The WordPress AI plugin is moving toward encrypted API keys and slowing to a monthly release cadence, both before WordPress 7.1 Beta 1 in July. This is how I’d audit client sites now, and why the Connectors field registry matters for self-hosted models.
Sales forecasts on store dashboards are usually trailing averages, which lag every trend and give no range. A pretrained time series model like Chronos-2 changes that: you hand it daily revenue plus known future facts and get quantiles back. Here’s how I’d wire it into WordPress.
A Towards Data Science post claims big savings from a semantic cache, router and circuit breaker for RAG. The diagnosis holds, but the implementation assumes one long-lived Python process. Here’s how the same ideas map onto transients, the object cache, and a spend counter that survives PHP-FPM.
WordPress planned React 19 for 7.1, then moved it to a Gutenberg experiment. The bigger risk is plugins that bundle their own React, so check your builds and test a store on staging before core ships it.
An AI feature that works for three turns and then dies with a context length exceeded error has a design flaw. The transcript was never a database. Here’s where the run log belongs and how to keep prompt caching working.
WooCommerce 10.9 adds seven canonical product and order abilities and starts retiring the REST-shaped MCP beta. Most stores can wait. If you call /wp-json/woocommerce/mcp you have a migration to plan, and extension authors have two traps to watch for.
WordPress.com now shows Bluesky, Mastodon, and Fediverse timelines in the Reader, next to the blogs you follow. Here’s how that compares with running ActivityPub and Friends on your own install, and where a WooCommerce store should opt out.
Every AI plugin ends up needing a threshold for when to auto-apply an answer and when to hold it for review. The confidence number most of us gate on tracks how fluently the model produced its tokens, which is a different thing from whether the answer is true.
A Towards Data Science tutorial calls a small Python chat loop an AI agent. The client setup is worth keeping, but it has no memory, no tools and no stop condition, and a WordPress build has to add all three.
WordPress 7.0 Armstrong puts an AI layer into core: an AI Client, a Connectors API, and one screen for provider keys. I look at what it changes for plugin code, what stays off by default, and what to test before updating client sites.