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Gutenberg Times: WordPress 7.1 Beta 3, AI in Action at #WCUS, Playground UI testing and more — Weekend Edition 370
by Birgit Pauli-Haack on 25th July 2026 at 10:41
Hi, After a few month dealing with a bad knee and a bad back, I enjoy moving again. As long as the weather is nice, I will be biking, swimming and walking the city with all the tourists that populate downtown Munich. From an SEO veteran’s surprisingly upbeat take on WordPress market share to a one-file answer to “what makes a block theme,” this week’s finds dig a little deeper than the usual headlines. There’s also plenty of hands-on material, whether you want to test 7.1 Beta 3, try the new Playground UI, or get your store ready for agentic commerce. Enjoy your weekend! Yours, Birgit WCUS 2026 has a dedicated AI track The AI in Action sessions are built around the questions site builders are actually sitting with right now. How do you set guardrails for AI-assisted development without losing client trust? How do you build sites that serve AI agents as visitors, not just humans? What are the legal and ethical boundaries when you put AI tools in front of clients? They’re practical sessions for developers navigating a workspace that changed faster than anyone planned for. The full schedule is live. If you’re figuring out how AI changes your pricing, your workflow, or your service model, this is a rare room to be in. August 16–19, Phoenix Convention Center. $100 includes four days, all sessions, lunch, and the community social. us.wordcamp.org/2026/tickets Developing Gutenberg and WordPress WordPress 7.1 Beta 3 is now available for testing. Rae Morey, The Repository, has the news WordPress 7.1 Beta 3 Now Available, Punts Unicode Email Support Over Security Concerns Contribute by Help Test WordPress 7.1 and learn deeply how the new features and blocks work. It’s a very impactful way to contribute to the open-source project that powers hundreds of millions of websites. Quite a few Dev notes made it out of the publishing queue this week: Text Shadow Support in Global Styles Editor components updates in WordPress 7.1 Editable blocks inside the Custom HTML block React 19: punted beyond WordPress 7.1, experiment in Gutenberg Registering and rendering SVG icons in WordPress 7.1 The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #132 – Proposals for Core, Calls for Testing, WordPress 7.1 and Gutenberg 23.4 and 23.5 Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners On the WordPress.com blog, Joe Fylan explains what agentic commerce means for your store. AI assistants that discover, compare, and buy products on a shopper’s behalf. You’ll get an overview of where the big AI tools stand on in-chat checkout, plus reassurance that small stores can win with verifiable facts. Fylan’s checklist for getting ready: clear product descriptions, structured data, and making sure your robots.txt isn’t blocking the agents you want. Dave Smith, core committer and Gutenberg contributor, thinks WordPress has a homepage problem — and he built a better version to prove it. In his video, he walks you through why setting a static homepage trips up so many beginners, then demos a prototype exploring a simpler, clearer approach. You can try the live demo yourself in the browser. Smith wants to know if the direction resonates, so drop your homepage struggles in the video’s comments. Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks In episode 226 of the WP Tavern Jukebox podcast, Nathan Wrigley talks with Jessica Lyschik about why accessibility in WordPress themes is easier than you think. Fresh from her WordCamp Europe 2026 talk, Lyschik walks you through the recently updated accessibility-ready requirements, quick wins like correct HTML tags, alt text, and skip links, and why block themes make much of this effortless because Core handles it. The insight: AI agents navigate your site like screen readers do. Ryan Welcher digs into how WordPress decides a theme is a “block theme” — and the answer might surprise you. It all comes down to one file: templates/index.html exists, or it doesn’t. Neither theme.json nor patterns flip the switch, which is why Astra, Kadence, and Blocksy all still test classic. “Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2026” 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. The previous years are also available: 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor In episode 477 of the WP Builds podcast, Nathan Wrigley talks with Olly Campion and Tommy Rockett about lessons from their WordPress plugin business and their block-based plugin Slidey Panel, which slides customizable side panels into any site. You’ll hear how years of client work revealed a gap in both classic themes and the block editor, the philosophy behind their “page as panel” approach, and their candid take on AI, market share shifts, and the future of bespoke agency work. Ryan Welcher walks you through What’s New for WordPress Developers for July 2026 in his monthly video roundup. You’ll learn why WordPress 7.0.2 is a must-install security release, how to test React 19 via a runtime flag in Gutenberg 23.4, and what the now-enforced iframed editor means for your themes. He also covers responsive styling, Block Bindings for list items, and MCP support in Playground. Prefer reading? There’s a companion post on the Developer Blog. What’s new with Playground The Playground team wants your help testing the new WordPress Playground UI before it officially launches. Fellyph Cintra shares four testing modules you can pick from: creating and managing Playgrounds, the Blueprint experience, developer tools like Files and Logs, and import/export workflows. Five minutes on desktop or mobile is enough, and the post walks you through each step. Feedback on text clarity, mechanics, and design goes into the GitHub issue #4092. Elliott Richmond shares how he uses WordPress Playground and Blueprints to train clients on block themes, inspired by WordCamp Europe. For a client migrating from a classic theme, he trimmed a gigabyte-plus database to a 50MB export, then built a Blueprint that loads their actual theme, plugin, and content into a disposable in-browser site. You send one link, the client can safely break things, and a refresh resets everything — no hosting or credentials needed. WordPress and AI On the Kinsta blog, Carlo Daniele takes a deep dive into the WordPress AI integration architecture that arrived with WordPress 7.0. You’ll learn how the three layers — Connectors, AI Client, and Providers — replace bundled SDKs and provider-specific code with the unified wp_ai_client_prompt() function. Daniele then walks you through building a real plugin, available on GitHub, that transcribes an audio note and converts it into structured Gutenberg blocks via two AI passes. An interesting take: On the MemberPress blog, SEO veteran Curt Noble argues that WordPress lost market share and got stronger. Drawing on twenty years in SEO, including his own private blog network (PBN) days, Noble contends the dip mostly reflects Google demolishing the spam economy that ran on WordPress. Meanwhile, search interest hit a five-year high, WordPress dominates the top 10,000 sites, and the vibe-coding security hangover is sending founders back to proven platforms. Noble’s bigger point: with the AI Client, Abilities API, and MCP Adapter, WordPress became the platform AI agents can natively and safely operate. Jeff Paul announced what’s new in AI 1.2.0, the latest release of the canonical AI plugin. You’ll find a new Suggest Reply experiment that drafts contextual comment responses for moderators to review, bulk Content Summary generation for existing content libraries, and two read-only Abilities: core/read-content and core/read-users. The settings screen got simpler, too, with advanced controls now tucked behind an opt-in Developer Tools option. Content Translations and C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) tracking are on the 1.3.0 roadmap. Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s master branch?Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review. Now also available via WordPress Playground. There is no need for a test site locally or on a server. Have you been using it? Email me with your experience. Questions? Suggestions? Ideas? Don’t hesitate to send them via email or send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph. For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com Featured Image:
Aaron D. Campbell: WP2Shell: Coordination Was Part of the Protection
by Aaron D. Campbell on 24th July 2026 at 18:37
WP2Shell showed that coordinated disclosure is more than a private warning. It's a system for turning trust, preparation, and fast execution into protection for users. The post WP2Shell: Coordination Was Part of the Protection appeared first on Aaron D. Campbell.
Open Channels FM: Our Guide to Open Channels FM Podcast Network’s Channels, Series, and Blog
by Bob Dunn on 24th July 2026 at 11:53
A guide to better understand the content, both audio and written that makes the Open Channels Podcast Network what it is today.
Matt: AI Slop
by Matt on 22nd July 2026 at 20:34
If you’re going to give me AI slop, at least make it fun! Give me iambic pentameter. Make it all rhyme. Have it be a song. I think we’re under-utilizing the artistic and creative capabilities of models by making them produce work that sort-of-but-not-really looks like human effort.
WordPress.org blog: WordPress 7.1 Beta 3
by Benjamin Zekavica on 22nd July 2026 at 15:23
WordPress 7.1 Beta 3 is ready for download and testing! This beta release is intended for testing and development only. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, use a test environment or local site to explore the new features. How to Test WordPress 7.1 Beta 3 You can test WordPress 7.1 Beta 3 in any of the following ways: WordPress Beta Tester PluginInstall and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a WordPress install. Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream.Direct DownloadDownload the Beta 3 version (zip) and install it on a WordPress website.Command Line (WP-CLI)Use this WP-CLI command: wp core update --version=7.1-beta3WordPress PlaygroundUse a 7.1 Beta 3 WordPress Playground instance to test the software directly in your browser. No setup required-just click and go! The scheduled final release date for WordPress 7.1 is August 19, 2026. The full release schedule can be found here. Your help testing Beta and RC versions is vital to making this release as stable and powerful as possible. Thank you to everyone who contributes by testing! Find out what’s new in WordPress 7.1: Read the Beta 1 announcement for details and highlights. How important is your testing? Testing for issues is a critical part of developing any software, and it’s a meaningful way for anyone to contribute – whether or not you have experience. Details on what to test in WordPress 7.1 are available here. If you encounter an issue, please share it in the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums. If you are comfortable submitting a reproducible bug report, you can do so via WordPress Trac. You can also check your issue against this list of known bugs. Curious about testing releases in general and how to get started? Follow along with the testing initiatives in Make Core and join the #core-test channel on Making WordPress Slack. What’s in WordPress 7.1 Beta 3? For technical details on the more than 71 issues addressed since Beta 1, see the following links: Closed 7.1 WordPress Core Trac tickets since July 15, 2026 7.1 Gutenberg commits since July 15, 2026 Note: Beta 2 was released on July 17, 2026, as part of the WordPress 7.0.2 release and includes important security fixes. Beta 3 introduces two improvements to styling. Applying local style changes globally is no longer an all-or-nothing action. The Apply globally option in the block inspector now opens a quick review step, allowing you to choose which modified styles to apply globally while keeping the rest as local overrides. Other notable fixes include improvements to media uploads: long animated GIF uploads no longer hang, images rotated using EXIF metadata are processed correctly, and uploading a single HEIC image in Safari no longer creates two entries. The editor also includes additional fixes for Notes, responsive styling, and custom CSS. For developers, WordPress Coding Standards has been updated to version 3.4.0. Unicode email address support will not be included in WordPress 7.1. The work will continue in a community plugin, allowing broader testing of compatibility, security, and data-handling considerations. A Beta 3 haiku Fresh bugs surface now,click by click, we chase them down—codebase grows steady. Props to @krupajnanda, @annezazu, @wildworks, @amykamala for proofreading and review. Join us for the launch of WordPress 7.1 at WordCamp US 2026, August 16–19.

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