March 21, 2026

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Gutenberg Times: Help test WordPress 7.0 beta2, CSS in Block themes, AI experiements – Weekend Edition 359

jaswantkaurm@gmail.com12516 mins

Happy Saturday!

It’s been another interesting week in WordPress, Gutenberg and AI.

If you would like to know more about my two weeks in New York and the immersive AI training there, here is a post for you. What Automattic’s AI Enablement Training Means for WordPress.

And now, enjoy all the videos, blog posts and podcasts below.

Yours, 💕
Birgit

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

WordPress 7.0 Beta2 is now available for testing. How? Glad you asked. The Test team has compiled a great list in their post Help Test WordPress 7.0. It’s the perfect way to learn what’s in the new release and you can help find bugs, that could be squashed before the final release.

Ray Morey, editor of The Repository, has some details in WordPress 7.0 Beta 2 Ships With Connectors UI, Delivering on Mullenweg’s AI Vision

Ella Van Durpe shares what’s shifting with the iframed post editor in WordPress 7.0: instead of checking all registered blocks across your plugins, WordPress will now only look at blocks actually inserted in the post. If they’re all Block API version 3 or higher, you get the iframe — if not, it steps back gracefully. Full enforcement isn’t happening in 7.0, but Gutenberg plugin 22.6 enforces it for classic themes to gather real-world feedback first.

Release lead Bernie Reiter, published a new version, Gutenberg 22.6 and in his release post What’s new in Gutenberg 22.6? (25 February) he highlighted:

Jessica Lyschik, senior developer at Greyd, and I had fun recording another Gutenberg Changelog episode. We discussed the main user-facing features coming to WordPress 7.0. As always the episode will arrive at your favorite podcast app over the weekend.

Jessica Lyschik and Birgit Pauli-Haack recording Gutenberg changelog episode number 127

Anne McCarthy shares a candid look at iterating on Notes features in WordPress that didn’t quite make the 7.0 cut. Built with Claude Code as part of her “Learn AI deeply” efforts, the three PRs in progress cover show/hide notes on the canvas, filter options (she leans toward “Open” over “Unresolved”), and compact note display. Questions around a resizable sidebar and UX friction remain open — your feedback on the PRs is warmly welcomed.

🎙 The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #126 – Gutenberg Releases 22.3, 22.4, 22.5 and WordPress 7.0 with special guest Carolina Nymark, author at fullsiteediting.com and long time contributor.

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

Tom Finley introduces Block Zapper, a utility block that strips custom colors, spacing, typography, and backgrounds from WordPress block patterns in one click — so you can actually use them as clean starting points. You get granular control: preserve images and cover backgrounds while clearing everything else. Finley’s one important warning: it’s largely vibe-coded with AI assistance, so sandbox it thoroughly before touching any real project, and move your zapped blocks out before leaving the editor.

This seems to be inline with the Content Only Pattern editing experience, core contributors also try to achieve abstracting away the design aspects of working with patterns for content creators. It’s about to come to WordPress in 7.0 (or 7.1, the jury is still out) It is already available in the Gutenberg plugin 22.6 and this GitHub comment by Ramon Dodd.

Carleton University’s Troy Chaplin built the Block Accessibility Checks plugin to catch what the WordPress block editor won’t — out-of-order headings, missing image alt text, and other gaps that slip through unexpectedly. Chaplin joined Chris Reynolds, Pantheon, on this week’s YouTube Livestream for a walk-through of how the plugin validates your content in real time and flags issues before they reach your readers. A practical tool for anyone serious about making their content genuinely accessible to everyone.

On WP Builds, Nathan Wrigley sits down with Ian Svoboda, a veteran of 10up, GenerateBlocks, and GeneratePress, to unpack the Content Area Block plugin. Born from a news site needing multiple editable regions per template, the plugin solves WordPress’s single-content-area limitation without meta field workarounds. You’ll hear about the technical hurdles — duplicating core hooks, navigating unstable APIs — and why this capability still hasn’t made it into Core.

Rodolfo Melogli is the organizer of the Checkout Summit in April and editor of the WooWeekly newsletters. In his recent blog post, he discusses WooCommerce Checkout Block adoption and explains that most merchants still use the classic Shortcode even after two years of the block being the default option. The main issue is hesitation around plugin compatibility. Although WooCommerce data shows a 27% boost in conversions with the block checkout, the ecosystem has not fully adapted, and merchants are reluctant to risk disrupting their working stores.

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

If you’ve ever wondered where your custom CSS actually lives — or should live — this comprehensive guide on 14 ways to add custom CSS in the WordPress Block Editor is your new reference. Covering everything from theme.json structured properties and CSS variables to per-block Additional CSS, Block Style Variations, and wp_enqueue_style(), you’ll find a decision guide to match each method to your role, whether you’re a site builder, designer, or theme developer.

Jon Ang, Human Made, made the case that WordPress in 2026 escapes the complexity tax that headless and composable stacks imposed on enterprise teams. The Site Editor, combined with Synced Patterns, Block Bindings, and the Interactivity API, now forms a structured visual system that scales alongside enterprise design systems without forcing teams into heavyweight JavaScript frameworks or fragile third-party glue. As Ang put it, it becomes a system interface “where visual work is grounded in real content models”.

 “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

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.

Ryan Welcher released v. 1.0.3 of his VSCode extension WordPress Interactivity API Helper that adds autocomplete for directive and even detects items in your store. After you install it you can invoke it by “Simply start typing data- in any HTML attribute position within PHP or HTML files”.

Ryan Welcher's Interactivity API VSCode extension

Ryan Welcher also released a new version of Advanced Query Loop 4.4.0 that enhances query speed and reliability. It includes transient caching for AQL instances and a new management control, along with fixes and improvements to caching. The current post ID and type are now included in the context, and the release features expanded unit tests, E2E tests via Playground, and static linting for both PHP and JavaScript.

JuanMa Garrido walks you through the new assertEqualHTML() assertion introduced in WordPress 6.9, available on WP_UnitTestCase. If fragile PHPUnit tests that break over attribute ordering or style whitespace are your nemesis, this is your fix. It compares HTML semantically — not literally — so your tests only fail when markup is genuinely different. Covers block render callbacks, HTML API transformations, Interactivity API directives, and tips for migrating away from assertSame().

AI and WordPress

In his post on The Repository, WordPress Faces an Event Horizon, Not a Sunset, Matt Cromwell, founder of Roots & Fruits, pushes back on the “WordPress is dying” narrative, reframing what looks like decline as an event horizon — a boundary where old rules break and new, denser ones form. AI, he argues, actually favors WordPress’s open, structured architecture. Flat plugin sales signal market maturity, not collapse. Educational pipelines are creating new builders. The real question isn’t whether WordPress survives, but whether its community will design for the physics ahead.

In this WordPress AI experiments roundup, Jonathan Bossenger dives into community-submitted projects, starting with the WP AI Client Mistral provider, where he clones the repo, gets the AI SDK running, and generates a “WordPress haiku” post — though the model returns Markdown rather than block markup. He then tests a Claude-to-WordPress MCP integration plugin, successfully publishing a post directly from Claude, uses MCP Tracker to monitor requests, and briefly explores Ability Scout, which surfaces potential abilities from code.

Rich Tabor walks you through the new WP AI Client landing in WordPress 7.0 — a provider-agnostic layer for calling Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and other AI models from both PHP and JavaScript, without plugins shipping their own API wrappers or credential pages. Configure once, use everywhere. His companion WP AI Content Kit demonstrates auto-generating alt text and post excerpts using structured JSON responses. WordPress 7.0 is due April 9, coinciding with WordCamp Asia.

Glen Davies at Automattic introduces new Skills and a Claude Cowork plugin that turns a conversation with Claude into a fully built block theme, deployed locally via WordPress Studio — no technical skills required. Describe your site, pick from design options, and Claude builds it. Setup takes about ten minutes and currently requires macOS. These tools are early and evolving fast, but the team wanted to ship them now rather than wait.

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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