A client pushed WordPress 6.9 RC3 to a live WooCommerce store and lost checkout inside ten minutes. What broke, why my first quick fix made it worse, and where release candidate testing actually belongs.
Hiding a block used to mean display: none and a browser that still downloaded every asset. WordPress 6.9 leaves hidden blocks out of the rendered HTML, and a short filter stops clients from hiding your structural containers.
A magazine site moving off an emoji subdomain came apart under wp search-replace. WordPress Importer 0.9.5 rewrites URLs during the import instead, using the block markup parsers in core to tell a real URL from a lookalike string.
Core heading styles used to outrank theme CSS inside the editor, which is how a stylesheet ends up full of !important. WordPress 6.9 changes how those styles are injected, and RC3 is out now for testing.
WordPress 6.9 ships live on stage during State of the Word on December 2. The timeline behind it, from the dry run 26 hours out to the T-30m handoff, is worth borrowing for your own launches.
A synchronous OpenAI call on image upload hung the admin for five seconds. The AI Experiments plugin v0.1.0 points at a different route: registered Abilities, the WP AI Client, and MCP.
WordPress 6.9 deprecates the core-data media entity, lets setAttributes take an updater function, and moves SelectControl class names to the root element. Each one can break an existing custom block.
Pointing an LLM at an undocumented WooCommerce extension produced hooks that never existed. Extracting the real hook list with PHP first, then prompting, is what separates a usable draft from a liability.
An official WordPress GitHub repo is not a support promise. Roughly 20 repos were archived across the WordPress and bbPress orgs, which is a good reason to go looking for orphaned code in the sites you maintain.
A tiny patch to a custom gateway plugin broke checkout for about 15% of one store’s customers. Release Confirmation, tracked in #8009-meta, holds auto-updates back for 24 hours so a mistake like that stays small.