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.
@wordpress/build is the tooling Gutenberg already uses internally: esbuild in place of Webpack, entry points discovered by folder, and a generated PHP file that handles enqueueing. It is not ready to replace wp-scripts on an ordinary plugin yet.
WooCommerce is at WordCamp Asia 2026 in Mumbai, with a community meetup that needs an RSVP and a booth in the Automattic area. The Developer Advocates are not attending this time, so here is how to get technical questions to them anyway.
WordPress 7.0 has gone back to beta work over real-time collaboration bugs, but it keeps shipping as RC3 and RC4 because version_compare() would reject a beta string. What that means for testing and backports until April 17th.
Updating WooCommerce PayPal Payments to v4.0.0 sent a lot of store owners a pile of “payment gateway enabled” emails. Nobody was hacked: the update split hidden Alternative Payment Methods into separate gateways. Here is what changed and what to check in your settings.