A client with fifteen editors kept losing work to overwrites, which is exactly what Phase 3 collaboration is meant to solve. Here is what else the 7.0 planning covers: React 19, block validation levels, block bindings and the AI Client API.
A client wanted the cycling word effect from a SaaS homepage. A custom block would have meant migrating their existing headings, so I extended the paragraph block instead using the Format API, WP_HTML_Tag_Processor and the Interactivity API.
The 6.9 update turned a client’s custom blocks into ghosts and I nearly wrote a core override for it. The December dev chat notes had the answer already: hotfix plugins now, official maintenance release in January 2026.
A client with 50,000 WooCommerce SKUs panicked about the 6.9 update. My answer was to read the release retrospective first, since that is where the problems the release squad ran into are actually written down.
WordPress 6.9 is at RC3 with a launch set for December 2nd. The heading specificity fix, the Post Editor iframe and the new DataViews all change what a custom theme has to do.
The December 10 dev chat pushed 6.9.1 planning into the new year, which says something about how 6.9 is holding up. Here is how I stage a major core update for client sites, and why the Gutenberg 22.2 labels matter.
Gutenberg 22.3 pulls font management out of the Global Styles panels and into its own Fonts page, makes the core Grid block responsive when columns are set, and stops the image cropper from losing your aspect ratio.
A law firm got a WordPress site out of an AI builder in ten minutes, then came back two weeks later with a broken contact form and no search traffic. How I treat AI output as scaffolding instead of a finished build.
A WooCommerce client hit editor errors after updating to 6.9, with the official fix scheduled for January 2026. Why rolling back was the wrong call and what we filtered instead.
A client was publishing three articles a week and getting no traffic. The cause was five sharing plugins, two SEO suites, and a three-second TTFB. Notes on what I stripped out, plus adding Open Graph tags through wp_head.