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Gutenberg Times: Block Theme Guide, AI Galore, Icon Block, WordPress 7.0 — Weekend Edition 357

jaswantkaurm@gmail.com2 months ago59516 mins

Hi there,

If you celebrate it, Happy Valentines day!

This week, WordPress developers and co-workers share their experiences exploring AI workflows around development and creation. These are exciting times for sure!

It’s good to be back behind the mic after an operation that irritated my vocal cord nerve — I’m still a bit hoarse, but that’s nothing new for this podcast, and I’m perfectly healthy otherwise.

Have a lovely weekend!

Yours,
Birgit

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

As a reminder, WordPress 7.0 Beta 1 is scheduled for February 19th and is considered Feature Freeze during this release cycle. Only bug fixes will make it into WordPress 7.0 after that date, until March 19, 2026, Release candidate 1 will be released. Around that time, the Field Guide will be published and it also comes with a String Freeze, so the translators of the Polyglotts team can start their work in translateing WordPress 7.0 into many languages.

Justin Tadlock‘s February developer roundup covers the rush toward WordPress 7.0 Beta 1. Highlights for your development work include the always-iframed post editor, viewport-based block visibility, per-block instance custom CSS, and a restructured Tabs block with inner blocks. You’ll also find updates to the AI Experiments plugin, new UI primitives and components, the reinstated Pullquote block, Navigation Overlay improvements, and wp-env now running on the Playground runtime.

Screenshot of viewport-based block visiblity.

Carolina Nymark is back as Core Contributor and she joined me on our first episode of 2026. On the Gutenberg Changelog #126, we talk about Gutenberg 22.3, 22.4 and 22.5 releases. As the three release had over 700 PRs merged, we were only able to cover the major enhancements and a few improvements. It was a fun conversation again. The episode will drop in your favorite podcast app on Sunday.

Carolina Nymark and Birgit Pauli-Haack recording Gutenberg Changelog 126.

The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #125 – WordPress 6.9, Gutenberg 22.1 and Gutenberg 22.2 with JC Palmes, WebDev Studios

Gutenberg Changelog 125 with JC Palmes and host Birgit Pauli-Haack

JuanMa Garrido is part of the release squad for WordPress 7.0 as a co-triage lead. To make is work a bit easier he created WP TRAC Triager. It’s a Chrome extension helper for the WordPress Trac ticket triage workflow and enhances it with smart timelines, universal role badges, keyword change history, and a fully customizable sidebar. It is ideal for WordPress contributors who want to streamline their triage process and make informed decisions based on complete context. The code is available on GitHub.

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

Bud Kraus walks you through building WordPress blocks with Telex, Automattic’s browser-based AI tool that generates block plugins from natural language prompts. You’ll see two real examples — a ChatGPT embed and an editor-only Social Draft block — highlighting both the speed of prototyping and the iterative refinement that vibe coding still demands. Telex handles scaffolding, building, and packaging without a local dev environment, though Kraus is clear that understanding block architecture remains essential once you move beyond experimentation.

And I just tested Telex again, and now it also can build block themes from a plain-english prompt. Try it out!

Troy Chaplin built ReadEase: Text Resizer — a Gutenberg block that gives your site visitors controls to scale text for better readability. You can choose from four control styles (dropdown, buttons, slider, or icons), configure scale ranges, and scope the effect to the full page or just the content area. Preferences persist via localStorage with cross-tab sync, and the block is fully accessible with keyboard navigation, ARIA labels, and reduced-motion support.

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

Varun Dubey has put together a thorough guide to WordPress Full Site Editing for 2026, covering everything from your first block theme setup to advanced techniques like the Block Bindings API and synced patterns. You’ll find practical code examples for theme.json configuration, custom templates, template parts, and block patterns, along with a step-by-step classic-to-block-theme migration roadmap. It’s a solid reference whether you’re just getting started with FSE or looking to deepen your understanding ahead of WordPress 7.0.

“Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2025”
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

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor

The saga continues: Ryan Welcher live streamed again on his work on the Icon Block for WordPress 7.0

Ai and WordPress

Eric Karkovack sits down with Jason Adams on the WP Minute+ to discuss the AI Team’s big plans for WordPress 7.0. You’ll hear how the Abilities API and MCP adapter lay the groundwork for plugin developers to integrate AI through the WordPress AI client, while WordPress 7.0 aims to ship foundational “under-the-hood” features for your projects. The conversation also covers how web hosts can simplify AI setup and why AI should remain a choice, not a mandate, across the ecosystem.

In her post WordPress: From CMS to agentic platform Human Made’s Sarah Jones explains that WordPress is changing from a content management system to a more active platform. This change involves new tools like the Abilities API, which helps plugins function better, and MCP, which allows AI agents to use real site data. The important takeaway for businesses is that these agents have the same permissions as human users, maintaining control while benefiting from WordPress’s large network of 60,000 plugins, which offers advantages that closed systems can’t provide.

I revamped my workflow writing tutorials for the Developer Blog and shared some details on my personal blog: my local tutorial creation flow with Claude Code. I walk you through how I build example plugins, draft developer blog posts in block notation, and publish directly to a local WordPress Studio site — all from the terminal. The setup relies on the WordPress MCP Adapter and a custom Content Abilities plugin to give Claude content access locally. The workflow saves me quite a bit of context switching.

According to James LePage, WordPress.com launched the first hosted Claude Connector for WordPress, building on their earlier MCP access and OAuth 2.1 support. You can connect Claude to your site in a few clicks through the connectors directory, choose which tools to expose, and get site-specific answers grounded in your real data. Claude receives read-only access, so nothing on your site changes, and you can revoke the connection at any time.

in My WP/Woo Plugin Scaffolding in 2026, Brian Coords rethinks plugin scaffolding arguing that coding agents have made mustache-based templates like create-block less essential. He shares a functional Woo extension starter on GitHub, built around React admin screens, DataViews, Interactivity API blocks, and WordPress Scripts. Coords also makes a compelling case for WordPress to invest in strong documentation and example repos so any AI agent can build with core’s UI components successfully.

Pablo Postigo documents his experiment building a WordPress block theme with Studio and Claude Cowork. After spending four hours hand-crafting a theme with the Create Block Theme plugin, he started fresh with Claude’s Opus 4.5 model — and had a working theme in five minutes, complete with dark mode and custom animations. The post raises thoughtful questions about whether block themes remain the best abstraction now that AI can generate and modify WordPress code so efficiently.

In Nobody Rips Out the Plumbing, Nick Hamze makes a spirited case that AI isn’t replacing WordPress — it’s enhancing it. Drawing on WordPress’s history of absorbing every supposed threat from mobile to JAMstack, the post argues that AI excels at generating the visible layer but still needs WordPress as the content management backbone underneath. With the Abilities API, MCP Adapter, and tools like Telex already shipping, the real question for your community isn’t the technology — it’s staying open and welcoming. It’s a great article to bookmark and share with people doubting WordPress.

Rich Tabor argues that the API is becoming the new UI as AI agents emerge as the fastest-growing users of your products. Agents don’t need buttons or drag-and-drop chrome — they need clean schemas, structured data, and predictable endpoints. The visual editor shifts to a review-and-refine layer where you steer what the agent built. For WordPress, the block model already provides the stable foundation agents can write to, making what happens beneath the interface the most important design work ahead.

In this live stream session, Road to WordPress 7.0: Upcoming Features for AI Integration JuanMa Garrido walks you through the major AI features heading to WordPress 7.0, focusing on the WP AI client and core abilities. He explains how the WP AI client — currently available as a Composer package — provides a foundation layer managing credentials, caching, and HTTP transport for connecting to external models like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Through a working demo, he shows you how WordPress can both consume AI models and, via the Abilities API, become a tool that agents interact with. He then dives into the core abilities proposal, defining built-in capabilities like create_post, get_post, find_posts, and update_post.

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

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