Notes from the April 21, 2026 performance chat: what auto sizes fixes about the sizes attribute, why the Gallery block is holding up a core merge, and a wp_calculate_image_sizes filter that beats regexing the_content.
The Core Dev Environment Toolkit gives contributors a one-click wordpress-develop setup. The less good news: the core privacy component has nobody maintaining it, two PRs are waiting on review, and the 7.0 release schedule still has not landed.
WooCommerce 10.7 drops HPOS order REST queries from 271 to 132, ships a beta Order Fulfillments API with typed methods, caches the Store API Last-Modified timestamp, and stops sanitization from eating % signs in gateway passwords.
The 7.0 release schedule is paused while the Core team validates another release candidate. My notes on the April 15 Dev Chat agenda, Gutenberg 22.9, the Twenty Twenty-Seven team, and why I would rather wait.
Notes from the latest WordPress AI contributor meeting: the MCP client is becoming a normal plugin instead of a Composer package, the Abilities API is getting real exception handling, and AI agents are getting a proper block dictionary.
The experimental core dev toolkit is a desktop app built on Playground and WASM. It bundles Git, Node and npm, so a contributor can clone wordpress-develop and generate a Trac patch without installing anything first.
WooCommerce 10.7 is mostly a performance release: the /wc/v4/orders endpoint drops from 271 queries to 132 and checkout loses about 15% of its SQL. It also ships a Fulfillment API beta and moves the Fulfillments namespace, which breaks old use statements.
Trunk is closed to 7.1 commits and WordPress 7.0 is under a hard string freeze while the core team stabilizes real-time collaboration. What that means for your workflow, plus the new custom sync provider API and where to help before the RC.
The 7.0 release went back from RC to Beta so Real-Time Collaboration data could move out of post_meta and into its own table. Also covers the WP AI Client, pseudo-states in theme.json and the Playground MCP server.
Notes from the April 8, 2026 dev chat: WordPress 7.0 makes the collaboration sync layer provider agnostic, so polling is only the default. What that means for WebSocket providers, CRDT reconciliation and block API v3.