WordPress.com opened the AI Assistant to every paid plan and shipped Studio Code, a beta CLI agent for local work. Notes on what the CLI does with block markup and what the plan change means day to day.
WooCommerce added a Subscriptions Health Check tool under Status. It finds subscriptions stuck on manual renewal after the HPOS cache bug, plus active subs with missing or overdue payment dates. Here is what caused it, and what the changelog left out.
WordPress 7.0 stopped hardcoding which blocks support Block Bindings and Pattern Overrides. Support is resolved through a filter now, so any lookup table you were trusting is out of date. Also new: a native Accordion block and an Icon block.
WordPress 7.0 lands May 20, 2026, and RC3 on May 8 is now being treated as the new Beta 1. The experimental Presence API gets its own wp_presence table with a 60-second TTL for tracking who is editing what.
WordPress 7.0 now ships May 20, 2026. Notes on why the schedule moved, why the release squad is treating RC3 as a new Beta 1, and the jump to PHP 7.4 as the minimum version.
The Presence API feature plugin gives the WordPress admin real-time awareness of who is editing what, using a dedicated ephemeral table on a 60-second TTL instead of hammering wp_options. Here is what ships with it, and where it still gets confused.
The WordPress 7.0 Beta is live for Business and Commerce plans, and the change worth having is a one-click Deactivate button on the fatal error screen, instead of an SFTP session or a recovery mode email that never arrives.
Studio Code Beta is a CLI coding agent for WordPress, built on Claude Code. It runs WP-CLI, spins up local sites, screenshots its own work, and validates block markup against the editor before inserting it.
Gutenberg 23.0 adds an experimental revisions panel for templates, template parts and patterns, plus a flag that stops legacy meta boxes from disabling real-time collaboration. The Guidelines rename will catch you out on update.
WordPress 7.0 is on pause while Real-Time Collaboration is reworked. What the April 15 dev chat said about treating the next RC as a beta, the PR tagging problem, and core-abilities moving out of React.