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<\/figure>\nAnd just in time for this Weekend Edition, WordCamp Europe announced their schedule<\/strong><\/a>, with two tracks for talks and two for workshops. In a few weeks, on June 4-6, 2026, roughly 1500 people will descend on Krakow, Poland. Will you be there? <\/p>\n If you would rather not get across the pond, there are a few WordCamps on the calendar in the US, too: <\/p>\n A full list of all planned WordCamps in various stages<\/a> is available at WordCamp.org <\/p>\n What else is in this Weekend Edition? AI in WordPress, block theme and plugin updates and more\u2026 <\/p>\n Have fun! <\/p>\n Yours, Miguel Fonseca<\/strong> recaps what\u2019s new in Gutenberg 22.9<\/a>,<\/strong> a focused release across 131 merged PRs. The headline addition is background gradient support for the Group block, letting you layer gradients over background images for the first time. The command palette gains organized sections for recent commands and contextual suggestions \u2014 experimental, opt-in via Gutenberg Experiments. Real-time collaboration gets stability fixes: block notes now sync without a page refresh, and the stuck \u201cJoin\u201d button in the post list is resolved. <\/p>\n Anne McCarthy<\/strong> introduces the Twenty Twenty-Seven team<\/strong><\/a>: Henrique Iamarino<\/a> leads design, with Maggie Cabrera<\/a> and Carolina Nymark<\/a> as co-lead developers. The standout addition is Juanfra Aldasoro<\/a> stepping into a newly created lead mentor role \u2014 a deliberate move to make theme contribution more structured and welcoming for newer contributors. Starting earlier than previous default theme cycles gives the team room to be more intentional: the goal isn\u2019t just a great theme, but growing the number of people who feel capable of contributing to WordPress theme work at all.<\/p>\n The release date is still pending. An update is expected on or before April 22, 2026, next week. Stay tuned. <\/p>\n Benjamin Zekavica<\/strong>, previous Core team rep, offers a practical pre-flight checklist to prepare your plugins and sites for WordPress 7.0<\/strong><\/a>: if your plugins still use metaboxes, real-time collaboration will silently break for your users \u2014 migration time is now. PHP 7.2 and 7.3 are gone, MySQL minimum jumps to 8.0, and API keys in the new Connectors screen sit unencrypted in Core AI team member Darin Kotter<\/strong> cuts through the noise in WP 7.0 + AI<\/strong><\/a>: WordPress 7.0 ships AI infrastructure, not AI features. Your site won\u2019t suddenly start firing off AI requests when you update. What lands in core are the provider-agnostic AI Client PHP API, the new Connectors API for managing external service authentication, and client-side enhancements to the Abilities API. Actual AI providers, features, and MCP integration all arrive via separate plugins \u2014 your choice, your setup.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, Depak Gupta<\/strong>,freelance developer from Mumbai and contributor on the Core AI team, published a plugin to Turn of all AI Features <\/strong><\/a> via the Settings > General<\/strong> page or via command line. <\/p>\n Jamie Marsland<\/strong> poses an interesting question in The future of WordPress after blocks<\/strong><\/a>: what if the builder isn\u2019t human? He suggests that blocks were made for people\u2014easy to understand but difficult for AI to interpret. He envisions a future where meaning is more important than layout, editing becomes conversations, and WordPress transforms from a site builder to a content operating system. <\/p>\n Shani Banerjee<\/strong> highlights the new features in WooCommerce 10.7<\/strong><\/a>, mainly focusing on performance boosts: improvements on the high-performance order storage (HPOS) reduce the number of database queries by 51%, and using object cache significantly cuts down checkout query counts. There are also updated analytics export filters that accurately reflect currency for background jobs, a new beta PHP API for handling orders, fixes for the Cart and Checkout blocks, better contrast for accessibility, and increased security for order notes in the REST API and AJAX handlers. Banerjee has all the salient details for you. <\/p>\n Speaking of WooCommerce, Wes Theron<\/strong> walks you through the new course, Build your store with WooCommerce<\/strong><\/a> on WordPress.com. It\u2019s free and beginner-friendly. You\u2019ll learn everything you need to launch and manage an online store. In about an hour of bite-size video lessons, you\u2019ll work through products, payments, shipping, taxes, and order management at your own pace, ending with a fully functional store and the confidence to run it day to day.<\/p>\n Derek Hanson<\/strong>\u2018s Cover Block Parallax Style v1.2.0<\/a> <\/strong>is more bug-fix than feature release. The most visible fix: the editor and frontend were using different default speeds, so what you previewed wasn\u2019t what visitors saw. Two mobile-handling bugs got squashed \u2014 the original global viewport check meant parallax would never initialize after resizing from mobile to desktop. The main new feature is a per-block \u201cDisable on mobile\u201d toggle, replacing the blunt all-or-nothing approach. Background oversizing also bumped from 130% to 140%, matching what production parallax libraries use.<\/p>\n Elliott Richmond <\/strong>continues his WordPress.com series with Design Your WordPress Homepage with Twenty Twenty-Five<\/strong><\/a>, switching to the core theme he contributed to and building a hero section, call to action, and quick links grid \u2014 properly, using blocks the way they were designed. In 12 minutes you\u2019ll learn how Groups, Covers, Grids, Global Styles, and Patterns fit together, and why understanding what\u2019s happening under the hood makes all the difference to your layouts.<\/p>\n At WordCamp Asia 2026 in Mumbai, I ran a block theme development workshop and whether you were there or couldn\u2019t get a seat, the f<\/strong><\/a>ull workshop bundle is now on GitHub<\/a> <\/strong>\u2014 everything you need to build Concrete & Light<\/em>, a portfolio theme, entirely through the Site Editor. Three guided exercises walk you through styling headers and footers, setting global element styles, and creating dynamic page and archive templates. You can be up and running in minutes via WordPress Studio, the Studio CLI, or directly in WordPress Playground.<\/p>\n Jonathan Bossenger<\/strong> documents how he built a custom WordPress block theme using Claude and MCP tools<\/a> <\/strong>\u2014 no CLI, no code editor, just conversation. WordPress.com MCP tools let Claude audit his live site directly; WordPress Studio MCP tools wrote the theme files into his local environment. The key lesson: AI got him 80% there fast, but converting Claude\u2019s raw HTML output into proper editable block markup still required a human in the loop \u2014 and Claude Code to help get it done.<\/p>\n Yann Collet<\/strong>, founder of Twentig, has launched Twentig One<\/strong><\/a>, a new free WordPress block theme built for the site editor. Lightweight and flexible, it offers templates, post formats, color presets, font pairings, and fluid spacing out of the box. Four starter sites \u2014 Business, Portfolio, Blog, and Personal \u2014 get you up and running quickly, with more on the way.<\/p>\n \u201cKeeping up with Gutenberg \u2013 Index 2025\u201d<\/a> <\/strong> The previous years are also available: Eric Karkovack <\/strong>walks you through using the Remote Data Blocks plugin to pull Google Sheets data into WordPress<\/a>,<\/strong> step by step. The plugin connects to Airtable, Shopify, and Google Sheets out of the box, with HTTP support for other sources. Most of the setup time goes into Google Cloud Platform \u2014 creating a project, enabling APIs, and generating JSON credentials. Once connected, your spreadsheet data renders via a block and a customizable pattern directly in the editor. <\/p>\n Varun Dubey<\/strong> shares a hard-won lesson in CLAUDE.md for WordPress Developers: Why Layered Knowledge Beats a Bigger File<\/a>:<\/strong> when your instructions file hits 400 lines, more rules aren\u2019t the fix. His solution is four distinct layers \u2014 rules in CLAUDE.md, facts in memory, procedures in skills, and capabilities in MCP servers \u2014 each loaded only when relevant. For WordPress developers already running Claude Code and feeling the weight of their own instructions pile up, this is the cleanup framework you didn\u2019t know you needed.<\/p>\n Jeffrey Paul<\/strong> announces two quick releases of the WordPress AI plugin. Version 0.6.0<\/strong><\/a> marked a shift toward connected publishing workflows \u2014 image editing and refinement landed as a full Feature, and the plugin was renamed from \u201cAI Experiments\u201d to simply \u201cAI.\u201d Now 0.7.0 is out<\/a>,<\/strong> expanding editorial workflows further: Content Classification suggests categories and tags from your post content, Meta Description Generation handles SEO descriptions without leaving the editor, and bulk alt text generation lets you process your entire Media Library at once. Your next stop is 0.8.0, where Content Provenance tracking via C2PA and a \u201cRefine from Notes\u201d experiment are already taking shape.<\/p>\n James LePage<\/strong>, co-team rep of WordPress Core AI and head of AI at Automattic, catalogs what the community is building on top of the WordPress AI infrastructure<\/strong><\/a> ahead of 7.0. The volume is the point: ten community AI provider plugins, 70+ plugins adopting the Abilities API covering hundreds of millions of installs, dozens of MCP server implementations, fourteen agent skills, and tutorials in Japanese, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian. WooCommerce, ACF, Ninja Forms, GravityKit, Yoast, and WP Engine are all in. None of it was dictated from the top \u2014 the community decided the building blocks were worth using. The post has about 180+ distinct resources and links. And LePage himself admits it\u2019s not exhaustive.<\/p>\n JuanMa Garrido<\/strong> shares hard-won lessons in Using local AI models with WordPress 7.0: what I learned connecting Ollama<\/strong><\/a> \u2014 the kind the official docs skip. The biggest gotcha: call Gary Pendergast<\/strong> brings his AI writing experiment directly into the block editor with Claudaborative Editing 0.4<\/a>. <\/strong>The new WordPress plugin \u2014 available on GitHub now, pending directory approval \u2014 adds a sidebar menu with Compose, Proofread, Review, Edit, and Translate modes, plus a pre-publish panel that suggests tags, categories, and excerpts. You control how much the LLM does: it can fix things outright or just leave notes for you to act on. Gary uses it mainly for planning \u2014 to organize his thoughts before writing, not to write for him.<\/p>\n Fellyph Cintra<\/strong> announces a new blueprint agent skill that teaches your coding agent to write valid WordPress Playground Blueprints<\/a> <\/strong>from natural language prompts. Install it with one Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg\u2019s master branch?<\/a><\/strong> Now also available via WordPress Playground<\/a>. There is no need for a test site locally or on a server. Have you been using it? Email me <\/a>with your experience.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Questions? Suggestions? Ideas? <\/em> For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog<\/a>, \n
![\"\ud83d\udc95\"](\"https:\/\/s.w.org\/images\/core\/emoji\/17.0.2\/72x72\/1f495.png\")
Birgit<\/em><\/p>\nDeveloping Gutenberg and WordPress<\/h2>\n
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The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #129 Artificial Intelligence, WordPress 7.0 and Gutenberg 22.8<\/a> with Beth Soderberg, of BeThink Studio <\/p>\n![\"Beth](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/gutenbergtimes.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Screenshot-2026-03-28-at-12.00.17.png?resize=652%2C185&ssl=1\")
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wp_options<\/code> until Trac #64789 lands, so use environment variables instead. The iframed editor isn\u2019t enforced in 7.0 core yet, but test your v2 blocks in the Gutenberg plugin today.<\/p>\n
\nPlugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners<\/h2>\n
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\nTheme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks<\/h2>\n
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A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test, and Meta team from Jan. 2024 on. Updated by yours truly.\u2002<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
<\/strong>2020<\/a> | 2021<\/a><\/strong> | 2022<\/a><\/strong> | 2023<\/a><\/strong> | 2024<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nBuilding Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.<\/h2>\n
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\nAI and WordPress<\/h2>\n
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\nwp_ai_client_prompt()<\/code> at init<\/code> priority 25 or later, not the default 10, or authentication won\u2019t be wired up yet and you\u2019ll get a silent \u201cNo models found.\u201d He also covers how to allowlist localhost requests (blocked by WordPress\u2019s SSRF protection by default), register fallback auth for keyless local providers, and use is_supported_for_text_generation()<\/code> as a pre-flight check before committing to an API call.<\/p>\n
\nWhat\u2019s new in Playground?<\/h2>\n
npx<\/code> command and your agent gains a structured reference covering every Blueprint property, resource type, step sequence, and common pitfalls \u2014 so it stops guessing property names or forgetting require '\/wordpress\/wp-load.php'<\/code> in runPHP<\/code> steps. It works with Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Cursor, Copilot, and Codex.<\/p>\n
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/gutenbergtimes.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/Screenshot-2025-11-15-at-12.06.44.png?resize=196%2C45&ssl=1\")
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Don\u2019t hesitate to send them via email<\/a> or<\/em>
Send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph<\/em>.<\/p>\n
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send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n
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