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 reworks the core design tools roster: Verse becomes Poetry, Accordion, Breadcrumbs and Math arrive with full design support, and pattern overrides are opt-in per attribute through a filter. Includes the updated support table and a registration snippet.
Browsers are shipping faster than most of us can refactor. A look at clip-path rounded polygons, element-scoped view transitions, subgrid and @scope, and which JavaScript libraries they let you drop from a WordPress project.
Chrome 145 adds column-wrap and column-height, so a multi-column container can push overflow content down to a new row instead of off the right edge. Here is how the two properties behave and where Grid or masonry still fits better.
Ten block themes I tested for personality without the performance hit, from the Afrofuturist Sankofa to the halftone lo-fi of Punk. Includes a CSS clip-path snippet for custom image shapes.
Cascade layers, the :is() pseudo-class and selector doubling all settle specificity conflicts without !important. Plus the few cases, like utility classes and accessibility overrides, where !important is still the right call.
WordPress.com opened plugins and Global Styles to every paid plan, starting at Personal. Here is what the lower tiers actually give you, and why SFTP, WP-CLI and staging still sit behind the Business plan.
Smashing Magazine’s April 2026 wallpaper collection is out, calendars and all. I picked out a few, then got sidetracked by the asset side: dozens of resolutions per design, and how you would serve them in WordPress without hardcoding links.
Gutenberg 22.9 lands background.gradient support so a gradient and a background image can coexist, adds an EmptyState component to wordpress/ui, and gives the experimental Forms block hidden input fields.
The Twenty Twenty-Seven core team added a Lead Mentor next to the usual dev leads. It reads like a soft change, but it is aimed at the contributor bottleneck that has been producing burnout and technical debt for years.