Notes from the February 4 contributor meeting on the WordPress AI Client merge into 7.0: why OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are moving out to separate plugins, why the off switch is a constant rather than a filter, and what MCP adapters mean for the Abilities API.
Chart libraries are heavy for four bars. Here is a CSS Grid bar chart that uses sibling-index() and attr() to read its values straight off the markup, plus the PHP helper I use to render it in WordPress.
Fifteen real WordPress sites looked at as architecture rather than inspiration: which themes they run, how they handle search and subscriptions, and where the block editor quietly does the work a plugin usually gets credit for.
Smashing Magazine’s February 2026 wallpapers collection, with the designs worth grabbing and a developer’s notes on shipping high-resolution images: srcset, lazy loading, and the mistakes that turn a wallpaper gallery into a slow page.
I ran the WordPress.com AI engine at 21 site types, from portfolios to membership hubs, to see whether the blocks it generates survive a mobile viewport and a Core Web Vitals pass. Here is what ships as is, and the parts I still fix in functions.php.
A ReliCSS run sorts a stylesheet’s hacks into dead-browser fossils, fragile IE8 workarounds and leftover vendor prefixes. Here is how I read that output on WordPress sites, plus the case where :has() replaces the old checkbox hack.
z-index is not a global ranking. It only orders elements inside whatever stacking context they sit in. The folder analogy, the CSS properties that quietly create a new context, and how isolation: isolate frees a trapped modal.
Chrome 144 added the ::search-text pseudo-element, which finally lets you style find-in-page highlights. Relative color syntax keeps matches readable on dark themes and saturated backgrounds.
Firefox Nightly has a flag for @custom-media, the at-rule that lets you alias a media query behind a name and reuse it. Notes on what it fixes, how Open Props packages ready-made queries, and how to write the syntax today with postcss-custom-media.
WordPress 7.0 turns the mobile menu overlay into a block-based template part, so a logo or a button goes in without CSS overrides. Here is what to test, plus the open argument about where the markup belongs in the HTML.