Hi there,
It’s good to be back from vacation! Norway is a great country with a rich history, excellent food, great culture, and huge prices. It is absolutely worth it, though.
While I was away, some great educational programs came online. I am glad Destiny Kanno published How to Talk About and Support the New WordPress Education Initiatives to catch me and you up on all the fabulous opportunities to help young folks get acquainted with WordPress and learn some life skills, too.
For the first time in three years, I will be back at WordCamp US in Portland, OR, August 26 to 29, 2025. Will you be there? I would love to see you again in person. It’s been too long! Get your ticket now. The organizer started announcing speakers.
And now back to regular programming. Enjoy the newsletter.
Yours, 💕
Birgit
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
WordPress 6.8.2 Maintenance Release came out this week. Release lead Jean Baptist Audras mentioned in his release post that 20 core and 15 block editor fixes were included in this minor release. Update now to benefit from these bug fixes.
Core committer Jeffrey Paul posted the WordPress 6.9 Planning Proposal and Call for Volunteers. The deadline to apply for the release squad is July 25th, 2025. Beta 1 is scheduled for October 21, RC 1 for November 11, and the final release date is December 2, 2025.
Just doing some quick calculations here: It looks like the upcoming release is going to pack in all the goodies from Gutenberg versions 20.5 to 21.9, assuming we keep up that two-week release schedule.
Justin Tadlock published What’s new for Developer (July 2025) and lists phased plugin updates, custom social icons, and more in this summer edition of the monthly WordPress developer roundup.
Speaking of the WordPress Developer Blog, Mary Baum put out a call for writers! If you like writing technical tutorials and sharing your learnings or research with WordPress developers, get the skinny from her post: The Developer Blog needs you!
Hector Prieto just managed the release of Gutenberg 21.2. It brings further refinements to the interface , Dataviews and continued progress on toolspanel implementation. You can read the full release post with details on what’s new in Gutenberg 21.2? (16 July)
James LePage gives you a run down of the AI Building Blocks for WordPress. Each building block is listed with a brief description and a more detailed overview article linked for further reading.
- PHP AI Client SDK
- Abilities API (former Feature API)
- MCP Adapter
- AI Experiments Plugin
The plugins will be worked on as canonical/feature plugins to avoid early lock-in in a space that moves really, really fast at the moment. LePage also gives context to how this work overlaps with the initiatives of Gutenberg Phase 3: new admin design, collaborative editing, and the work on revamping the Media Library.
In this week’s live stream, JuanMa Garrido covered each of the building blocks. You can watch the recording on YouTube: Core projects for AI in WordPress
🎙️ The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #125 – WordPress 6.9, Gutenberg 22.1 and Gutenberg 22.2 with JC Palmes, WebDev Studios
Plugins, Themes, and tools for #nocode site builders and owners
In his latest video, Designing with the Columns block, Wes Theron guides you through how to use the columns block to build various layouts to build sites. He covers how to structure and organize your content. He’ll show you how to add, customize, and design layouts with multiple columns—ideal for displaying text, images, and other blocks side by side.
New and updated Plugins
Brian Coords, developer advocate at Woo, announced “WooCommerce 10.0 is here!
- Major frontend accessibility improvements
- Shareable checkout URLs
- Coupon enhancements
- A better product importer.
- And over 400 commits from 67 contributors!’
The release notes have all the details including screenshots and links.
Remote Data Blocks is a WordPress plugin by Automattic’s WordPressVIP team. It lets you fetch and display remote data in Gutenberg using customizable blocks. It’s ideal for flat, consistent data sources like APIs or Google Sheets. You map data to layouts, and the plugin handles fetching, caching, and rendering inside the block editor. Documentation is available on this site. You can test it with Playground.
Stephen Edde blogged about it: Bring Your Content to Life With Remote Data Blocks. He also invites you to the webinar Launched: The Newest Product Solutions from WordPress VIP on August 21, 2025, at 18:00 UTC
Nathan Wrigley and Dan Maby have just rolled out the beta version of their awesome new Podcaster Plus plugin! It makes building podcast websites easy without any coding. It pulls your RSS feed automatically to show episodes and offers customizable blocks and a responsive player which works well on any device. It’s designed for podcasters and agencies managing multiple shows, focusing on quick setup and flexible layouts within WordPress. Or so the promise. You can sign up for the beta version with your email address.
Lesley Sim and Ahmed Fouad are the awesome duo behind Newsletter Glue, and guess what? They just sold it! 🎉 Now, they’ve rolled out their new project, EventKoi, which is a super cool events calendar plugin for WordPress fans. Want to know more about what they’re up to? Check out the sneak peek video and hop on that waitlist!
Marco Almeida from Naked Cat Plugins just published a free plugin called Language Attribute for Container Blocks. Once you install it, you can easily add an lang HTML attribute to your Group, Columns, and Cover blocks on your site. It helps accessibility tools and browsers figure out the language of different sections on your page. The readme file mentions that it came to pass as a community collaboration out of WordCamp Europe.
Paul Halfpenny announced PersonalizeWP Pro Is Now Completely Free: Choose Your Perfect Personalization Solution. “WordPress personalization just became accessible to everyone.” It also meant as a contribution to help WordPress stay competitive with other platforms that offer personalization out of the box. Halfpenny explains about the two version, PersonalizeWP Lite and Pro, for different use cases. The plugin helps site owners to provide different content depending on user behavior or make it visible under different conditions, depending on user types. while keeping within privacy guidelines.
Classic vs. Blocks vs. Page Builders
Sagar Sharma, from Lubus, just dropped a post titled Embracing What We Preach: Our Journey Migrating to WordPress Block Editor & Full Site Editing. It’s all about their journey moving the agency’s website from the old-school WordPress setup to the new block editor and block theme. Why? To get more flexibility, speed things up, cut down on plugins, and keep the design consistent. You’ll get the scoop on their rebranding, how they rolled out the FSE migration step by step, and how they’re fine-tuning things along the way. Sharma also shares how they empowered non-tech folks to handle content and how this switch seriously leveled up user experience and SEO scores.
While Lubus works with middle and large clients, Patricia Brun Torre tells a similar story on why she loves the WP block editor, site editor, and the Gutenberg project. She raves about how the WordPress block editor and site editor are super fast, easy to use, work without extra plugins and make teaching clients a breeze. She loves how everything is intuitive, copy-paste just works, and you can design full sites—including headers, footers, and layouts—without touching code.
At WordCamp Krakow, a panel discussion was held around Page Builders. Magdalena Pjoreck, former freelancer and now developer at a hosting company; Raitis Sevelis, owner of WPBakery; and Robert Windisch, owner of Syde, an enterprise agency, all come to the discussion from different angles. The conversation was recorded and is available on WordPressTV.
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
Bud Kraus published a new tutorial on how to apply custom styling for WordPress block themes using a child theme. He explains that child themes remain essential for customizing WordPress block themes, allowing safe style overrides and customizations without altering parent theme files. Kraus details how, despite the flexibility of block themes and theme.json, child themes are still crucial for advanced customization in WordPress. He demonstrates creating a child theme for the Twenty Twenty-Five theme, using its own style.css and functions.php to safely override styles, define custom block styles, and set up style variations, ensuring control without modifying parent theme files.
Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.
Ryan Welcher has been working on his Block Developer Cookbook for a few years. Hundreds of developers worked through examples at workshops at WordCamp Asia and WordCamp Europe. Now he brought it all to YouTube in one big livestream session. The Block Developer Cookbook: Live Stream Edition. You can use it to learn how to build custom WordPress blocks or freshen up on certain aspects of it. The video is full of real-world block development techniques , including custom blocks, variations, transforms, interactivity, and more.
In this week’s stream, Jonathan Bossenger covered Feature API updates & building a block with Claude Code. He wrote, “This week, I reviewed the latest update to the Feature API and tested it against my course creation flow. After that, I wanted to see how easy it would be to build a block based on existing HTML/CSS and JS, but only using Claude Code in PhpStorm. The results were pretty impressive, but not perfect, so I decided to try coding it myself. However, I soon discovered that it had been so long since I built a block that I’d forgotten how to do it.”
Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s master branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily builds for testing and review.
Now also available via WordPress Playground. There is no need for a test site locally or on a server. Have you been using it? Email me with your experience
Questions? Suggestions? Ideas?
Don’t hesitate to send them via email or
send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.
For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog,
send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com
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