 6,500 themes haven’t been updated in two or more years, with roughly 918,000 live sites running that unmaintained code.

The block theme story is the sharpest finding. Theme developers have shifted: 44% of new 2026 submissions are block themes. Users haven’t followed. Classic themes hold 91.7% of the non-default install base. Only five non-default block themes have crossed 100,000 active installs. The biggest has 200K. The biggest classic theme has 1M+. The bundled block defaults (Twenty Twenty-Two, Twenty Twenty-Three) also rank among the worst-rated themes in the directory.

In large parts, the WordPress theme directory is a museum. The real market is far smaller and more concentrated than its size suggests.

Read more on WP.MD →

On a more encouraging note, one WordPress program is proving that mentorship and community still produce real results.

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WordPress Credits Updates

The WP Credits program, which brings students into WordPress contribution as part of their academic coursework, has hit its year-end partnership target halfway through 2026. More than 20 institutions signed, students volunteered at WCEU, and graduates are staying active in their local communities.

Program lead Isotta Peira shared what the pilots taught them. Self-directed onboarding before mentor matching didn’t work. The lesson: mentorship isn’t optional. It’s what makes the program stick. A new regional leads structure is rolling out to give students and mentors a genuine sense of shared context.

The second half of 2026 shifts focus from growth to quality. The goal is 35 partnerships by year-end, with a public impact dashboard, a formal alumni retention program, and a stronger sponsorship base for mentors, all groundwork for a larger 2027 push.

If you know a school or company that would be a good fit, the program’s page is the place to start.

Read more on WordPress.org →

And now, the legal front: the WP Engine vs. WordPress Foundation trademark battle has a new chapter.

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WP Engine Opposes WordPress Foundation’s Trademark Bids in the U.S. and Canada, Alleging Fraud and Bad Faith

WP Engine has filed formal oppositions to the WordPress Foundation’s “Managed WordPress” and “Hosted WordPress” trademark applications in both the United States and Canada, accusing the Foundation of trying to lock down common industry terms through bad-faith filings.

The U.S. opposition, filed in February with the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, centers on a fraud claim: WP Engine argues the Foundation’s sworn statement that no other parties had the right to use those phrases was knowingly false, given at least 50 companies had been using them for years. The U.S. proceeding is on hold until the California federal lawsuit reaches a final determination. A jury trial is scheduled for October 2027.

The Canadian opposition goes further, naming Automattic as the Foundation’s exclusive licensee and arguing the filings were designed to help Automattic extract license fees. Canada’s IP Office issued a provisional refusal three days after the filing. The Foundation has until August 30 to respond. Both marks are already registered in the UK, Australia, and the EU.

Read the full report on The Repository →

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WordPress Must Read

→ SiteGround Report: 41% of Small Businesses Using WordPress Don’t Get Usable AI Results (newsfilecorp.com)

→ I Asked Claude to Review WordPress. Here’s What It Found. (pootlepress.com)

→ Code for the People | A Film by Bao Nguyen | Full Documentary (youtube.com)

→ WordPress Drops to 41.5% Market Share, but Three Datasets Tell Different Stories About What’s Going On (therepository.email)

→ Why Are WordPress Sites Still Running EOL PHP? (censys.com)

→ Why Gato GraphQL Is Moving Off WordPress.org (And What You Gain From It) (gatographql.com)

→ One Month of EmDash Hosting: Here’s What We’ve Sorted (wpmudev.com)

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On Other WordPress News

→ Supporting High Quality Contributions to WooCommerce Core (developer.woocommerce.com)

→ What’s New in AI 1.1.0 (30 June 2026)? (make.wordpress.org)

→ Meetup.com → GatherPress (make.wordpress.org)

→ WordPress 7.0.1 Maintenance Release (wordpress.org)

→ The Classic Block Stays in the Inserter for WordPress 7.1 (make.wordpress.org)

→ What’s New in Gutenberg 23.5? (July 1, 2026) (make.wordpress.org)

→ Proposal: Restructure the Community Team Handbooks (make.wordpress.org)

→ WordPress 7.1 Release Party Schedule (make.wordpress.org)

→ WooCommerce 10.9.3 Release Notes (developer.woocommerce.com)

→ Merge Proposal: Expanding WordPress Core Abilities (make.wordpress.org)

→ Call for Testing: Responsive Styling (make.wordpress.org)

→ WebHosting.com Acquired by WordPress Parent Automattic (domaininvesting.com)

→ Guidelines for Syncing Code From Gutenberg Into WordPress Develop (make.wordpress.org)

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From WordPress Community

→ A Letter to the WooCommerce Community (woosa.com)

→ Perspectives with Sé Reed (crossword.fm)

→ WordPress Community Support Recorded a $372,000 Deficit in 2025 Even as Event Attendance Rose 27% (therepository.email)

→ Automattic Releases Code for the People, a Documentary Short Arguing the Open Web Is Under Siege and Needs Defending (therepository.email)

→ WordPress 7.0.1 Now Available, Fixes 31 Bugs (therepository.email)

→ Inside WordCamp US 2026: Lead Organizers on Hitting ‘Reset,’ Adding a New Beginner Track, and Beating the Phoenix Heat (therepository.email)

→ Proposal to Expand Abilities in WordPress 7.1 Draws Pushback From Component Maintainer Over Testing and Readiness (therepository.email)

→ Contributors Call for Testing Responsive Styling Ahead of WordPress 7.1 After Years of Community Demand (therepository.email)

→ Elementor Cuts 30% of Its Workforce, Frames Layoffs as AI-Driven Reset (therepository.email)

→ First AI Leaders Cohort Graduates as Automattic Pledges $500 Million in Hosting for Open Source Education (therepository.email)

→ Elementor Cuts 100 Jobs, 30% of Workforce, as AI Reshapes Website Building (calcalistech.com)

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Until Next Week

The old assumptions about how the WordPress business works are being tested by AI, by market concentration, by legal battles, and by shifting user habits. The good news is that the community is paying attention, asking hard questions, and in some cases finding new paths forward.

Thanks for reading. If you found something useful here, share the issue with a fellow WordPress person. It genuinely helps.

Nishat, WP More

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7.0 retro, AI Client streaming, a hall of shame for nagging plugins, and remembering WordPress’s own Om Malik.

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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.

Thanks for reading WP More! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

→ Automattic Wins Privilege Fight Over Pre-Lawsuit Trademark Strategy Slack Messages, Court Set to Rule on Motions to Dismiss

Don’t forget to subscribe & support them, they do some amazing hard-hitting WordPress journalism.

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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

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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)

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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)

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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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Join Our Community → Sub-Reddit | X Community

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CERN’s massive WordPress migration, what plugin licenses really pay for, Envato’s new 50% fee, marketing lessons from 10k installs, and paying WordCamp organizers.

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Hello WordPressers!

Welcome to this week’s WP More roundup, WP More newsletter issue 45, where you get curated news about WordPress and the WordPress community all in one place.

This week is all about money and who actually gets it.

Plugin companies are rethinking what a license fee even covers, Envato just raised its cut to a flat 50%, and one founder is sharing the real receipts behind five years of plugin growth. Add a fresh push to pay WordCamp organizers and CERN’s enormous move to WordPress, and you’ve got a packed issue.

Let’s get into it.

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In this Issue:

• What your plugin license is actually paying for in the age of AI
• Envato’s new 50% author fee, and what it really represents
• Five years and 10,000 installs later: marketing lessons from Accessibility Checker
• Why one organizer thinks it’s time to pay WordCamp speakers and organizers
• CERN just moved the birthplace of the web to WordPress

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What is Your Plugin License Actually Paying for?

AI is quietly rewriting the plugin business model. Casey Burridge, who runs growth at GravityKit, points out that when something breaks, your customers don’t file a ticket anymore. They paste the error into ChatGPT along with your docs URL and get an answer faster than your support queue can even assign it. Custom development is following the same path. AI coding tools can now write the hook or integration your dev team had planned for next quarter.

Burridge isn’t writing off support and updates entirely, security patches and architecture decisions still need real humans, but he argues the renewal pitch needs a third pillar. His bet: MCP servers that let AI agents work directly with your plugin, SaaS backends that keep core logic out of reach, and becoming the product AI recommends when someone asks what the best WordPress plugin is for a given job.

Read the full blog on Casey Burridge’s blog here.

If support and updates are losing their pull as selling points, distribution is facing its own reckoning too, just ask anyone selling through Envato.

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Envato’s Flat 50% Fee is a Wake-up Call, not a Death Sentence

Starting July 1, 2026, Envato Market drops its tiered system for a flat 50% author fee across every account, paired with a non-exclusive model. Maria Ansari at BloggInc argues the headline number misses the real story: that 50% has always functioned as a marketing budget you don’t control, covering traffic acquisition, conversion testing, and placement inside Envato’s discovery system.

The piece isn’t a leave marketplaces now argument, going independent means owning licensing, fraud prevention, and customer acquisition yourself, and revenue often dips before it stabilizes. But brands like OceanWP, Melapress, and Blocksy have already built hybrid or fully independent distribution, and Ansari’s point stands: marketplaces are a channel you rent, not equity you build.

Read the full blog on BloggInc’s blog here.

Building that kind of equity outside a marketplace takes consistent, often unglamorous marketing, and Amber Hinds has plenty of receipts for what that actually looks like.

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Five Years, 10,000 Installs, and No Shortcuts

While other plugin founders describe AI eating into their sales, Amber Hinds of Equalize Digital just crossed 10,000 active installs on Accessibility Checker, more than doubling from 4,000 in seven months and growing plugin revenue 44.3% in 2025. Her five-year breakdown is refreshingly unglamorous: weekly meetups since 2021, a podcast, hundreds of blog posts, and years of free accessibility help in Facebook groups before any of it converted into customers.

Her six-person team logged 2,362 hours on marketing in 2025 alone, on a budget that’s ranged between $25,000 and $71,000 a year. Nothing here is a growth hack. Hinds’ real point is that marketing and product quality compound together, and that the overnight success people see now is five years of unpaid groundwork finally paying off.

Read the full blog on Amber Hinds’ blog here.

That kind of long game depends on people willing to organize the events where this community actually connects, and increasingly, those people are asking to get paid for it.

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Should WordCamp Organizers Finally Get Paid?

Rodolfo Melogli just spent months organizing his own event, Checkout Summit, and came home from WordCamp Europe 2026 in Kraków with a blunt take: the people running flagship WordCamps for free aren’t being compensated, they’re absorbing months of real work as a donation. A 50 euro ticket doesn’t cover travel, accommodation, or the year of planning behind it.

He’s careful to say not every volunteer role needs pay, just the people carrying an event on their shoulders for months. Amber Hinds added her own experience in the comments: WP Accessibility Day left the official WordPress community in part so it could pay speakers, easier to manage for a virtual event with no travel costs. Melogli says future Checkout Summit editions will set aside a real budget for organizers and speakers too.

Read the full blog on Checkout Summit’s blog here.

Paying the people who run our community events is one thing, but this week also brought proof of just how far WordPress’s institutional reach now extends.

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CERN just Moved the Birthplace of the Web to WordPress

Thirty-five years after the first website went live at CERN, the organization has migrated home.cern from Drupal to WordPress, officially switching over the same day its team took the stage at WordCamp Europe 2026 in Kraków. The numbers behind it are wild: 183,346 content items, more than 510,000 files, and 580 WordPress sites now running on CERN’s own Kubernetes infrastructure. The audit covered CERN’s 800 most important Drupal sites, and WordPress beat five other CMS platforms in a six-month evaluation.

New sites spin up automatically in about a minute through a custom-built WordPress Operator. CERN plans to retire Drupal entirely by year’s end and open-source its migration tooling. As one of the engineers put it, the goal was a platform anyone at CERN could use regardless of their technical skills, accessible by design, not by accident.

Read the full report on The Repository here.

Other reports from The Repository you might like to read:

• Core Committers Float Chrome-Style Canary Approach for WordPress, Question Whether RTC Belongs in Core
• Anne McCarthy Named WordPress 7.1 Release Lead
• WordPress 7.1 Roadmap Focuses on Collaboration, Guidelines, and Responsive Styling With RTC Still Unresolved
• OptinMonster Plugin Hacked in CDN Supply-Chain Attack
• Awesome Motive Breach Widens as Uncanny Automator Confirms Customer Data Theft, MonsterInsights Users Hit With Phishing Campaign
• Developer Traces 13-Year Backdoor Campaign Across 44 WordPress.org Plugins to a Single Operator
• WordPress Plugins Team Adds Three Reviewers, Re-Opens Applications as Submissions Hit New Records
• WordPress.org Marketing Director Open Sources AI Agent Skills and Brand Writing Guide Powering Project’s Social Media
• U.S. Court Orders WP Engine to Reveal Strategy Deck Sentence, Finds Mullenweg Was “Evasive” in Deposition
• WordCamp Europe Draws 2,458 to Kraków, Bouncing Back From Basel Dip as CERN Goes Live on WordPress
• WordPress.org Launches ‘Protect the Shire’ Initiative, Adds 24-Hour Cooldown for Plugin and Theme Auto-Updates

Don’t forget to subscribe & support them, they do some amazing hard-hitting WordPress journalism.

---

WordPress Must Read

→ Future of the Web 2026: Chapter 1 (wpvip.com)

→ From a 7 KB file to a 13-year backdoor operation (anchor.host)

→ The WordPress Conference We Need Next (remkusdevries.com)

→ Diversifying to break a $1.6M/yr plateau (indiehackers.com)

→ WordPress Is the Doorway, Not the Room (regionallyfamous.com)

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On Other WordPress News

→ Core Committers Meeting – WordCamp Europe 2026 (make.wordpress.org)

→ Announcing the WordPress 7.1 Release Squad (make.wordpress.org)

→ WordPress 7.0.1 Release Schedule (make.wordpress.org)

→ What’s new in Gutenberg 23.4? (June 17, 2026) (make.wordpress.org)

→ WordCamp India 2027: What’s Next? (make.wordpress.org)

→ Meet Desktop Mode: A New Workspace for WordPress Admin (wordpress.com)

→ How effective are our advertising efforts for WordCamps? (make.wordpress.org)

→ How to Bring Your Community to Make WordPress Slack (make.wordpress.org)

→ Recap: Restoring removed version history (make.wordpress.org)

→ The Story Behind the Gifts from the WCEU 2026 Local Team (make.wordpress.org) → Update on the status of the plugin team – June 2026 (make.wordpress.org)

→ WordPress Education at WCEU 2026: More Than Learning to Build a Website (make.wordpress.org)

→ Develop Locally on Linux with WordPress Studio (wordpress.com)

→ How AI and Automation Spotlight the Best of WordPress (make.wordpress.org)

→ What’s new for developers? (June 2026) (developer.wordpress.org)

→ AI Contributor Weekly Summary – 10 June 2026 (make.wordpress.org)

→ Plugin Directory screenshots gallery update (make.wordpress.org)

→ React 19 upgrade temporarily reverted in Gutenberg (make.wordpress.org)

→ Call for WordPress 7.0.x Release Managers (make.wordpress.org)

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From WordPress Community

→ Standing with Eric Binnion & his family (gofundme.com)

→ Where Have All the WordPress Speakers Gone? (elliottrichmond.co.uk)

→ Imokol Faith Ruth receives the Yoast Care fund for her contribution to the WordPress community (yoast.com)

→ How Was My WordCamp Europe 2026 in Krakow? (callmelana.com)

→ WordCamp Europe 2026: Worth the Wait (wordpress.com)

→ Rino de Boer’s WordCamp Europe 2026 recap thread (x.com)

→ Did I enjoy WordCamp Europe 2026? #WCEU – Imran Siddiq (youtube.com)

→ General, automated WordPress-to-WordPress sync is unsolvable (adamadam.blog)

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Conclusion

That’s a wrap for issue 45.

Plenty to chew on this week: AI reshaping what a plugin license buys you, Envato resetting the rules of the marketplace game, a marketing playbook built on five patient years, a real conversation about paying the people behind WordCamp, and CERN proving WordPress can run at a genuinely massive scale.

Reply and tell me which story stuck with you most, and if you found this useful, share it with another WordPresser who’d enjoy it too.

Nishat, WP More

Follow → X.com | LinkedIn | BlueSky | Facebook

Join Our Community → Sub-Reddit | X Community

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Kraków recap, WooCommerce new update drops, hosting benchmarks return.

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Hello WordPressers!

Welcome to this week’s WP More roundup — WP More newsletter issue 44, where you get curated news about WordPress and the WordPress community all in one place.

This week had a lot going on.

WordCamp Europe wrapped up in Kraków with nearly 2,500 attendees and a keynote from CERN. WooCommerce dropped version 10.8. WordPress’s market share slide hit six months in a row. The Core team kicked off a community testing push for real-time collaboration in 7.1. And Review Signal published its first hosting benchmarks in three years.

Plenty to catch up on.

---

In this issue:

• WordCamp Europe 2026 wrapped up in Kraków with 2,458 attendees from 81 countries
• WooCommerce 10.8 ships with storefront performance improvements and a new offline-aware admin
• WordPress market share drops for the sixth consecutive month, now at 41.9%
• The Core team launches a community outreach program to test real-time collaboration for WordPress 7.1
• Review Signal’s 2026 WordPress hosting benchmarks are back after a three-year gap

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WordCamp Europe 2026 brought 2,458 people to Kraków

WordCamp Europe 2026 ran June 4–6 in Kraków, pulling in 2,458 attendees from 81 countries, about a quarter of them first-timers. The schedule packed in 49 talks and eight workshops across tracks covering core development, AI, and business.

Contributor Day kicked things off with teams spread across Polyglots, Core, Performance, Plugins, and more, with onboarding support for newcomers. The opening keynote came from CERN, the birthplace of the World Wide Web, who explained why they chose WordPress to carry their web presence forward.

There’s a lot more from Kraków worth reading about: the talks, the after-party, the community moments.

Read the full blog on Official blog here.

Now over to the product side of things, where WooCommerce pushed out a notable new release this week.

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WooCommerce 10.8 ships with faster storefronts and an offline-aware admin

WooCommerce 10.8 dropped May 26, built by 67 contributors across 176 pull requests. First thing to check: it now requires WordPress 6.9 or higher, so update that before anything else.

The headline changes are a new offline-aware admin (no more silent save failures when your connection drops), UI alignment with WordPress 7.0 styling, and storefront performance improvements including a smoother Add to Cart flow. There’s also a database update in this release, so read the notes before you hit update.

For the full breakdown of what changed, including API updates and the beta-to-release differences, the release notes have everything.

Read the full blog on Official blog here.

While WooCommerce keeps shipping improvements, the broader WordPress platform picture looks a bit more complicated.

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WordPress market share is down for the sixth month in a row

W3Techs data reported by Search Engine Journal puts WordPress at 41.9% of all websites as of late May 2026, down from 43.2% in December 2025. That 1.3 percentage point drop over six months is more than double what the platform lost across all of 2025.

WordPress still leads the CMS market by a wide margin (59.4% among sites with a known CMS), and the nearest rival Shopify sits near 5.2%. But the pace of decline is accelerating, and the timing lines up with the Automattic-WP Engine fallout plus growing interest in developer-focused alternatives like Astro.

Whether this is a blip or a real shift is the question everyone’s asking. The full article digs into the data.

Read the full blog on Official blog here.

Meanwhile, the people building WordPress core are focused on what comes next and they need your help testing it.

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WordPress 7.1 wants you to test real-time collaboration

Real-time collaboration was cut from WordPress 7.0 last month over concerns about race conditions, server load, and recurring bugs. Now the Core team is setting it up properly for 7.1, with a proposed release date of August 19, 2026.

They’ve launched a community outreach effort, modeled on the old FSE experiment to get early adopters testing the feature in real-world conditions before Beta 1 on July 15. They’re looking for regular editors, professional teams (newsrooms, agencies, small businesses), and web hosts willing to recruit their customers. The goal isn’t just bug reports, they want honest feedback on what the experience actually feels like.

If you’ve been curious about collaborative editing, this is your window to shape it.

Read the full blog on Official blog here.

And wrapping up this week’s main stories, we’ve got something for everyone who’s ever agonized over a hosting decision.

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WordPress hosting benchmarks are back after three years

Review Signal’s Kevin Ohashi just published his 2026 WordPress and WooCommerce hosting benchmarks, the first since 2023. The three-year gap had a reason: when Grafana Labs acquired k6, running the benchmarks on Grafana Cloud would’ve cost around $250,000 in virtual user fees. So Ohashi built his own open source load testing platform, Orderly Ape, from scratch. That took three years.

The 2026 results cover five WordPress price tiers (under $25/month up to $500+ enterprise) plus a WooCommerce tier, with updated tooling and methodology. One caveat: year-over-year comparisons with past editions need careful handling due to infrastructure changes.

Which hosts came out on top? You’ll want to read the full report for that.

Read the full report on The Repository here.

Other reports from The Repository you might like to read:

• Contributors Launch FSE-Style Outreach Program to Get Real-Time Collaboration Ready for WordPress 7.1
• Gutenberg 23.3 Ships Experimental Customizable WordPress Dashboard
• WordPress.org Overhauls 20-Year-Old Jobs Board, Adds Career Features to Profiles

Don’t forget to subscribe & support them, they do some amazing hard-hitting WordPress journalism.

---

WordPress Must Read

→ 2026 WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (wphostingbenchmarks.com)

→ Protect The Shire (wordpress.org)

→ WordPress powers 33% of the web in 2026 (down from 36% at its peak): CMS market share report (gravitykit.com)

→ Malware Targeting WordPress Abuses Steam Community Profiles for Command & Control Operations (godaddy.com)

→ Quarterly WordPress Threat Intelligence Report – Q1 2026 (wordfence.com)

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On other WordPress News

→ WooCommerce 10.8.1: Dot Release (developer.woocommerce.com)

→ Monthly Education Buzz Report – May 2026 (make.wordpress.org)

→ Help Core help test Real Time Collaboration (make.wordpress.org)

→ What’s new in Gutenberg 23.3? (03 Jun) (make.wordpress.org)

→ Help test new career functionality on WordPress.org (make.wordpress.org)

→ wpcontributordashboard.org revamped and launched (wpcontributordashboard.org)

→ Welcome Estela as a team rep (make.wordpress.org)

→ Expanding Abilities across WooCommerce Extensions (developer.woocommerce.com)

→ The product editor beta is being retired in WooCommerce 11.0 (developer.woocommerce.com)

→ Automattic Joins the Tech Coalition (automattic.com)

→ Call for WordCamp Europe Host City 2028 (europe.wordcamp.org)

→ SiteGround Faces Backlash After Automatically Installing AI Plugin on Customer Sites (wp-content.co)

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From WordPress Community

→ Arundhati Kane receives the Yoast Care fund for her contribution to the WordPress community (yoast.com)

→ Little Big Things for WordPress Editing (richtabor.com)

→ 1 Million Forced Installs and a 1-Star Rating: Inside SiteGround’s AI Plugin Rollout (wpmayor.com)

→ Kadence Is Now Liquid Web: My Honest Take on the Rebrand (diydreamsite.com) → Speaking at WP Accessibility Day (wpaccessibility.day)

→ AI Workflows for WordPress and WooCommerce: Live Event (developer.woocommerce.com)

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Conclusion

That’s Issue 44 wrapped up. It’s been a big week, a packed WordCamp in Kraków, a solid WooCommerce release, some sobering market share numbers, a community call to help shape the next version of WordPress, and the long-awaited return of hosting benchmarks. A lot to take in, but that’s WordPress for you.

Thanks for reading WP More; if you found this useful, share it with a WordPress friend.

Nishat, WP More

Follow → X.com | LinkedIn | BlueSky | Facebook

Join Our Community → Sub-Reddit | X Community

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Big WordPress releases, hard numbers, and a leadership change. Everything happended in WordPress Community last week.

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Hello WordPressers!

Welcome to this week’s WP More roundup — WP More newsletter issue 43, where you get curated news about WordPress and the WordPress community all in one place.

WordPress 7.0 has landed, the next release is already calling for volunteers, WordCamp Europe’s attendance numbers deserve a closer look, a fresh security report has some uncomfortable findings, and the WordPress AI Team just saw its two founding co-leads step down.

A lot happened. Let’s get into it.

---

In this Issue:

• WordPress 7.0 “Armstrong” is officially out
• WordPress 7.1 is already looking for volunteers
• WordCamp Europe 2026 attendance is down, and the data tells an interesting story
• Over half of WordPress sites have a plugin with a known vulnerability
• James LePage and Felix Arntz step down from the WordPress AI Team

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WordPress 7.0 “Armstrong” is officially here

Named after jazz legend Louis Armstrong, WordPress 7.0 marks the start of a new phase for the platform. The headline feature is AI infrastructure, this release lays the groundwork for AI across the WordPress experience. Alongside that, you get a modernized dashboard, new design tools, and enhanced development capabilities.

It’s a major release. If you haven’t updated yet, now’s the time to check your plugins for compatibility and plan your upgrade.

Read the full release post on WordPress.org here.

With 7.0 shipped, the team is already moving on to what comes next.

---

WordPress 7.1 is calling for volunteers

The ink is barely dry on 7.0 and planning for WordPress 7.1 is already underway. The proposed release date is August 19, 2026, and the Make WordPress Core team is looking for contributors to join the release squad.

Whether you’ve helped with a release before or this would be your first time, there are roles for different skill levels and time commitments. This is one of the most direct ways to contribute to WordPress core.

Read the full call on Make WordPress Core here.

While we talk about the future of WordPress, let’s look at how the community’s biggest annual event is faring.

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WordCamp Europe’s attendance numbers are worth reading carefully

Jean Galea published a detailed breakdown of four years of WordCamp Europe data, and the picture is more specific than most headline takes suggest.

Actual attendance figures (using organizer-verified counts): Berlin 2019 had 2,734 attendees. Athens 2023 and Torino 2024 were essentially flat at around 2,545 and 2,584 respectively. Then Basel 2025 dropped to 1,723 — a 33% fall. Kraków 2026 is expected to land at roughly 1,650–1,800 based on ticket sales and historical show-up rates, which means Basel was the break point, not the start of a continuing slide.

The more telling detail is where the drop happened. Sponsor passes and volunteer tickets held steady across all four years. The contraction came entirely from paying attendees — Stripe and PayPal ticket sales fell from around 2,260 in Athens/Torino to around 1,400 in Basel/Kraków.

On the content side, AI talks jumped from one session in Torino 2024 to eight in Kraków 2026, now 16% of the program. Security talks doubled. Business and agency content nearly disappeared (nine sessions in Athens, two in Kraków). The program itself is smaller: 77 talks in Athens, 49 in Kraków.

Read the full analysis on Jean Galea’s blog here.

The security picture at WCEU matches a real-world study that came out this month.

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More than half of WordPress sites have a known vulnerable plugin

GuardingWP scanned 1,981 sites across 40+ verticals and analyzed 424 confirmed WordPress installs. The findings aren’t catastrophic, but they’re not comfortable either.

52.8% of those sites are running at least one plugin with a known CVE — meaning a documented vulnerability with a patch already published, sitting unpatched on the live site. 55.9% of sites leak their WordPress version through the generator meta tag, handing attackers a shortcut to finding relevant exploits. 93.2% are missing one or more modern security headers like HSTS, CSP, or X-Frame-Options. 35.8% still have XML-RPC enabled. And 15.9% of version-disclosing sites are on a WordPress branch that no longer receives security backports.

The report notes that most of these issues are fixable in about 10 minutes. The reason they persist is that nothing breaks visibly when you ignore them, until something does.

Read the full report on GuardingWP here.

And while we’re talking about the AI layer that WordPress 7.0 introduced, the team that built it just saw its leadership change.

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James LePage and Felix Arntz step down from the WordPress AI Team

The two founding co-reps of the WordPress AI Team are moving on. James LePage and Felix Arntz stepped back from their leadership roles after what LePage described as taking WordPress AI “from 0 to 1” over the past year.

LePage is leaving Automattic entirely to start a new AI project of his own. He joined Automattic through the WPAI acquisition in 2024 and rose to Head of AI, sitting on Automattic’s executive leadership board. Felix Arntz, who joined the team from Google, also stepped back after the year of work getting AI into WordPress core.

Jason Adams is stepping in as the new Core AI Team Rep to lead the effort going forward.

The departures drew warm responses from across the community. Developer Brian Coords called it “one of the biggest impacts on WordPress in recent history.” Automattic’s Rich Tabor noted that LePage “treated AI like a product and ecosystem shift, not just a feature.”

Read the full story on The Repository here.

Other reports from The Repository you might like to read:

• The WP Community Collective Launches State of the Community Survey
• Five for the Future Gets Its Biggest Overhaul in Years With New Pledge and Profile Pages
• Matt Mullenweg Uses WordPress’s 23rd Birthday to Appeal Directly to Silver Lake: “You’ve Won. I Submit.”
• Patchstack CEO Warns WordPress 7.0 Could Trigger “Absolute Rush” To Steal AI API Keys
• SiteGround Auto-Installs AI Plugin on Customer Sites, Calls WordPress 7.0 a ‘Watershed Moment’ as Customers Push Back
• WordPress 7.0 “Armstrong” Ships With AI Infrastructure, Modernized Dashboard, and New Design Tools
• Liquid Web Retires StellarWP in Botched Rollout, Drawing Backlash From Customers and Community
• CERN Engineers to Deliver WordCamp Europe 2026 Opening Keynote as Workshop Registrations Start Filling Up
• Envato Ends Exclusive Author Model, Moves All Marketplace Sellers to Flat 50% Revenue Share

Don’t forget to subscribe & support them, they do some amazing, hard-hitting WordPress journalism.

---

WordPress Must Read

→ WordPress 7.0 changed what a plugin can be (x.com)

→ I Love WordPress. There’s Nothing for Me at WordCamp. (regionallyfamous.com) → WordCamp Asia 2026 doubles local speaker representation (wpapac.com)

→ How Much Does a WooCommerce Store Cost in 2026? (studiowombat.com)

→ Safely Using AI API Keys in WordPress Connectors (wsform.com)

→ How to stand out as a WordPress developer (olgagleckler.com)

→ Hackers abuse Google ads for GoDaddy ManageWP login phishing (bleepingcomputer.com)

→ Your WordPress AI connector dies on the 4th click: the 30,000 token limit nobody warned you about (designsetgo.dev)

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On other WordPress News

→ Help test new career functionality on WordPress.org (make.wordpress.org)

→ Hotfix available for #65286 (make.wordpress.org)

→ Accessibility Improvements in WordPress 7.0 (make.wordpress.org)

→ WordCamp Asia 2026 Core Committers Meeting (make.wordpress.org)

→ Open Horizons in Action: What Our First Cohort Has Been Up To (wordpressfoundation.org)

→ React 19 Upgrade in WordPress (make.wordpress.org)

→ WordPress 6.9 Server Compatibility (make.wordpress.org)

→ WooCommerce.com is now running on nightly WC Core: here’s why (developer.woocommerce.com)

→ PHP support clarification, spring 2026 edition (make.wordpress.org)

→ Extending Unicode support in email addresses (make.wordpress.org)

→ Vercel AI Gateway plugin for WordPress (vercel.com)

→ AI Contributor Weekly Summary – 20 May 2026 (make.wordpress.org)

→ Media Editor Modal: Call for Testing (make.wordpress.org)

→ What’s new for developers? (May 2026) (developer.wordpress.org)

→ Woo’s Artistic Director talks agentic commerce at Stripe Sessions (developer.woocommerce.com)

→ WordPress 7.0: A new direction forward (youtube.com)

→ WordPress 7.0 in 7 Minutes (youtube.com)

→ What’s new in Gutenberg 23.2? (21 May) (make.wordpress.org)

→ WordPress AI Plugin Hits 1.0 Milestone With New Request Logging and Connector Approvals Experiments (therepository.email)

→ WordPress Gets an Official Browser Extension, Testers Wanted Ahead of 1.0 (therepository.email)

→ Automattic’s Radical Speed Month Wraps Up With Podcast, Payment and Publishing Tools Among 400+ Projects (therepository.email)

---

From WordPress Community

→ What 8 Years of Building Dynamic WordPress Websites Taught Us (crocoblock.com)

→ 2026 Has Changed Everything About WordPress Security (publishpress.com)

→ “Do the Woo” has become its own standalone podcast at dothewoo.com (openchannels.fm)

→ A conference for Nordic WordPress enthusiasts by the community (wpsuomi.fi)

→ Should Hosting Companies Own WordPress Products? (thewpminute.com)

→ AI, generate 100 designs for WordPress Playground (adamadam.blog)

→ Back on WordPress (dannyvankooten.com)

→ The Case for Content Modeling Without Code (briancoords.com)

→ If WordPress gets CPTs in Core, we also need custom fields (joost.blog)

→ The Breach Isn’t the Problem. Your Silence Is. (zant.com)

→ Legacy software companies are screwed (x.com)

→ The Ankler moves to new publishing platform created by Ben Thompson (axios.com)

→ Acquia builds Drupal funding into its partner program (dri.es)

→ Divi 5.5 Release Notes (elegantthemes.com)

→ Indebted: The Ugandan WordPress Dream that Flew to Asia (heropress.com)

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Conclusion

What a week for WordPress. A major release shipped, the next one is already in planning, WCEU data tells a more specific story than the headlines suggest, security fundamentals still need attention across thousands of sites, and the team that built WordPress AI from scratch has handed the baton to new leadership. The platform keeps moving.

Thanks for reading WP More; if you found this useful, share it with a WordPress friend.

Nishat, WP More

Follow → X.com | LinkedIn | BlueSky | Facebook

Join Our Community → Sub-Reddit | X Community

RC3 is live, real-time collab is out, and Matt’s moves raise eyebrows.

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Hello WordPressers!

Welcome to this week’s WP More roundup — WP More newsletter issue 42, where you get curated news about WordPress and the WordPress community all in one place.

WordPress 7.0 is a week away from release, and the lead-up has been anything but quiet. A third release candidate is out, real-time collaboration got pulled at the last minute, Gutenberg 23.1 shipped some genuinely useful editor upgrades, and behind the scenes, Matt Mullenweg is reshaping how WordPress.org operates, while a federal judge is asking hard questions about deleted messages.

A lot to cover, so let’s get into it.

---

In this Issue:

• WordPress 7.0 RC3 is out, final release set for May 20
• Real-time collaboration has been pulled from WordPress 7.0
• Gutenberg 23.1 lands with faster uploads, new UI primitives, and experimental tools
• Matt Mullenweg forms a trusted group to overhaul WordPress.org and Five for the Future
• A federal judge orders Matt to explain missing messages in the WP Engine dispute

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WordPress 7.0 RC3 Is Here, Final Release on May 20

The third release candidate for WordPress 7.0 dropped on May 8, and the team is in the final stretch before the May 20 launch. RC3 addresses 143+ issues since RC2, and this is your last real window to test before the release goes out to the world.

You can test RC3 a few ways: install the WordPress Beta Tester plugin, download the RC3 zip directly, use WP-CLI with wp core update --version=7.0-RC3, or open a browser-based test environment via WordPress Playground — no local setup needed for that last option.

For plugin and theme developers, this is the time to wrap up testing and update your “Tested up to” value to 7.0. If you find bugs, report them in the Alpha/Beta support forum or on WordPress Trac.

• RC3 is the third and likely final release candidate before the May 20 launch
• 143+ issues addressed since RC2
• Plugin and theme authors should update their “Tested up to” version now

Read the full blog on WordPress News here.

One notable item missing from RC3 deserves its own section: real-time collaboration has been cut from the release entirely.

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Real-Time Collaboration Will Not Ship in WordPress 7.0

Matt Mullenweg made the call on May 8: real-time collaboration is out of WordPress 7.0. His stated reason is that he’s not confident the current approach is stable enough for core. Specific concerns include race conditions, server load, memory efficiency, surface area risk, and bugs that surfaced through fuzz testing.

The decision is framed as putting a stable 7.0 release ahead of shipping a feature that isn’t ready. Work is underway to unwind RTC from the release, the May 20 date hasn’t moved, and a plan for broader testing and continued iteration will be shared once the immediate work is done, with 7.1 being the most likely next target. In the meantime, you can still test the feature through the Gutenberg plugin.

• Real-time collab won’t be in WordPress 7.0 due to stability concerns
• The May 20 release date is unchanged
• Development continues — expect an update and broader testing during the 7.1 cycle

Read the full blog on Make WordPress Core here.

What did ship this week is worth your time, Gutenberg 23.1 has real improvements for both everyday users and developers.

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Gutenberg 23.1: Faster Uploads, New Experiments, and a Cleaner Editor UI

Gutenberg 23.1 landed on May 7 with a solid set of improvements across performance, developer tooling, and experimental features.

The most noticeable change for everyday users: image uploads are faster. Thumbnail generation now runs in parallel rather than one at a time, which makes a real difference on bulk uploads and large images, especially on slower connections. The @wordpress/ui package adds two new primitives — Drawer for slide-in side panels and Autocomplete for combobox-style inputs, along with polish across overlay components to support sticky headers and footers.

On the experimental side, there’s a new Custom Taxonomies management screen that lets you create and manage taxonomies without writing PHP, and an experimental Image Editor modal with a freeform cropper for Image and Site Logo blocks. The Classic block has been quietly hidden from the inserter (existing instances still work). Developers also get an early preview of @wordpress/grid, a new package for dashboard-style drag-and-resize layouts.

• Parallel thumbnail uploads speed up the media library noticeably
• New Drawer and Autocomplete UI primitives for developers
• Experimental custom taxonomies UI and image editor are worth testing if you’re a developer or power user

Read the full blog on Make WordPress Core here.

While the editor keeps moving forward, some significant changes are happening to how WordPress.org itself is run.

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Matt Mullenweg’s #meta-janitors: A Trusted Group Overhauling WordPress.org

On April 18, Matt Mullenweg created a new Slack channel called #meta-janitors and handed a small group of handpicked contributors production access to WordPress.org, with a mandate to ship changes without approval from any team, committee, or stakeholder other than himself.

“Spinning up an initial group of people I’m very comfortable with having dotorg sandboxes and making changes without approval or feedback needed from any team, group, stakeholder, commenter, or approval from anyone but me,” Mullenweg wrote in his opening message. The channel launched just days after he spent hours in #core-committers calling WordPress’s culture broken and its output “boring or mediocre crap.” He told the group they could “override anyone in WordPress.org, including each other, except for me.”

The initial group of 12 included Automattic’s Anne McCarthy, WordPress Executive Director Mary Hubbard, WP Engine-sponsored core committer Weston Ruter, Human Made CGO Noel Tock, and longtime lead developers including Mark Jaquith, Andrew Nacin, and Dion Hulse. The channel has since grown to 32 members.

The most ambitious project underway is a full overhaul of Five for the Future, led by ServMask CEO Yani Iliev. Four mockups approved by Mullenweg would introduce a new Team Directory ranking contributors by weighted contributions, redesigned company and individual profile pages, and a “Find a Contributor” page for companies looking to sponsor active contributors. Other changes already shipped include a new WP-CLI landing page at wordpress.org/cli, an updated Requirements page, and LinkedIn-style “open to work” options in WordPress.org’s jobs infrastructure.

The channel is technically public on WordPress Slack, but the initiative hasn’t been formally announced, an unconventional approach for a project that has traditionally operated through team consensus and open discussion.

• A handpicked group now has production access to WordPress.org with authority to ship changes without community approval
• Five for the Future is getting a major structural overhaul, with new contributor ranking and discovery pages
• The initiative is public on Slack but hasn’t been formally announced — worth watching closely

Read the full report on The Repository here.

Other reports from The Repository you might like to read:

• Matt Mullenweg Pulls Real-Time Collaboration From WordPress 7.0, Blames WP Engine Litigation
• WP Engine Accuses Audrey of Failing to Produce Documents in Discovery Fight
• Gutenberg 23.1 Ships Custom Taxonomies UI, Prompting “Why Now?” From the Community
• Contact Form 7 Creator Reveals Contactable.io Will Launch as RESTful API
• Court Rejects Developer’s Contempt Motion Against Automattic and Mullenweg
• New Contributor Onboarding Project Rallies Make Teams Ahead of WordCamp Europe Launch
• WordPress Accessibility Team Overhauls Theme Guidelines for the First Time in 14 Years
• WordPress 7.0 Gets a New May 20 Release Date
• New Presence API Feature Plugin Released as Side Project to Real-Time Collaboration
• WordPress.org Closes Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin After Author Operated Years-Long Backdoor
• WordPress AI 0.8.0 Introduces New Refine From Notes Experiment and Dashboard Widgets
• WordPress Community Team Opens Applications for WordCamp India 2027 Host City
• Woo Ships WooCommerce Subscriptions Health Check Tool Following Disclosure of Four Renewal Bugs
• Austin Ginder Reports Fourth Plugin Backdoor in a Month, Unveils WP Beacon
• Automattic Engineers Reimagine wp-admin as a Desktop OS — and Nick Hamze’s Already Built an App Store for It
• Woo to Notify WooCommerce Subscriptions Customers After Four Bugs Silently Broke Renewals
• WordCamp Europe 2026 Schedule Now Live, With New Extended Workshop Format
• Woo Ships Google for WooCommerce 3.6, Making YouTube Shopping a Direct Sales Channel

Don’t forget to subscribe & support them, they do some amazing, hard-hitting WordPress journalism.

That WordPress.org governance story connects directly to the next one — because Mullenweg’s communication habits are now under legal scrutiny.

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A Federal Judge Orders Matt Mullenweg to Explain Missing Messages

The WP Engine lawsuit took a serious turn. A federal magistrate judge has ordered Mullenweg to submit a sworn declaration explaining why so few messages from WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram were produced in discovery, calling WP Engine’s allegations that relevant communications were deleted “concerning.”

The dispute stems from a joint filing on April 10, where WP Engine alleged Mullenweg produced just 40 Telegram messages, one Signal message, and zero WhatsApp messages, despite actively using all three platforms. WP Engine also alleged he deleted posts from the WordCamp Sydney and WordPress.org X accounts, a Post Status Slack channel, and plugin reviews on WordPress.org. Automattic disputed the claims, saying thousands of communications had been produced and that no relevant WhatsApp messages were found after a “reasonable” search.

Magistrate Judge Ajay Krishnan wasn’t satisfied. He found WP Engine “plausibly contends” that Mullenweg deleted relevant documents after a legal preservation obligation was triggered, and said Automattic’s response failed to address the deleted X posts, Slack channel, and plugin reviews — writing that the response appeared to “elide that topic.” One particularly pointed detail: in September 2024, Mullenweg publicly invited people to contact him via “Signal with disappearing messages” at the start of what he called his “nuclear war” against WP Engine. Automattic said disappearing messages weren’t enabled, but Krishnan noted third parties could have toggled that feature when reaching out.

Mullenweg must now submit a sworn account covering his use of these platforms, steps taken to preserve messages, whether auto-delete was active, date ranges for preserved and deleted messages, and what happened to the deleted public content cited in the dispute.

• A federal judge found WP Engine’s spoliation allegations “concerning” and Automattic’s response “unsatisfying”
• Mullenweg must now submit a sworn declaration about his messaging app use and preservation steps
• The case is active and escalating — one of the most consequential developments in the dispute so far

Read the full report on The Repository here.

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WordPress Must Read

→ An Open Letter to WooCommerce and the Woo Community (businessbloomer.com)

→ What I’d Build If I Had to Start Over in WordPress Today (devin.org)

→ Legacy software companies are screwed (x.com)

→ AI Can Design a WordPress Site. It Still Doesn’t Know Where the Design Should Live. (chrislema.com)

→ It Turns Out WordPress Was Built for the AI Era (therepository.email)

→ WordPress isn’t dying. It’s disaggregating (alexstandiford.com)

→ 2026 Community Survey Results: What You Told Us, and What’s Coming Next (generatepress.com)

→ Better, Faster, and Yes, Cheaper – Or Be Left Behind (therepository.email)

→ WordPress: The Operating System of the Agentic Web (automattic.com)

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On Other WordPress News

→ Woo Design team joins X/Twitter — share your feedback (developer.woocommerce.com)

→ WooCommerce 10.7: 51% fewer queries, a real fulfillment API, one important cache fix (woocommerce.com)

→ Welcome All Languages and Communities to Make WordPress Slack (make.wordpress.org)

→ Proposal: Auto-generate Block Editor Handbook docs from block.json (make.wordpress.org)

→ Uganda Website Projects Competition | 2026 (events.wordpress.org)

→ WordPress Student Clubs Build Momentum (wordpress.org)

→ WP A11y Docs update April 2026 (make.wordpress.org)

→ WordPress Academy for young people in Krakow (make.wordpress.org)

→ Urgent: Testing request to Web hosts for collaborative editing by May 4th (make.wordpress.org) → Presence API Feature Plugin (make.wordpress.org)

→ Roster of design tools per block (WordPress 7.0 edition) (make.wordpress.org)

→ WordPress 7.0 Release Party Updated Schedule (make.wordpress.org)

→ WordPress Documentation Team Closes 200+ Issues — and Needs Your Help (make.wordpress.org)

→ Plugins Team: 20 Apr 2026 (make.wordpress.org)

→ What’s new in AI 0.8.0 (23 APR 2026)? (make.wordpress.org)

→ Meetup Formats That Work: How WordPress Nairobi turned a meetup into a hands-on workshop (make.wordpress.org)

→ Requests for Automation (make.wordpress.org)

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From WordPress Community

→ Using Studio Code to travel back in time (pablopostigo.com)

→ A Journey to Remember: My WordCamp Asia 2026 Experience in Mumbai (central.wordcamp.org)

→ Where Automattic Meets Up (automattic.com)

→ Block Format Bridge: A Practical Solution for AI-Generated Content in WordPress (gutenbergtimes.com)

→ WordPress Businesses Are Moving From Products to Services, With Robbie Adair (publishpress.com)

→ Behind the Fiber-Optic Rope: Engineering WordCamp (automattic.com)

→ Keeping #WPLDN free and open (github.com)

→ How to get started contributing to WordPress (thewpminute.com)

→ The Hero of HeroPress and quiet art of walking with people (heropress.com)

→ WPFolks Launches Platform With Community Fund to Support Members to Attend WordPress Events (wp-content.co)

→ From WP Credits to WordCamp: The first university thesis focused on WordCamp participation (wpbakery.com)

→ WordCamp Asia 2026 Contributor Day: Photos Team Recap (make.wordpress.org) → WordCamp Asia 2026 Community Booth: A Retrospective (make.wordpress.org)

→ WordCamp Asia 2026 でインドに行ってきました (miyoshitakayuki.com)

→ From a Small Village to WordCamp Asia: My WordPress Journey (heropress.com) → Back from Burnout (poststatus.com)

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That’s a wrap on issue 42. It’s been one of the more eventful weeks in recent WordPress memory: RC3 out, real-time collab cut, governance changes happening quietly in the background, and a federal judge demanding answers. May 20 is close; if you haven’t tested WordPress 7.0 yet, this week is the time.

If this issue was useful, forward it to a WordPress friend or share it in your community. It genuinely helps the newsletter grow.

Nishat, WP More

Follow → X.com | LinkedIn | BlueSky | Facebook

Join Our Community → Sub-Reddit | X Community

Matt Mullenweg dropped a blunt, wide-ranging critique in WordPress Slack. Matt also posted about shifting focus back to individual contributors over corporate recognition.

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Hello WordPressers!

Welcome to this week’s WP More roundup — WP More newsletter issue 41, where you get curated news about WordPress and the WordPress community all in one place.

It’s been a big week in the WordPress world. Mumbai just wrapped up one of the most memorable WordCamps in years, Matt Mullenweg dropped a candid (and pointed) critique in WordPress Slack, the April developer roundup for WordPress 7.0 is out with a lot to unpack, there’s a thoughtful post from Matt about how we recognize contributors, and PressConf 2026 wrapped in Arizona with some honest conversations about where the business of WordPress is heading.

Let’s get into it.

---

In this Issue:

• WordCamp Asia 2026 wraps in Mumbai with record attendance and a new flagship announcement
• Matt Mullenweg goes candid in Slack and it’s a lot
• What’s new for WordPress developers in April 2026
• Matt’s post on elevating individual contributors over corporate identity
• PressConf 2026 recap: clarity, challenge, and some uncomfortable truths

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WordCamp Asia 2026: Mumbai Delivered and Then Some

WordCamp Asia 2026 wrapped up on April 11 in Mumbai, India, and by nearly every measure, it was the biggest and most memorable edition of the flagship Asian WordCamp yet. The event drew 2,627 attendees to the Jio World Convention Centre across Contributor Day and two full conference days, bringing together developers, designers, agency owners, bloggers, and first-time attendees from across Asia and beyond.

The program covered serious ground from technical sessions and workshops to conversations about WordPress’s future in the age of AI. The closing ceremony had one major announcement that landed with real excitement: WordCamp India will join the calendar in 2027 as the fourth flagship WordPress event, a recognition of India’s long and active role in the WordPress project.

Penang, Malaysia was also confirmed as the host city for WordCamp Asia 2027, scheduled for April 9–11. Programs like Campus Connect, WordPress Credits, and YouthCamp all featured prominently, showing how wide the community has grown.

Key takeaways:

• 2,627 attendees made this a record edition for WordCamp Asia
• India officially confirmed as the fourth flagship WordCamp host country
• WordCamp Asia 2027 heads to Penang, Malaysia

Read the full report on The Repository here.

Mumbai’s energy carried into conversations happening in real-time back in WordPress’s own digital spaces, which brings us to what happened next.

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Matt Mullenweg Says “The Wheels Have Fallen Off”

In a wide-ranging Slack session in the #core-committers channel, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg delivered a blunt assessment of the WordPress project. Returning from WordCamp Asia and catching up on messages mid-flight over Starlink, he weighed in on a disputed Trac issue and then kept going.

Over several hours, Mullenweg criticized what he described as a release culture producing “boring or mediocre crap,” called for an end to attacks on Automattic, and said the project had spent years doing damage to itself. He also posted publicly: “The only bomb is what we’ve been doing the last few years. And yes it’s my fault, and I’m going to fix it.”

Reactions in the community were split. Some found themselves agreeing with the substance of his critique while pushing back on the delivery. Others pointed out that the WordPress 7.0 release has been stalled and that contributions haven’t always been going to the right places. One contributor noted that Mullenweg’s communication style, processing things internally and then delivering it all at once, can make it difficult to actually act on his vision.

Key takeaways:

• Mullenweg is openly self-critical about where the project has gone
• The reaction in the community was mixed, support for the substance, pushback on the approach
• Expect more changes to how WordPress development is run in the coming months

Read the full report on The Repository here.

Mullenweg’s concerns about project culture tie into something he posted directly to Make WordPress Core the same week, which we’ll cover next.

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What’s New for WordPress Developers in April 2026

The April developer roundup from the WordPress Developer Blog is out, and it covers a lot of ground for WordPress 7.0. The biggest news first: the 7.0 release schedule was extended after a performance issue in the Real-Time Collaboration (RTC) database architecture required a deeper architectural fix rather than a late-cycle patch. Pre-releases were paused until April 17, with a new schedule to be announced by April 22. Everything else in 7.0 is ready to go.

On the feature side, two major systems are coming: the WP AI Client, a new core PHP library that gives plugins a standardized way to work with AI providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, and the Connectors API, which lets site owners configure their preferred AI providers from a dedicated screen in the admin.

There’s also the new Client-Side Abilities API, a JavaScript counterpart to the PHP Abilities system introduced in 6.9. For themes, WordPress 7.0 brings button pseudo-state styling in Global Styles, viewport-based block visibility controls, and gradient support for background images. Developers should also note that PHP 7.2 and 7.3 support is being dropped; the new minimum is PHP 7.4.

Key takeaways:

• WordPress 7.0’s release schedule was extended to fix RTC database architecture
• AI Client and Connectors API are coming to core, a big deal for the plugin ecosystem
• PHP 7.2/7.3 sites will need to update before the 7.0 update

Read the full blog on the WordPress Developer Blog here.

And while the technical side of WordPress evolves, there’s a parallel conversation happening about who gets recognized for building it.

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Elevating Individuals: Matt Wants to Put People Back at the Center

In a post to Make WordPress Core that spans several teams, Matt Mullenweg made a direct appeal: let’s go back to celebrating individual contributors, not just corporate sponsors. The prompt was a badge photo from WordCamp Asia, specifically a badge displaying “SELF EMPLOYED” as the primary identifier in place of a name, which led Mullenweg to reflect on how the push for corporate sponsorship recognition has quietly reshaped the culture around contribution.

He points out that this isn’t just about badge design. It shows up in Five for the Future testimonials, in the plugin and theme directories, in WordCamp business models, and in how the project measures contribution at all. His core argument: WordPress has been tracking and celebrating inputs (hours pledged, sponsorships listed) rather than actual impact and results.

He’s calling for a rethink, both in how events recognize attendees and in how the project evaluates whether contribution is actually moving things forward. He also refers to the Mythical Man-Month, noting that adding more contributors doesn’t automatically equal more progress.

Key takeaways:

• WordPress has drifted toward recognizing companies over individuals, Mullenweg wants that reversed
• The Five for the Future model needs to focus on real impact, not just pledged hours
• This is a cultural shift, not just a design fix

Read the full blog on Make WordPress Core here.

The question of what WordPress values and who it values was also at the heart of what was being discussed in Tempe, Arizona ,at PressConf.

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PressConf 2026: The Business of WordPress Gets Honest

PressConf 2026 wrapped up at Tempe Mission Palms in Arizona on April 11, and the theme for this year’s edition was “clarity”, with a deliberate edge to it. Organizer Raquel Manriquez designed the event to be more challenging than the first, with fewer sessions and more space for real conversations. Her belief going in: if you’re clear-eyed about where WordPress actually stands right now, it’s uncomfortable.

That discomfort was present throughout. One of the sharpest sessions came from Bryce Adams of Metorik, who made the case that WooCommerce has been trying to compete with Shopify for years and lost that fight before it started. On the plugin economics panel, moderated by The Repository’s Rae Morey, the consensus was that a smaller, more focused WordPress community built around real business outcomes might actually be healthier than a platform stretching to be everything to everyone.

PressConf doesn’t stage product launches or perform optimism; it’s a room of people with actual businesses at stake, being honest with each other about what’s working and what isn’t. For anyone in the WordPress business world, this is the one event worth following closely.

Key takeaways:

• Clarity was the theme and it came with some uncomfortable conclusions
• WooCommerce’s competition with Shopify was called out directly
• The ecosystem may be healthier at a smaller, more focused scale

Read the full report on The Repository here.

Other reports from The Repository you might like to read:

• WordPress.org Closes 31 Plugins After Backdoor Planted Across Flippa Portfolio
• Decision to Build EmDash Came from Cloudflare CEO, Engineer Reveals
• Matt Mullenweg Overrules Core Committers to Put Akismet on WordPress 7.0’s Connectors Screen
• WordPress 7.0 Pre-Releases Paused Through April 17, New Schedule Due by April 22

Don’t forget to subscribe & support them, they do some amazing, hard-hitting WordPress journalism.

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WordPress Must Read

→ Being The Bigger Table (sereed.media)

→ How to Prepare Your Plugins and Sites for WordPress 7.0 (unleash-wp.com)

→ Someone Bought 30 WordPress Plugins and Planted Backdoors in All of Them (thenextweb.com)

→ WordPress Media Is Becoming the Real Front Page (thewp.world)

→ It’s Time to Level Up in WordPress (remkusdevries.com)

→ AI Across The WP Ecosystem (j.cv)

→ Why ‘Future Revisions’ Should Be the Next Priority Feature for WordPress (briancoords.com)

→ WordPress Plugins Are in Trouble (justinferriman.com)

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On Other WordPress News

→ Announcing Our 2026 Global Partners! (make.wordpress.org)

→ What’s New in AI 0.7.0 (9 Apr 2026)? (make.wordpress.org)

→ WordPress Core Dev Environment Toolkit: A Faster Path to Your First Core Contribution (make.wordpress.org)

→ Twenty Twenty-Seven: Team Announcement (make.wordpress.org)

→ Monthly Education Buzz Report – March 2026 (make.wordpress.org)

→ New AI-Powered Tools for Creating WordPress Learning Materials (make.wordpress.org)

→ Defining Expectations for Iteration Issues (make.wordpress.org)

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From WordPress Community

→ Sumit Singh Receives the Yoast Care Fund for His Contribution to the WordPress Community (yoast.com)

→ New WP Engine AI Agency Trends Report Finds the Rise of the Intelligent Web Is Accelerating Digital Agency Investment in AI (wpengine.com)

→ 5 Years at Rank Math (kafleg.com.np)

→ WordPress Is Very Much Alive (kittenkamala.com)

→ Your AI Remembers Everything. You Own None of It. (regionallyfamous.com)

→ WordCamp Asia 2026, FOMO or JOMO? (tacoverdo.com)

→ Meet Studio Code: I Redesigned My WordPress Site in 2 Hours (riad.blog)

→ Write: What If WordPress Was Designed Purely for Writers? (pootlepress.com)

→ After WordCamp Asia 2026: The AI Conversation Nobody Was Prepared For (vapvarun.com)

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Conclusion

That’s a wrap on Issue 41. This week made one thing clear: WordPress is in a moment of genuine self-reflection about its culture, contributors, releases, and business ecosystem.

That’s not a bad thing. Projects that can ask hard questions about themselves tend to come out better for it.

If something here sparked a thought, hit reply; we read every message. And if a friend or colleague would find this useful, feel free to pass it along.

Nishat, WP More

Follow → X.com | LinkedIn | BlueSky | Facebook

Join Our Community → Sub-Reddit | X Community

Also: 7.0 RC2 drops, Gutenberg 22.9 ships, 6.9.2 lessons learned, ClassicPress 2.7.0.

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Hello WordPressers!

Welcome to this week’s WordPress roundup — WP More newsletter issue 40, where you get curated news about WordPress and the WordPress community all in one place.

WordPress 7.0 is close enough to touch and the ecosystem around it has been buzzing. This week we’re covering the final stretch of the 7.0 release cycle, a Gutenberg update packed with collaboration fixes, some hard lessons from the 6.9.2 security release, a challenger CMS that’s got everyone talking, and a quiet but solid update from ClassicPress.

Lots to dig into.

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In this Issue:

• WordPress 7.0 Is Almost Ready, Here’s How to Test It
• Gutenberg 22.9 Brings Gradient Overlays, Better Collaboration, and More
• The 6.9.2 Security Release Didn’t Go Smoothly, Here’s What the Team Learned
• Cloudflare Launched a “WordPress Spiritual Successor” and The Community Wasn’t Buying It
• ClassicPress 2.7.0 Is Out , With Speed Boosts You’ll Actually Notice

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WordPress 7.0 Is Almost Ready, Here’s How to Test It

The second Release Candidate for WordPress 7.0 is out, which means the final release is right around the corner. RC2 dropped ahead of the scheduled, and the core team is asking the community to help with one last round of testing before it ships.

You can test it four ways: install the WordPress Beta Tester plugin, download the RC2 zip directly, use WP-CLI (wp core update --version=7.0-RC2), or try it instantly in your browser via WordPress Playground — no setup required.

Two areas the team specifically wants eyes on: Real Time Collaboration and Pattern Editing with content-only interactivity. If you find a bug, report it on the support forums or directly on Trac.

This is also the point where plugin and theme authors should wrap up their compatibility testing and update the “Tested up to” value in their readme files to 7.0.

• RC2 marks a hard string freeze — translations need to be finalized now.
• WordPress Playground makes testing dead simple, even if you don’t have a test server handy.

Read the full blog on Official WordPress blog here.

Speaking of what’s going into 7.0, the Gutenberg project just shipped a release that gives us a clearer picture of what’s coming.

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Gutenberg 22.9 Brings Gradient Overlays, Better Collaboration, and More

Gutenberg 22.9 is out, and it’s a tidy release with a few highlights worth knowing about. The Group block now supports background gradients alongside background images, meaning you can finally layer a gradient overlay on top of a photo without workarounds. A new gradient picker appears in the Background panel and works independently of existing color controls.

The command palette (Cmd+K / Ctrl+K) is getting an experimental upgrade too: it now shows sections for recently used commands and contextual suggestions, making it easier to find actions quickly. To try it, enable “Workflow Palette” under WP-Admin > Gutenberg > Experiments.

Real-time collaboration also got meaningful stability improvements. Block comments now sync properly between editors without requiring a page refresh, and the “Join” button in the post list correctly reverts to “Edit” when a collaboration lock expires. A handful of behind-the-scenes fixes also prevent memory issues during collaborative sessions.

• 131 pull requests merged, with 5 first-time contributors.
• A new EmptyState component was added to the wordpress/ui package for consistent placeholder UI patterns.
• The experimental Forms block now supports hidden input fields.

Read the full blog on Official Make WordPress blog here.

Before we get too excited about what’s new, there’s an important post-mortem worth reading about what went wrong last month.

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The 6.9.2 Security Release Didn’t Go Smoothly, Here’s What the Team Learned

The WordPress 6.9.2 security release in March had a rough rollout, and the Security Team has published a candid retrospective about it. The short version: a bug fix triggered a fast-follow 6.9.3 release just eight hours later, three security commits were accidentally left out of the original 6.9.2 package (leading to a 6.9.4), and backporting fixes to 22 older branches turned out to be a slow, labor-intensive process.

The good news is that the team has identified concrete fixes. The minor release checklist will be updated to include double-verification of merge commits, clearer steps for releasing during a beta phase, and better documentation throughout. On the technical side, backport tooling and automation are being improved to reduce the manual burden.

There’s also a longer-term question on the table: Matt Mullenweg has asked what AI-assisted tooling could help review changes going into releases and improve quality control. No specifics yet, but it’s being explored.

• A checklist gap – no step to independently verify all commits made it into the branch, caused the missing fixes in 6.9.2.
• The 6.0 branch (version 6.0.12) remains unreleased at the time of writing due to an unresolved build issue.
• Backporting to 22 branches is increasingly unsustainable without better automation.

Read the full blog on Official Make WordPress blog here.

While the WordPress team was working through its own growing pains, a newcomer arrived claiming to pick up WordPress’s mantle and the community had thoughts.

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Cloudflare Launched a “WordPress Spiritual Successor” and The Community Wasn’t Buying It

Cloudflare released a new CMS called EmDash on April 1, not a joke, billing it as a “spiritual successor to WordPress.” Built on TypeScript and Astro 6.0, running serverless on Cloudflare Workers, and licensed under MIT, it was built in roughly two months with heavy AI assistance. Its headline claim: plugins run in isolated sandboxes, solving the plugin security problem.

Matt Mullenweg pushed back firmly, arguing that WordPress’s spirit is about democratization, running anywhere, on any host, with no lock-in. Critics across the community echoed that point: EmDash’s sandboxed plugin model only works on Cloudflare’s infrastructure, which is a hard limit for anyone hoping to see it adopted at WordPress’s scale.

Others pointed out that the editing interface felt dated (it uses TipTap, not Gutenberg), that it lacks site editing capabilities, and that it’s built almost entirely for developers, leaving out the bloggers, small business owners, and content managers who make up most of WordPress’s actual user base.

• Joost de Valk (Yoast founder) praised EmDash as a CMS “built for 2026,” particularly for AI-assisted development workflows.
• WordPress CMS market share has dipped below 43% for the first time since 2022, making the broader conversation about alternatives more relevant.
• Mullenweg said he expects plugin security to be addressed in WordPress itself within 18 months, with the help of AI.

Read the full report on The Repository here.

Other reports from The Repository you might like to read:

• The Admin Bar’s 2026 Agency Survey Shows Growth Slowing and Passive Marketing at Its Limit
• The WP Community Collective Publishes Open Source Contributor Pay Standard
• Roots Launches WP Composer as Open Source Alternative to WPackagist

Don’t forget to subscribe & support them, they do some amazing hard-hitting WordPress journalism.

And finally, a quieter but genuinely useful update from the WordPress fork that keeps things classic.

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ClassicPress 2.7.0 Is Out , With Speed Boosts You’ll Actually Notice

ClassicPress, the community fork of WordPress that dropped Gutenberg in favor of the classic editor, released version 2.7.0 in late March, and it’s a practical update focused on speed and reliability.

The two headline features are view transitions in the admin (navigation between pages now feels smoother, closer to a single-page app experience) and a built-in object cache option under Settings > Reading. When enabled, the object cache reduces database queries significantly and speeds up your site for both logged-in and logged-out users, something page caching alone can’t do. It requires your host to support the APCu module, and ClassicPress will tell you if yours doesn’t.

The Text widget was also completely rewritten in vanilla JavaScript, dropping jQuery and Backbone.js dependencies. That’s part of ClassicPress’s ongoing effort to remove outdated libraries and improve performance across the board. Translation loading also got faster, which will be noticeable on non-English sites.

• Object caching works alongside other caching methods like OpCache and page caching, they’re not mutually exclusive.
• The jQuery removal in the Text widget is part of a longer-term modernization project.
• Version 2.7.0 also includes security fixes and library dependency updates.

Read the full announcement on Official blog here.

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WordPress Must Read

→ WordPress 7.0 AI Connectors: Pros, Cons, and What the Ecosystem Needs to Get Right (vapvarun.com)

→ WooCommerce Data Insights, 2026 Edition (studiowombat.com)

→ WordPress 7.0 Source of Truth (gutenbergtimes.com)

→ The Lifespan Of SSL Certificates Is Shrinking, And Agencies Must Adapt (forbes.com)

→ State of the WordPress Agency 2026 (theadminbar.com)

→ WordPress Is Colliding With AI — and Nobody Had ‘None’ on Their Bingo Card (therepository.email)

→ Do you need a CMS? (joost.blog)

→ The Risk of Software Dependency (zant.com)

→ Building WordPress plugins in context (mattcohen.co)

→ AI Featured Images (darinkotter.com)

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On other WordPress News

→ @wordpress/build, the next generation of WordPress plugin build tooling (developer.wordpress.org)

→ Monthly Education Buzz Report – March 2026 (make.wordpress.org)

→ Introducing the WordPress Facilitator Training Program (make.wordpress.org)

→ Community Summit alongside a flagship event for 2027 or 2028 (make.wordpress.org)

→ Building a custom sync provider for real-time collaboration (make.wordpress.org)

→ How WordPress 7.0 Is Building the Foundation for AI-Powered Sites (wordpress.com)

→ New in WordPress Studio: Studio CLI on npm & phpMyAdmin Access (wordpress.com)

→ The Path Forward for WordPress 7.0 (make.wordpress.org)

→ 2026 Community Team Reps (make.wordpress.org)

→ WordPress Studio now has an independently installable CLI (x.com)

→ Announcing the Training Team Cohort: “Block Theme Development in WordPress” (make.wordpress.org)

→ WordCamp Creator Studio, Sponsored by WordPress.com: Available for Sign Ups Now! (asia.wordcamp.org)

→ Rethinking Left Navigation (make.wordpress.org)

→ Plugin Directory MCP Server (make.wordpress.org)

→ Guidelines Lands in Gutenberg 22.7 (make.wordpress.org)

→ What’s new in AI 0.6.0 (20 MAR 2026)? (make.wordpress.org)

→ Call for Testing: Community AI Connector Plugins (make.wordpress.org)

→ Contribute to the Plugins Team! (make.wordpress.org)

→ Introducing the Connectors API in WordPress 7.0 (make.wordpress.org)

→ Twenty Twenty-Seven default theme: Call for Volunteers (make.wordpress.org)

→ Connect AI coding agents to WordPress Playground with MCP (make.wordpress.org)

→ Plugin Directory: Local Development Environment (make.wordpress.org)

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From WordPress Community

→ Checkout Summit {Reloaded} – The first independent online conference for WooCommerce builders, founders, and agencies (checkoutsummit.com)

→ Alina Kakshapati receives the Yoast Care fund for her contribution to the WordPress community (yoast.com)

→ Joan Namunina receives the Yoast Care fund for her contribution to the WordPress community (yoast.com)

→ WP Packages is Working the Way Open Source Should (wordpress.org)

→ WP Engine Announces DE{CODE} 2026: Shape What’s Next (wpengine.com)

→ Akramul Hasan receives the Yoast Care fund for his contribution to the WordPress community (yoast.com)

→ Organizing Asia’s Biggest WordPress Gathering: A Conversation with the WordCamp Asia 2026 Event Leads (wp-content.co)

→ #WCEU2026 – Community That Shapes WordCamp Europe (youtube.com)

→ WordPress Campus Connect Jinja 2025 Recap: Piloting Africa’s First and Largest Campus Connect Program Across 12 Campuses in Eastern Uganda (central.wordcamp.org)

→ Introducing EmDash — the spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security (cloudflare.com)

→ EmDash Feedback (ma.tt)

→ AI for Nearly a Billion (j.cv)

→ #209 – Simon Pollard on Navigating the New Normal for WordPress Community and Events (wptavern.com)

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Conclusion

That’s your WP More roundup for this week. Whether you’re testing WordPress 7.0 RC2, watching the EmDash conversation unfold, or just quietly appreciating a ClassicPress object cache, there’s a lot happening in this corner of the web.

If something here sparked a thought, hit reply; we read every message. And if a friend or colleague would find this useful, feel free to pass it along.

Nishat, WP More

Follow → X.com | LinkedIn | BlueSky | Facebook

Join Our Community → Sub-Reddit | X Community