The screenshots gallery on WordPress.org plugin pages now renders core Gallery and Image blocks with the standard lightbox, while the masonry part stayed out of core. Here is what shipped, why core turned the masonry down, and how I would build the same thing.
June was a loud month: WordPress 7.0 is out, React 19 got reverted, and media processing moved into the browser. Here’s how I split the roundup into what gets tested now on real sites and what gets filed for later.
Gutenberg 23.3 quietly moves the editor to React 19, and that is the item most likely to break a custom plugin. This post covers which legacy patterns were removed, how per-block responsive styles affect themes, and what stays behind an experiment flag.
AI keeps drifting from your design system because it is guessing. The fix is written spec files, a real token layer, and an audit. For WordPress that means theme.json presets, template hooks you refuse to regenerate, and a grep for hard-coded colors.
contrast-color() reached Baseline in April 2026. On WordPress it matters because clients edit the palette, and hardcoded text colors on those presets keep breaking. One declaration covers most of it, with some limits.
The letter-spacing reveal trick going around is a nice piece of CSS, but the demos hide two costs: it relayouts text on every frame, and transparent text still gets read aloud by screen readers. This is the version I’d ship.
Most centering doesn’t need a flex or grid hack anymore. This post covers align-content on plain block elements, text-box trimming for text that actually looks centered, the safe keyword, and anchor-center for tooltips.
Staggered animations used to mean a pile of nth-child rules or an SCSS loop. CSS sibling-index() and sibling-count() handle it in the stylesheet, however many items the grid has, with no JavaScript.
Gutenberg 23.2 adds experimental per-breakpoint block styles in Global Styles, motion design tokens, bottom-sheet modals on mobile, and fixes for race conditions in real-time collaboration.
Notes from the core performance chat the day before WordPress 7.0 ships: on-demand block style loading for classic themes, Performance Lab moving to PHP 7.4, npm ignore-scripts, and an FTP filesystem install fix.