WordPress 7.1 is targeting React 19, and the npm packages are no longer tagged per version. Here is how I decide between core’s React and bundling my own, plus the checks I run before a major upgrade.
The week after WordPress 7.0 shipped, the dev chat agenda quietly listed the field guide, three dev notes, a PHP clarification and unicode email support. I run the same four-pass triage on every agenda like this before touching a client site. This is the checklist.
WordPress planned React 19 for 7.1, then moved it to a Gutenberg experiment. The bigger risk is plugins that bundle their own React, so check your builds and test a store on staging before core ships it.
WooCommerce 10.8.1 shipped on May 28 with fixes for a WooPayments onboarding crash and a fatal error during 10.7 to 10.8 upgrades. The fatal came from upgrade code running while the autoloader still pointed at the old plugin files, and the same guard works in your own plugins.
WordPress 7.0 shipped with a messy publish screen wherever the block editor isn’t in charge, and the fix is going out through the Hotfix and Classic Editor plugins instead of a core release. This is how to find the sites that need it.
WooCommerce 10.9 adds seven canonical product and order abilities and starts retiring the REST-shaped MCP beta. Most stores can wait. If you call /wp-json/woocommerce/mcp you have a migration to plan, and extension authors have two traps to watch for.
WordPress 7.0 broke custom action buttons in the classic editor’s publish panel. Classic Editor 1.7.0 or Hotfix 1.4 covers it until 7.0.1 ships the real repair. I compared the two and wrote down the check I run before picking one.
WordPress turned 23, and 46% of installs were on 7.0 within seven days. If you maintain sites, keep minors automatic, make majors a deliberate call, and don’t read a quiet inbox as proof an update went fine.
The WordCamp Asia committer notes are mostly process talk, but the SQLite paragraph reaches plugin authors first. What the notes settled, which schema habits break under SQLite, and what I’d test before core writes its support policy.
WordPress can now send mail to international addresses but still won’t store them on a user account, after a core proposal was merged and then reverted. This covers what that means for plugin code and two checks to run on your own site.