Beta 3, a silent Beta 4 next to 6.9.3, and Beta 5 due March 12. What real-time collaboration, the new Breadcrumb block filters and theme.json pseudo-elements mean for your custom code before the RCs land.
The release party is a Slack marathon that produces a hundred reports saying everything looks good and almost no usable coverage data. A proposal: structured JSON reports, identical Playground environments, and pairing contributors at WordCamp Asia.
WordPress 6.9.3 is a fast-follow fix for a 6.9.2 regression that blanked out sites whose themes returned stringable objects to template_include. Here is what broke, and what you need to update.
my.WordPress.net turns WordPress Playground into a workspace that survives a page reload. The site lives in browser storage instead of on a server, and Blueprints handle the setup. Clear your cache without a backup and it is gone.
WordPress 7.0 Beta 3 ships 148 fixes and swaps the static AI provider list for the WP AI Client registry. Here is what changed in the connectors screen and how to test it on staging before the April 9 release.
WordPress 7.0 in Beta 3: RTC syncs over HTTP polling with Yjs, AI connectors give plugins one shared interface, and patterns default to content-only editing. Patch 6.9.2 before you touch any of it.
WordPress 7.0 Beta 2 adds one Connectors screen for AI providers and forces Block API v3 blocks into the iframed editor. Both change what your plugin code has to do before the April 9 release.
AI Experiments 0.4.0 puts prompt-based image generation in the Block Editor and the Media Library, and adds a Generate Review Notes pass for accessibility and readability. It also points at the WordPress AI rename in 0.5.0.
WordPress 7.0 supports :hover, :focus, :focus-visible and :active inside theme.json for blocks and their variations. What that replaces, how the JSON looks, and the limits worth knowing before you refactor.
Beta 2 landed on February 26th and Beta 3 is due March 5th. The parts that matter for developers: blocks you can register in PHP alone, an iframed editor that isolates your CSS, and the handbook back in sync with Gutenberg 22.6.