The 2025 Web Almanac covers 17.2 million sites. Variable fonts and text-wrap are finally common, but median mobile page weight is up 202.8% since 2015 and two thirds of sites strip their focus outlines.
The Core-AI team shipped v0.1.0 of the WordPress PHP AI Client SDK. It is a provider-agnostic Composer package you bundle into your own plugin, so swapping the LLM behind a feature stops being a refactor.
Version 0.2.0 of WordPress AI Experiments adds excerpt generation that authors can edit or reject, and an Abilities Explorer screen for testing every registered ability in the browser.
WordPress 6.9.1 is a maintenance-only release set for February 3, 2026, with bug scrubs running from January 20. These are the dates that matter, plus why I keep minor auto-updates off on sites with custom hooks.
Six months in, WordPress Core AI has a stable shape: the Abilities API lands in 6.9, WP Client AI abstracts the LLM providers, and the MCP adapter turns a site into a server that agents can call.
Running your own VPS looks cheaper right up until the traffic spike. Here is what managed WordPress hosting actually handles for you: server-level caching, a persistent Redis object cache, brute force filtering at the edge, and the patching you stop doing.
WooCommerce 10.5 drops the AccessiblePrivateMethods trait that let private methods act as hook callbacks. Extensions still using it will throw a fatal error. The replacement is a public method carrying an @internal annotation.
WooCommerce is moving to a block-first frontend, and the Developer Advocacy team is taking the 2026 roadmap to Zagreb. What the Interactivity API and block-based checkout extensibility mean if you still maintain legacy hooks.
Nominations for the 2026 WordPress Core Team Reps close on January 31. The job is administrative rather than technical: agendas, Dev Chat, release monitoring and quarterly updates, at roughly two hours a week.
WordPress AI Client v0.4.0 rewrites the Google, Anthropic and OpenAI providers, adds PSR-14 events and a caching layer. What that means for plugin authors ahead of the February 19th Beta 1 for Core 7.0.