WordPress 6.9 fixes a Trac field that cost me hours
A Trac ticket listed the bug under 6.8, so I ruled it out. It had been introduced earlier and only found in 6.8. The WordPress 6.9 release comes with a wording fix for exactly that confusion.
Tag: Beta
What broke on my client’s site after WordPress 6.9
A client’s checkout threw a fatal error right after they updated to 6.9, and core wasn’t the cause. Notes on staging updates, and on Trac switching to the version a bug was introduced in.
The WordPress 6.9 change that broke adjacent post navigation
A WooCommerce store’s next-product links kept reloading the same page after an update. The cause was the WordPress 6.9 tiebreaker in get_adjacent_post(), plus a filter that only swapped the date out of the SQL.
Why I wait before running WordPress core updates
A client updated to WordPress 6.9 the day it shipped and broke their landing page. Here is why I hold major core updates until the first maintenance release, and the filter I use to keep them in staging.
What the WordPress 7.0 roadmap means for your build
The November 2025 core committers check-in set the direction for WordPress 7.0: PHP 7.4 as the minimum, AI models running in the browser instead of on your server, and a reworked WP Admin.
WordPress 6.9 core updates and the bugs RC4 fixed
A pre-release WordPress install killed a client’s publish button. The cause was a core bug in hidden async-upload fields, one of several things the 6.9 release candidates cleaned up alongside alternate cron and REST API errors.
What a moderation fight taught me about incident response
A banned member was back in ten minutes on three new accounts, because a dynamic IP beats a firewall rule. What the site actually needed was an incident response protocol: logging, permissions, and a human who owns the ban button.
The WordPress Abilities API replaces your wrapper classes
Fifty layers of function_exists() held a membership site together until the LMS renamed its methods. The Abilities API in 6.9 gives plugins a registry to declare what they can do instead.
Keep WordPress 6.9 testing off your production site
A client pushed WordPress 6.9 RC3 to a live WooCommerce store and lost checkout inside ten minutes. What broke, why my first quick fix made it worse, and where release candidate testing actually belongs.
WordPress Importer URL migration beats search-replace
A magazine site moving off an emoji subdomain came apart under wp search-replace. WordPress Importer 0.9.5 rewrites URLs during the import instead, using the block markup parsers in core to tell a real URL from a lookalike string.