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.
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.
I once spent three weeks bolting a permissions layer onto custom REST endpoints so an AI agent could not wreck a client’s product catalog. The Abilities API landing in WordPress 6.9 is the standard that job was missing.
A client’s AI recommendation engine turned out to be raw curl calls dropped into single.php, pinned to a deprecated API version. Core’s PHP AI Client and Abilities API work is the standard that kind of build has been missing.
A client wanted their block plugin hosted under the WordPress GitHub organization and found the path opaque. Here are the actual criteria: community ownership, a sponsoring Make team, more than one maintainer, and what happens when maintenance stops.
A client’s store slowed to a crawl right after someone clicked update to WooCommerce 10.4. Here is what the release actually changes in the REST API, the Store API and the block editor, and which custom code you should review first.
A client’s booking plugin started throwing fatal errors after a theme update, because both files defined get_data(). Prefixing the function bought five minutes. Here is what proper PHP namespacing does instead.
Plugins have always exposed their features however they liked, so integration meant writing a wrapper per plugin and repairing it after every update. The Abilities API in WordPress 6.9 replaces that with one registration format.
A client’s AI plugins each shipped their own settings screen and each asked for API keys they had already entered. The Core AI check-in from October 8th, 2025 covers both fixes: categories on the Abilities API, and one provider settings screen.