Hi there,
AI is on my mind a lot these days. It speeds up my life when I research or analyze content, tools and technology. Even more so when working on workflow automation. This week saw an “explosion of visible AI progress in the WordPress project” as James LePage calls it. And on my travel through the feeds Block Themes and theme.json appeared as an important topic.
We are less than two weeks and one Gutenberg release away from WordPress 7.0 Beta 1 release on February 19th. WordPress 6.9.1 and Gutenberg 22.5 were released..
You all have a wonderful weekend!
Yours, 💕
Birgit
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
As mentioned last week, WordPress 6.9.1 Maintenance Release shipped on Tuesday with 49 bugs fixed throughout Core and the Block Editor. If your site has automatic minor updates enabled you should have it by now. Otherwise you definitely should make it a point to update manually.
Rae Morey, editor of The Repository, has the skinny for you in WordPress 6.9.1 Released
Gutenberg 22.5 was also released. My post on the Make blog gives you What’s new in Gutenberg 22.5? (04 February). The highlights:
- Custom CSS Support for Individual Blocks
- Image Block: Aspect Ratio Control for Wide and Full Alignment
- List View Improvements
- Other Notable Highlights, among those, Text-columns support and focal point for fixed Cover background images.
In his trac ticket, Fabian Kägy proposed a “coat-of-paint” visual reskin of the WordPress admin for the 7.0 release. The goal is to modernize wp-admin’s appearance. It aims to reduce inconsistencies between older screens and the block editor. All elements should align with the WordPress Design System. Kägy has broken the work into focused sub-tickets covering color variables, buttons, inputs, notices, typography, spacing, and the admin frame. You can test early explorations via WordPress Playground. A new wp-base-styles handle has already landed to share admin color scheme CSS variables across core. Your feedback would be appreciated. 12 days before WordPress 7.0 beta, it’s not clear that it makes it into the next WordPress version. Kägy also mentioned that he is working with Tammie Lister on a post on the Make Core blog.
🎙️ 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
Troy Chaplin released Planned Outage for Block Themes, a simple maintenance-mode plugin for block themes. You can create your maintenance page directly in the Site Editor or use a maintenance.html template in your theme. Logged-in users can still browse normally, while other visitors see a 503 error with a Retry-After header. It also allows search engine bots to keep crawling during extended outages, helping to maintain your rankings while you make updates.
Johanne Courtright has restructured her Groundworx Core product into a bundle of four focused plugins — Query Filters, Showcase (Embla Carousels), Cards & Sections, and Tabs & Accordion — each now available separately. You can still buy the full bundle or grab just what you need. The core block extensions like responsive column controls and unified breakpoints have been spun off into a free plugin called Foundation, which also adds a new Gravity Forms block with proper block theme styling support.
Hans-Gerd Gerhards released version 1.5 of his Dynamic Header & Navigation for Block Themes plugin in January, fixing an annoying header flicker when scrolling back near the top of a page. You can now try the plugin instantly via a Live Preview directly from the WordPress plugin directory.
Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks
Mike Davey, senior editor at Delicious Brains, published a developer’s cheat sheet to theme.json anatomy. You’ll learn how setting the $schema property unlocks IntelliSense in VS Code. The settings section lets you lock down color pickers and font sizes to prevent design drift. The styles section replaces traditional CSS with auto-generated variables. The post also covers block-specific overrides. “Once understood, [theme.json] offers a level of granular control over what clients can and cannot do that was difficult to achieve in the classic PHP era.” Davey wrote.
As a side note, the post 15 ways to curate the WordPress editing experience by Nick Diego is still one of the most read articles on the WordPress Developer Blog. You’ll learn how to turn off blocks, unregister variations and styles, lock down color pickers and font sizes via theme.json, restrict access to the Code Editor and Template Editor, and remove Openverse and the Block Directory. The post covers PHP filters, JavaScript techniques, and Editor settings.
If you want to dive deeper into how to handle common theme-building problems with theme.json, here is a list of articles for your perusal from the WordPress Developer blog, mostly by Justin Tadlock.
- How WordPress 6.9 gives forms a theme.json makeover
- You don’t need theme.json for block theme styles
- Mastering theme.json: You might not need CSS
- Adding and using custom settings in theme.json
- How to modify theme.json data using server-side filters by Nick Diego
- Customizing core block style variations via theme.json
- Per-block CSS with theme.json
- Leveraging theme.json and per-block styles for more performant themes
Johanne Courtright makes a compelling case for why she chooses Gutenberg over Elementor. She argues that Elementor became a CMS inside a CMS—duplicating templates, colors, typography, and breakpoints WordPress already provides. The result? Specificity wars, inline styles, and sites that break when you deactivate the plugin. With Gutenberg and theme.json, you get one source of truth: change a spacing value once, see it everywhere. Her clients now update their own sites without calling for help.
Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.
In his latest live stream, Getting the Icon Block ready for WordPress 7.0, Ryan Welcher takes you behind the scenes of contributing. He has been working on the new Icon Block for Gutenberg plugin and the next version of WordPress. He is in crunch mode to finish the new Icon Block in time. Join him to see where we’re at and what needs to be done before then! You can read up about the genesis of this block via the GitHub PR.
Ai and WordPress
Jonathan Bossenger has published a helpful article titled From Abilities to AI Agents: Introducing the WordPress MCP Adapter on the WordPress Developer blog. The WordPress MCP Adapter links the Abilities API with AI tools like Claude Desktop. In this article, you’ll learn how to change abilities into MCP tools, connect using STDIO or HTTP transport, and create custom MCP servers for your plugins. It also provides easy configuration examples for each client and security tips for turning existing abilities into AI-ready APIs.
James LePage rounds up a remarkable burst of AI progress across the WordPress project. You’ll find a proposal to bring an LLM client into WordPress 7.0 core, a mature MCP adapter for building agents, the Abilities API shipping in 6.9, and a new “AI Leaders” micro-credential for students. There’s also WP-Bench for benchmarking model performance on WordPress tasks, plus a growing AI experiments plugin nearing 1,000 commits — covering everything from Typeahead completions to content guidelines in Gutenberg.
Speaking of which, you can read more about Content Guidelines: A Gutenberg Experiment on the Make AI Blog. In its the first version. Lots of feedback is expected. The goal is to give site owners a first-class place in WordPress to capture the rules and context that shape how content should be written, edited, and managed on their site.
The WordPress project now has an official Agent Skills repository designed to teach AI coding assistants like Claude, Copilot, and Codex how to build WordPress properly. You’ll find portable bundles of instructions, checklists, and scripts covering block development, block themes, the REST API, Interactivity API, Abilities API, performance, and more. Skills install globally or per-project, helping AI assistants avoid outdated patterns and follow current best practices — contributions are welcome, mostly in Markdown.
Jeff Paul published a call for testing to explore new AI experiments you can try right now via WordPress Playground. The experiments are
- Type-ahead suggestions while writing,
- AI-assisted comment moderation,
- Markdown feeds for agent consumption,
- extended provider options,
- an AI Playground for testing prompts,
- MCP integration, and
- request logging for debugging and cost tracking.
The instructions are quite detailed to follow along. The ask is feedback on UX, usefulness, and flow. Jump in and share your impressions on the post or the PRs links with each experiment.
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