The WordPress ecosystem has drifted from crediting contributors to crediting their employers, from WordCamp badges to Five for the Future testimonials. My argument for putting people back first, and why pledged hours are the wrong thing to count.
Jetpack now lets you comp a paid subscription from the Subscribers screen, so gifting access no longer means a custom VIP role and a pile of expiring metadata. Here is what changes, plus the math on Substack’s 10% cut.
The 7.0 release went back from RC to Beta so Real-Time Collaboration data could move out of post_meta and into its own table. Also covers the WP AI Client, pseudo-states in theme.json and the Playground MCP server.
Notes from the April 8, 2026 dev chat: WordPress 7.0 makes the collaboration sync layer provider agnostic, so polling is only the default. What that means for WebSocket providers, CRDT reconciliation and block API v3.
WordPress 7.0 ships three pieces of AI plumbing: the Abilities API for registering what a site can do, the AI Client for provider-agnostic model calls, and the MCP Adapter that exposes both to assistants like Claude.
Notes from the April 8 contributor chat: the AI Client centralizes the transport layer, the Connectors page holds credentials for any service and not just AI, and the MCP adapter is close to 0.5.0.
WordPress.com opened plugins and Global Styles to every paid plan, starting at Personal. Here is what the lower tiers actually give you, and why SFTP, WP-CLI and staging still sit behind the Business plan.
The Twenty Twenty-Seven core team added a Lead Mentor next to the usual dev leads. It reads like a soft change, but it is aimed at the contributor bottleneck that has been producing burnout and technical debt for years.
The WordCamp Asia 2026 schedule is out: Mumbai, April 9 to 11, leaning hard on AI, enterprise scale, and the Interactivity API. My notes on which sessions are worth a slot in your day.
The Gutenberg repo is changing how iteration issues work: a fresh issue per release, monthly updates before beta, weekly through RC, and a template that asks for scope and blockers up front.