I dismissed WordPress Playground as a browser toy. It now installs almost every popular plugin, runs Composer and Laravel, and spins up a shareable environment per ticket, which has replaced most of my staging work.
Real-time collaboration is targeted at WordPress 7.0 in 2026. Beta feedback says native blocks work fine and legacy post meta does not, so custom fields need registering for the REST API before then.
The 6.9 update turned a client’s custom blocks into ghosts and I nearly wrote a core override for it. The December dev chat notes had the answer already: hotfix plugins now, official maintenance release in January 2026.
A client with 50,000 WooCommerce SKUs panicked about the 6.9 update. My answer was to read the release retrospective first, since that is where the problems the release squad ran into are actually written down.
The December 10 dev chat pushed 6.9.1 planning into the new year, which says something about how 6.9 is holding up. Here is how I stage a major core update for client sites, and why the Gutenberg 22.2 labels matter.
WordPress goes back to three major releases a year in 2026, on a four-month cycle. What that changes for maintenance, plus a small logger that catches deprecation notices before the next update lands.
A WooCommerce client hit editor errors after updating to 6.9, with the official fix scheduled for January 2026. Why rolling back was the wrong call and what we filtered instead.
A 15k-product WooCommerce store had red LCP scores and broken layouts after stacking speed plugins. What actually helped: enqueueing block styles properly, plus the Safari LCP support and Compression Dictionaries work from the core performance chat.
A client’s admin was three AI plugins deep, each with its own API key and settings page. The AI Experiments plugin v0.1.0 offers a registry and a base class instead, so features get built once against a standard API.
A client’s custom React admin broke on every core update, so I rebuilt it on what WordPress 6.9 ships instead: DataViews, the wider Fields API, the Abilities API and Block Bindings. Notes from that job.