The WordPress 6.9 “Gene” retrospective is more useful than the release notes. Two triage leads in different time zones, too many manual release steps, and contributor pairing that actually worked. Here is what that means if you run client sites on Core.
WordPress 6.9.1 RC1 closes 23 core bugs and 25 Block Editor issues, including the mail function error, the double-escaped class names from the HTML API, and the broken Add Plugins screen. Plus how to test the RC on staging with WP-CLI.
The core team wants the legacy 1024-bit certificates out of the WordPress root bundle before 7.0 ships in April 2026. NIST disallowed those keys in 2013, and CentOS 7, the main reason they stayed, went end of life in mid-2024.
WordPress now has a repository for AI agent skills, starting with wp-playground. It uses the Playground CLI so an agent can mount a plugin or theme, wait for WordPress to be ready, log in, and check its own work in seconds.
Browser vendors are quiet but the community is not. Video state that survives navigation with view transitions, Kevin Powell’s cascade-layer trick for naming media queries, and native masonry landing as grid-lanes.
Notes from the AI contributor meeting: AI Experiments 0.2.0 is out, the Core Post Management abilities PR is under review, PHP AI Client v0.4.0 shipped, and the MCP Adapter stays a canonical plugin. February 19 is the Beta 1 cutoff.
Nominations for the WordPress 7.0 release squad are open until January 16, with the final release set for April 9, 2026. Here is the beta schedule and what the four lead roles actually involve.
The WordPress 7.0 bug scrubs run twice a week from late January to April 8, moving from alpha triage to hunting regressions. Here are the dates, the Slack channels, and what it takes to lead a session.
The WordPress AI Client is being lined up for a core inclusion proposal. January 2026 contributor notes cover streaming leaving the PHP client, a kill switch filter for locked-down sites, and MCP for tool discovery.
WordPress AI Experiments 0.2.0 adds AI-generated excerpts in the block editor and an Abilities Explorer screen under Tools. Here is what the release changes for plugin developers, plus the code for registering your own ability.