Greetings from snow-covered Munich — or at least it was when we left Friday for Salzburg, Austria, with a one-hour delay after our locomotive engineer got caught in the city’s snow-induced chaos.
Have a fabulous weekend!
Yours, 
Birgit
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
This week, WordPress 7.0 Beta 1 is ready for your testing on a staging or local site, please, not your live site. You can jump in via the WordPress Beta Tester plugin, a direct zip download, WP-CLI, or instantly through WordPress Playground in your browser.
The most important feature coming to WordPress 7.0 is real-time collaboration, when more than one person can edit a post or page. Even for a single-person blogger this might be helpful when the proofreading buddy and the photographer can also be involved in editing different parts of a post.
The final release is scheduled for April 9, 2026. Bugs go to the Alpha/Beta support forums or Trac — your testing genuinely shapes what ships. The release post also has an overview of the other features coming to WordPress 7.0, there are quite a lot.
Gutenberg 22.6 RC1 is also available for testing. Once released it introduces a new Icon block, lightbox support for the Gallery block (a personal favorite of mine), and renames the Verse block to Poetry. Next to improvements to the Navigation overlay and block visibility controls, it also features a new approach to revisions with visual change tracking and block awareness. The final release is planned for February 25, 2026.
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
Content for AI is a hot topic for news sites, especially since they rely on those ad views and sponsored posts, and AI is pulling snippets from their content. It’s a tough situation, and many sites are working hard to keep AI bots from crawling their pages. But here’s the thing: AI really loves quality, long-form content. If your site serves up unique, quality stuff for humans, then it’s also going to catch the attention of AI systems looking to help users with their questions.
If your site fits the bill, Maddy Osman has put together 9 Steps to Prepare Your WordPress Site for AI Search Engines as a practical guide for the era of ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode. The good news: WordPress already has most of what AI systems need. You’ll learn to write answer-first content, use structured blocks, add schema markup, and manage your robots.txt — small, actionable tweaks that help your site surface in both traditional and AI-generated search results.
Jamie Marsland built a plugin for block theme to manage beautiful sticky header variations. He demos it in the video This Sticky Header Trick Makes WordPress Sites Look Incredible! If you are interested in the free plugin you get it on the website.
Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.
Carolina Nymark published two companion lessons on her Full Site Editing resource site. The Block Bindings API guide walks you through connecting dynamic data—post meta, custom sources, and more—to core blocks like paragraphs, images, and buttons, potentially saving you from building custom blocks altogether. In her Block Hooks API lesson, she shows you how plugins can automatically insert blocks into templates and patterns using PHP filters, with practical examples including WooCommerce and context-aware placement.
In the latest article on the WordPress Developer, I show you exactly How to add custom entries to the editor Preview dropdown. Using the PluginPreviewMenuItem component from @wordpress/editor, you can extend the Preview menu with your own options — the tutorial walks you through building a “Social Card Preview” to show how to add an entry and serve up a modal for content.
Paulo Carvajal dives deep into Building Dynamic Lists and Collections with data-wp-each on WP Block Editor. The data-wp-each directive from the Interactivity API lets you build reactive lists — product catalogues, task lists, feeds — that update automatically when state changes, no manual DOM manipulation needed. You’ll learn how to coordinate PHP server-side rendering with JavaScript-derived state and implement advanced patterns like filtering, sorting, and pagination following WordPress best practices.
Ryan Welcher gave a talk at WordCamp Sofia titled From Static to Dynamic: Mastering the Interactivity APIn the Interactivity API. With the arrival of the Interactivity API, WordPress offers a native, declarative way to add client-side behavior to blocks using directives like data-wp-on–click, data-wp-bind, and data-wp-context. Developers can define reactive behavior, state management, and side effects—all while staying in the WordPress stack. The talk’s recording just appeared on WordPressTV. It’s a well-rounded introduction to the Interactivity API with real-life examples.
AI and WordPress
Semiha Kocer shares the latest Telex updates from WordPress.com’s AI-powered block creation tool, launched last August. The two headline features are
- upload reference images — a Figma mockup, a screenshot, or even a napkin sketch — alongside your prompt to guide complex layouts.
- download your block, edit it in your favorite code editor, and bring it back into Telex seamlessly.
This week, Jonathan Bossenger explored the WordPress Studio MCP server, which connects WordPress Studio with AI tools via MCP. He set up MCP in VS Code and then used an AI agent to generate a custom block theme for a small coffee shop selling beans and accessories.
Ray Morey reported on WordPress.com’s launches of a Built-In AI Assistant That Works in Editor, Media Library, and Notes. She notes that in the block editor, users can make plain-language requests — adjust layouts, swap color palettes, rewrite copy — and see changes render in real time. Notes users can tag “@ai” for fact-checks or edits, and the media library gets image generation and editing too. Morey adds that the feature, powered by Google’s Nano Banana models, is available on Business and Commerce plans.
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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