Gutenberg Times: WordPress 6.9 Beta, Gutenberg 21.9, Playground, and Fields API—Weekend Edition 346

Hi there,

I am genuinely giddy about WordPress 6.9 and its delightful updates. Major kudos to all contributors, who push it over the first hurdle of this release cycle. The Beta 1 release happened earlier this week. The final release is scheduled for December 2nd, 2025.

There are lots of different updates for the full range of WordPress users.

• Content creators get a number of new and waited-for Blocks, with Accordion, Time to Read, Term Query and MathML Block, and further refinements to block handling and existing blocks.
• Theme and site builders get additional tools to style a site via theme.json and majorly improved template management right in the site editor, and
• Developers can build faster with an enhanced Block Bindings API and Interactivity API, and for the admin side of plugins the component library of DataViews and DataForms has some great updates as well.

Release Test co-lead, Krupa Nanda posted great instructions on how you can Help test the Beta 1 release of WordPress 6.9 . It’s the best way to learn how to use the new features and report quirks and bugs back to the contributors, so they can be fixed before Release Candidate 1 which is scheduled for November 11.

In Europe we will turn back our clocks one hour on Sunday (Oct 26). The US will follow suit next week (Nov 2). This will be the week of “pick-up meetings” for me. It’s what I call the phase where I miss a meeting and instead turn up at someone else’s meeting and meet new people. Win-win. But seriously, if you scheduled a meeting with me next week, you can’t send too many reminders if you want me to turn up in time.

Have a splendid weekend ahead,

Yours,
Birgit

This week in WordPress is a great long-running show by WPbuilds and host Nathan Wrigley. A panel of three people chats about last week’s WordPress news. They comment, explain and present addtional view points. It’s loosely inspired by “This week in Google” an even longer-running show of the This week in Tech (TWiT) network that was renamed at the beginning of this year to Intelligent Machines. With Jeff Jarvis, Leo LaPorte and others. It’s my favorite podcast. But I digress.

In the latest episode, This week in WordPress 353, Michelle Frechette, Tim Nash, Nathan Wrigley and yours truly discussed the great Internet outage of 2025 aka AWS outage, the WordFence Security Report, WordPress 6.9 upcoming features, Gutenberg updates, and Tammie Lister’s fun blocks and so much more. Listen in on YouTube or your favorite Podcast app.

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

Ray Morey, The Repository, reported that WordPress 6.9 Beta 1 Now Available and Ready for Testing and gives and overview of the features and also what’s didn’t make it into the release, a nice recap on the progress of the Admin Redesign.

Besides WordPress 6.9 Beta, the fabulous crew of contributors also released Gutenberg 21.9. It brings three new blocks: MathML, Term name and Term Count blocks, the latter two used in the context of the new Term Query block. The allowedBlocks feature has been expanded to all blocks and users can also use the new UI tools to controls allowed blocks for templates and patterns, without writing code or editing raw block markup. Hide/show block features was added also to synced patterns and template parts. It can also be called upon via Command Palette and keyboard shortcut cmd/ctrl+shift+H.

Isabel Brison, JavaScript developer at Automattic and core contributor, joined me on the podcast and filled various knowledge gaps about the updates in this release. We also had great fun discussing WordPress 6.9 features, soon coming to your a WordPress instance near you. The podcast episode Gutenberg Changelog #123 will land in your favorite podcast app over the weekend.

Upcoming Learn WordPress online workshops

On Thursday, Oct 30, 10:00 UTC, Maruti Mohanty will hold a workshop and show off WordPress 6.8 Features in Action + 6.9 Sneak Peek: A Hands-On Workshop.

On Thursday, Oct 30, at 20:00 UTC, Velda Christensen‘s workshop will be about Landing Pages, Posts, & More: Strategies for a Stronger Site -In this beginner-friendly workshop, we’ll explore simple ways to organize your WordPress content so visitors can easily find what they need and take the next step.

The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #122 – Gutenberg 21.8 and WordPress 6.9 with Beth Soderberg of Bethink Studio

If you are listening via Spotify, please leave a comment. If you listen via other podcast apps, please leave a review. It’ll help with the distribution.

Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners

Brian Coords has the details on the latest release of WooCommerce 10.3. in his release post. WooCommerce 10.3: COGS comes to core and MCP beta he highlights:

• Address autocomplete for Checkout blocks and shortcode
• Product Collection Editor improvements
• Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) is here
• WooCommerce MCP is available for testing in beta.
• More new features and updates
• API Updates

Blocktober Fun, the October challenge to build a block a day with Automattic’s Telex, is almost over. This week, Tammie Lister prompted the Block building AI tool for another set of fun blocks:

• Sketch Image
• Ripple Text
• VHS glitch
• Flip Card
• Emoji voting

A new fun plugin arrived at the WordPress plugin repository: It’s called Throwable by Qara Yahya, founder of BlockLayouts. Using it you can place buttons, paragraphs or image into the Throwable block. The adjust Gravity aka speed items fall and Bounce setting, and have some nice animation on your site.

Justin Tadlock released Breadcrumbs Block v. 3.0. The update includes support for the built-in Layout and Block Gap (Spacing) features in WordPress. “There are quite a few other changes and some notable bug fixes, particularly if you extend the block with custom code. Be sure to check out the changelog” he wrote on X.

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

Sid Sharma, content creator from Nepal, demonstrates how to create a transparently floating sticky header in WordPress, all in the Site Editor for Block Themes.

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.

Seth Rubenstein, lead developer at the Pew Research Center and speaker at WordCamp US, chatted with Nathan Wrigley on the Jukebox podcast about Block Composability in WordPress’ Future. Rubinstein “shares fascinating stories from the work h e’s recently been doing. He breaks down what block composability really means, the ability to build modular, reusable, and even interactive blocks that work seamlessly together, empowering both developers and end users to create sophisticated web applications within the familiar WordPress block editor.” wrote Wrigley in his podcast show notes.

Fellyph Cintra, developer advocate working for Automattic, published Things you might have missed about the Playground project over the past few months. It’s a great roundup post about the amazing work of the team. He mentions the PHP-Wasm changes, updates to the Playground CLI, the JavaScript API, how to use Playground with Playwright and the performance improvements with OPCache enabled by default. He also addresses rumors about missing features compared to traditional WordPress installs, noting that this gap is becoming less significant.

In preparation for the WordPress 6.9 Field Guide, André Maneiro just posted an update about the Fields API, that has been worked on for many Gutenberg releases. It lists functions and options with code examples. Updates on DataViews and DataForm are still to come.

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