The week after WordPress 7.0 shipped, the dev chat agenda quietly listed the field guide, three dev notes, a PHP clarification and unicode email support. I run the same four-pass triage on every agenda like this before touching a client site. This is the checklist.
::checkmark styles the tick of native checkboxes, radios and selects without touching markup, which matters when WooCommerce owns the template. Here’s how I’d ship it, with a plain fallback first, @supports as the gate, and a plan for testing in Safari.
contrast-color() reached Baseline in April 2026. On WordPress it matters because clients edit the palette, and hardcoded text colors on those presets keep breaking. One declaration covers most of it, with some limits.
The letter-spacing reveal trick going around is a nice piece of CSS, but the demos hide two costs: it relayouts text on every frame, and transparent text still gets read aloud by screen readers. This is the version I’d ship.
WordPress 7.0 ships 40 accessibility fixes, and a few of them change how uploads, theme functions and admin screens behave. Here’s what I’d test, what breaks quietly, and a query to run against your media library.
Most centering doesn’t need a flex or grid hack anymore. This post covers align-content on plain block elements, text-box trimming for text that actually looks centered, the safe keyword, and anchor-center for tooltips.
Gutenberg 23.2 adds experimental per-breakpoint block styles in Global Styles, motion design tokens, bottom-sheet modals on mobile, and fixes for race conditions in real-time collaboration.
Cross-document view transitions give multi-page sites a native-app feel, but they fail silently. Here’s how to replace the deprecated meta tag, handle the 4-second timeout, and stop images from stretching mid-transition.
How WordPress 7.0 handles author link title attributes: the archive link drops its title by default, and core author functions gain a parameter to toggle the tooltip.
Ten data points on the business value of user experience, from the 1:100 rule and page speed to Hick’s law and design maturity, written from a developer’s point of view.