The February 4, 2026 dev chat put client-side media on the road to WordPress 7.0: libvips compiled to WASM, running in a worker thread, with image resizing done in the visitor’s browser instead of on your server.
The WP AI Client merge proposal would put a provider-agnostic AI API in WordPress 7.0: one PHP interface, a fluent prompt builder, WP_Error returns, and no outbound calls until a plugin configures a provider.
The Core AI team put out a Call for Testing for the AI Experiments plugin. Here is what is in it: MCP server support, markdown feeds, extra providers and AI request logging, plus the $400 API bill that convinced me logging is the part you cannot skip.
WordPress 7.0 may merge the WP AI Client into Core, giving plugins one provider-agnostic API for calling models instead of each shipping its own SDK. Notes on the Connectors keychain, the package size argument, and what it changes for developers.
The WordPress 6.9 “Gene” retrospective is more useful than the release notes. Two triage leads in different time zones, too many manual release steps, and contributor pairing that actually worked. Here is what that means if you run client sites on Core.
WordPress 6.9.1 RC1 closes 23 core bugs and 25 Block Editor issues, including the mail function error, the double-escaped class names from the HTML API, and the broken Add Plugins screen. Plus how to test the RC on staging with WP-CLI.
The core team wants the legacy 1024-bit certificates out of the WordPress root bundle before 7.0 ships in April 2026. NIST disallowed those keys in 2013, and CentOS 7, the main reason they stayed, went end of life in mid-2024.
WordPress now has a repository for AI agent skills, starting with wp-playground. It uses the Playground CLI so an agent can mount a plugin or theme, wait for WordPress to be ready, log in, and check its own work in seconds.
Browser vendors are quiet but the community is not. Video state that survives navigation with view transitions, Kevin Powell’s cascade-layer trick for naming media queries, and native masonry landing as grid-lanes.
Notes from the AI contributor meeting: AI Experiments 0.2.0 is out, the Core Post Management abilities PR is under review, PHP AI Client v0.4.0 shipped, and the MCP Adapter stays a canonical plugin. February 19 is the Beta 1 cutoff.