The core team wants the legacy 1024-bit certificates out of the WordPress root bundle before 7.0 ships in April 2026. NIST disallowed those keys in 2013, and CentOS 7, the main reason they stayed, went end of life in mid-2024.
WordPress now has a repository for AI agent skills, starting with wp-playground. It uses the Playground CLI so an agent can mount a plugin or theme, wait for WordPress to be ready, log in, and check its own work in seconds.
Notes from the January 28, 2026 WordPress dev chat: the 6.9.1 maintenance release on February 3, the 7.0 release squad and bug scrubs, and pattern overrides in Gutenberg 22.4.
Notes from the AI contributor meeting: AI Experiments 0.2.0 is out, the Core Post Management abilities PR is under review, PHP AI Client v0.4.0 shipped, and the MCP Adapter stays a canonical plugin. February 19 is the Beta 1 cutoff.
Nominations for the WordPress 7.0 release squad are open until January 16, with the final release set for April 9, 2026. Here is the beta schedule and what the four lead roles actually involve.
The WordPress 7.0 bug scrubs run twice a week from late January to April 8, moving from alpha triage to hunting regressions. Here are the dates, the Slack channels, and what it takes to lead a session.
The WordPress AI Client is being lined up for a core inclusion proposal. January 2026 contributor notes cover streaming leaving the PHP client, a kill switch filter for locked-down sites, and MCP for tool discovery.
WordPress 7.0 turns the mobile menu overlay into a block-based template part, so a logo or a button goes in without CSS overrides. Here is what to test, plus the open argument about where the markup belongs in the HTML.
The core team confirmed at Dev Chat that WordPress 7.0 drops PHP 7.2 and 7.3 support. Notes on what that leaves for the 22% of sites still running 7.4, plus where the 6.9.1 maintenance release fits in.
WooCommerce 10.5 swaps per-order analytics jobs for batched scheduled imports, which is the fix for bloated ActionScheduler tables. Also inside: experimental product object caching, a new shipping tax filter, and the add to cart fix.