Have a fabulous weekend! <\/p>\n
Yours, On the WPBuilds podcast series At the Core<\/strong>, <\/a>Anne McCarthy<\/strong> and I talked with Nathan Wrigley<\/strong> about WordPress 7.1. We cover responsive styling, the persistent admin bar, and richer inline notes, plus why the new image crop modal and customisable viewports change your day-to-day editing. You\u2019ll also hear how community feedback saved the Classic Block, where the collaborative editing outreach stands, and which developer changes to test now.<\/p>\n Responsive styling finally lands in the block editor, and The WP Minute+ podcast has release lead Anne McCarthy demoing it<\/a> with Eric Karkovack. You\u2019ll also get the reasoning behind what didn\u2019t make 7.1, including collaborative editing, plus how Classic Block deprecation is being paced. Anne talks about her first turn as release lead and points out hidden gems like the \u2018On This Day\u2019 widget and custom icon registration for the Icon block. The episode Why WordPress 7.1 Will Improve Your Workflow<\/strong><\/a> is also available as video.<\/p>\n More Devnotes: <\/strong><\/p>\n There are still more to come and they will be published next week, together with the WordPress 7.1 Field Guide. <\/p>\n A list of all the dev notes can be reviewed from the Make Core blog<\/a><\/p>\n Anne McCarthy<\/strong> gives a candid account of the punted inherited styles indicator <\/a>and its design dead ends. If you\u2019ve ever watched someone style a template expecting it to apply site-wide, that\u2019s the problem she\u2019s chased since the FSE Outreach Program. Blue dots, diamonds, tooltips versus infotips, two competing reset paths \u2014 none settled, and summer holidays thinned the reviewer pool. She\u2019s aiming at 7.2.<\/p>\n Last week, Gutenberg 23.6 was already released. The WordPress 7.1 tech co-lead. Aki Hamano highlighted in his post What\u2019s new in Gutenberg 23.6? (July 22, 2026)<\/a><\/p>\n This week on the Gutenberg Changelog podcast, my guest was Faith Imokol<\/strong> from Uganda. We began with the wonderful work of the WordPress community there, who have put together a series of events \u2014 WordCamps, Campus Connect, and a website competition \u2014 bringing WordPress to schools, colleges, and universities, and to thousands of students and users. Then we turned to the latest release and had a great time going through the details. As always, the episode drops in your favorite podcast app over the weekend.<\/p>\n No PHP template, no shortcode, no custom block \u2014 Meta Box fields can now feed core blocks directly through block bindings for custom fields<\/strong><\/a>. Lua Nguyen<\/strong> shows the setup: select a Paragraph, Heading, Image, or Button, open Attributes in the sidebar, pick a Meta Box source, choose your field. Sources cover post, term, author, and settings-page fields, and an image field binds URL, alt, title, and caption separately. WordPress 6.5+, though the Attributes panel needs 6.9.<\/p>\n Coming to the Site Editor from Elementor or Divi means learning new vocabulary, and Ollie\u2019s ground-up guide to the WordPress Site Editor<\/strong><\/a> by Gina Lucia <\/strong>covers it: templates, template parts, patterns, global styles, navigation, the Font Library, and each toolbar button, starting at A typical Elementor page ships 200\u2013400 KB of extra frontend assets, three to five times a native block build \u2014 the number behind Bikash Pun Magar<\/strong>\u2018s case for custom Gutenberg blocks over page builders on client sites<\/strong><\/a>. You get conditional per-block asset loading, HTML you control line by line, and content stored in native block grammar rather than a proprietary format. He\u2019s fair about where Elementor still fits: prototypes and solo builders wanting pixel control without code.<\/p>\n The theme.json schema resolves to more than 40MB across hundreds of nested properties, which is why S\u00e9rgio Santos<\/strong> built a form-driven visual editor for theme.json<\/strong><\/a> as a VS Code extension. Fields come from the official schema rather than hand-written forms, and a weekly scan of core and Gutenberg adds experimental properties with honest badges. The feature Santos says changed his workflow: every preset shows the CSS variable name it will generate as you type the slug.<\/p>\n There\u2019s also a companion WordPress plugin that mounts the same editor under \u201cKeeping up with Gutenberg \u2013 Index 2026\u201d<\/a> <\/strong> The previous years are also available: If your custom blocks touch the global Welcher also published a detailed tutorial: The post editor is going full iframe: what block developers need to know before WordPress 7.1<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Some people still assumed every Playground was temporary. Persistence, multiple sites, Blueprints, file editing \u2014 all already there, just easy to miss, which is what the new WordPress Playground interface<\/strong><\/a> sets out to fix. A customizable Dock gathers those tools into one bottom toolbar: New, Playgrounds, Blueprint, Site Settings, Database, Files, Logs, Export. It\u2019s navigation, not new capability. The design came out of the Playground table at WordCamp Europe Contributor Day, after Adam Zieli\u0144ski used AI to explore 400+ variations.<\/p>\n Point a coding agent at WordPress Playground and it reads an instruction file first. The wp-playground agent skill<\/strong><\/a> now splits that file into a 52-line router plus focused references, so your agent loads the CLI details only for a local run and the sharing rules only for a share link \u2014 encoding, CORS, public hosting. Fellyph Cintra<\/strong>\u2018s four-scenario benchmark scored 24\/24 against 22\/24 for the old version, one run per prompt. All this is explain in more details in the post One Playground, three workflows: Consistent agent guidance across surfaces<\/strong><\/a> in the team\u2019s Make Blog. <\/p>\n In a third post, Fellyph Cintra<\/strong> walks you through programmatic site management in WordPress Playground<\/strong><\/a>: from DevTools you can list, create, save, rename, and switch sites, change PHP or networking, and run PHP inside a site to check active plugins. Order matters \u2014 temporary sites must be saved before you can rename or reconfigure them.<\/p>\n One caveat worth knowing if it runs alongside the other Playground item: this API belongs to playground.wordpress.net only. It isn\u2019t in the Carlo Daniele<\/strong>\u2018s guide to the Abilities API for plugin developers<\/a> stays on fundamentals: the input schema, output schema, callback, and permission check that together form an ability\u2019s contract, and the WP-CLI commands that let you inspect one. A fresh install ships three \u2014 site info, user info, environment info. His example registers an audio-to-blocks process from an existing plugin and triggers it over the wp-abilities\/v1 REST route.<\/p>\n Where Carlo Daniele registers a single ability, Jonathan Bossenger <\/strong>composes three into your first AI-powered WordPress plugin<\/a>.<\/strong> Two call the AI Client, a third orchestrates them via One rule for this stream: no hand-written code. Ryan Welcher<\/strong> takes a full WordPress site build with Studio Code<\/strong><\/a> end to end for his son\u2019s hockey team, and you watch a custom post type, a teams taxonomy, an Advanced Query Loop roster, and junior\/intermediate\/senior tabs come together by direction alone. The highlight is the agent reaching for block bindings unprompted. The lowlight: rogue PHP metaboxes, and a PHP-first answer where he wanted a SlotFill.<\/p>\n Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg\u2019s master branch?<\/a><\/strong> Now also available via WordPress Playground<\/a>. There is no need for a test site locally or on a server. Have you been using it? Email me <\/a>with your experience.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Questions? Suggestions? Ideas? <\/em> For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog<\/a>, ![\"\ud83d\udc95\"](\"https:\/\/s.w.org\/images\/core\/emoji\/17.0.2\/72x72\/1f495.png\")
Birgit<\/em><\/p>\nWordPress 7.1 updates <\/h2>\n
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\n![\"Birgit](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/gutenbergtimes.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Screenshot-2026-07-31-at-11.29.00.png?resize=652%2C215&ssl=1\")
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\nGutenberg 23.6 released<\/h2>\n
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\n![\"Faith](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/gutenbergtimes.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Screenshot-2026-07-31-at-13.13.07.png?resize=652%2C186&ssl=1\")
<\/figure>\n![\"\ud83c\udf99\"](\"https:\/\/s.w.org\/images\/core\/emoji\/17.0.2\/72x72\/1f399.png\")
The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #132 \u2013 Proposals for Core, Calls for Testing, WordPress 7.1 and Gutenberg 23.4 and 23.5<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/gutenbergtimes.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Screenshot-2026-07-10-at-10.56.17-edited-1.png?resize=652%2C183&ssl=1\")
<\/figure>\nPlugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners<\/h2>\n
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks<\/h2>\n
Appearance \u2192 Editor<\/code>. A comparison table weighs both approaches on performance, flexibility, and portability. Ollie-specific tips sit alongside the core explanations, so you can read past them if you use another theme. <\/p>\n
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\nAppearance<\/code>. There will be dragons though: ![\"\ud83d\udc32\"](\"https:\/\/s.w.org\/images\/core\/emoji\/17.0.2\/72x72\/1f432.png\")
Santos flags it as an experiment as it overwrites theme.json in place with no revisions or backups.<\/p>\n
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.\u2002<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
2020<\/a> | 2021<\/a><\/strong> | 2022<\/a><\/strong><\/strong> | 2023<\/a><\/strong> | 2024<\/strong><\/a> | 2025<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nBuilding Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.<\/h2>\n
window<\/code> or document<\/code>, WordPress 7.1 will break them. Ryan Welcher <\/strong>walks through the <\/strong>forced iframed post editor canvas<\/a>,<\/strong> landing August 19th with no flag to check and no opt-out. Five demos cover viewport detection, click-outside handlers, editor styles, admin body-class CSS, and unmaintained third-party libraries, with fixes using ownerDocument, defaultView, useRefEffect, editorStyle in block.json, and patch-package. His demo plugin ships broken and fixed versions of each.<\/p>\nWhat\u2019s new in Playground?<\/h2>\n
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\n@wp-playground\/client<\/code> package, the CLI, or embedded Playgrounds via \/remote.html<\/code> \u2014 those need the JavaScript API instead.<\/p>\nAI and WordPress <\/h2>\n
\nwp_get_ability()<\/code> and execute()<\/code>, turning an image URL into a draft post. The same ability then answers over curl, from a React settings page, and from Claude Desktop through the MCP Adapter. Gotchas included: base64 data URIs for vision providers, stray markdown fences, and request timeouts.<\/p>\n
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Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/gutenbergtimes.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/Screenshot-2025-11-15-at-12.06.44.png?resize=196%2C45&ssl=1\")
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Don\u2019t hesitate to send them via email<\/a> or<\/em>
send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph<\/em>.<\/p>\n
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send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n
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