Studio Code, Hosting call for testing, Design with AI, and more — Weekend Edition 365

Hi there,

May is an action-packed month for the WordPress community, packed with tons of local WordCamps and Campus Connect events. After so long without seeing each other, it’s awesome to get together in person — sharing ideas, storytelling, and just making real connections. In this digital age, those genuine face-to-face moments remind us how much it really matters to show up in person.

Enjoy the people around you, friends and family. Speaking of which my next two weeks are all about that. We are on the road to a family reunion and the following weeks we get a visit from our long -time Canadian friends. I also will take another break on the weekend edition, though. Number 366 is scheduled to come out on May 23, 2026, the 77th Anniversary of the German Constitution.

Have a wonderful weekend.

Yours, 💕
Birgit

Table of Contents

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

Amy Kamala, co-release coordinator for WordPress 7.0, published an Urgent: Testing request to Web hosts for collaborative editing by May 4th. The results will inform core architectural decisions before release. The test suite needs only bash, cURL, WP-CLI, and patch — and the Core team wants data from your actual customer environments, not clean installs. Results are aggregated and kept anonymous.

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Hamza Kwehangana, co-organizer of WordCamp Vienna, walks you through everything new in WordPress 7.0, the release that kicks off Phase 3: Collaboration. You’ll see real-time multi-user editing in action, native AI Connectors for plugging in providers like OpenAI or Anthropic, a refreshed admin with Data Views, and a new Notes and Comments system for editorial teams. Block-level additions include heading variations, fit text, responsive editing mode, a native Icons block, and Visual Revisions.

Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners

The WooCommerce team is actively exploring a DataViews-powered Product Catalog Management experience that could improve how merchants handle large product sets. Led by Luigi Teschio, you can already test a working prototype via WordPress Playground. The shared blueprint installs WooCommerce nightly, Gutenberg, and sample products in one click. Smoother filtering, price filtering, inline variation handling, and improved bulk edit workflows are all on the table.

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WPMet, plugin developers of GutenKit, introduced TableKit, a native Gutenberg table builder aimed at replacing the block editor’s limited default table with a more sophisticated approach. You get four table types — standard tables, WooCommerce product tables with live stock and direct add-to-cart, data tables that import from CSV, Google Sheets, or JSON with auto-sync, and WordPress post tables. Standout features include conditional formatting, freeze columns, column sorting, search and filtering, and export to PDF, CSV, or Excel, all without shortcodes or leaving your editor.

Mike McAlister has been busy shipping for Ollie Pro. He posted a demo on X showing new responsive controls in the block editor — device-specific settings for typography, padding, margin, spacing, and text alignment at specific breakpoints, no custom CSS or extra plugins required. Alongside that, he introduced a completely redesigned Ollie Pattern Library with a unified design language across hundreds of patterns, a faster Browse tab with live search and one-click actions, and a brand-new Discover tab powered by Ollie AI, letting you describe a layout in plain language, use pre-made prompts, or hit “Inspire Me” to instantly assemble a full page.

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Maxime Bernard-Jacquet announces that Modern Fields 1.0 is now out of beta — a custom fields plugin built for the block editor era and positioned as an ACF alternative. The 1.0 release adds JSON import/export, automatic field sync with the theme, a no-code UI for creating custom post types and taxonomies, and WP-CLI commands. A live in-browser demo requires no installation. A Pro version is in the works, with repeater and relational fields, conditional logic, options pages, query loop filters, and custom block creation planned.

Core contributors Nik Tsekouras and Marin Atanasov started an Experiment: Content types tracking issue, developer might want to keep an eye out. The idea is to bring management of majority of the cases to core and leave complex use cases in plugin territory.

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

Jamie Marsland shares a neat design-system-to-WordPress workflow that lets you spin up a styled site in minutes — no local install, no hosting, no deploy. Head to claude.ai/design, grab a DESIGN.md from the awesome-design-md repo (Vercel, Linear, or Stripe are solid picks), upload it to Claude, and ask it to build a homepage, about page, and blog with sample posts inside WordPress Playground. One tip you shouldn’t skip: make sure Playground uses storage=browser so your work persists between reloads.

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.

Taylor Drayson‘s WP Wireframe is a PHP library that you can include in your plugin to create complete WordPress admin settings pages using one configuration array—no JS build step required. It offers over 20 field types (like text, color, file picker, and more), an API for accessing settings, options for conditional visibility, validation, support for multiple pages, and a helper to adjust settings. Install it with Composer, point it to a settings.php file, and your settings page is ready to go. Or so Drayson promises.

AI and WordPress

Automattic’s Alexa Peduzzi introduces Studio Code, now in public beta — a WordPress-native agentic CLI tool built on top of Claude Code. Install Studio CLI and run studio code to get started. Unlike general-purpose coding agents, it’s purpose-built for WordPress: you can describe a site in natural language and it builds a complete block theme — layout, typography, fonts, and content — then validates block markup against the real editor, runs WP-CLI commands, audits performance, and pushes to WordPress.com or Pressable hosting. Free during beta. Details on how to get started are on the developer portal.

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Varun Dubey, founder of Wbcom Designs and BuddyPress contributor, offers a developer’s honest take on WordPress 7.0 AI Connectors — what they get right and what still worries him. You’ll find the case for standardization (one dashboard for all AI providers, lower barrier for solo plugin developers, user choice of cloud or local models) balanced against real concerns: data privacy enforcement is still honor-system, budget limits are soft rather than hard, and local/self-hosted AI remains a second-class setup experience despite Varun’s own work running a private Ollama-powered WordPress instance. His prescription for the ecosystem — mandatory data transparency declarations, hard cost caps, end-user consent hooks, and provider certification — is worth reading before you start wiring AI connectors into your own plugins.

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Among other things, Varun Dubey flagged unencrypted AI Connector key storage as one of the sharper edges of WordPress 7.0 — and Encrypt AI Connector Keys by Thomas Zwirner is exactly the kind of ecosystem response he was calling for. Install it, re-enter your keys under Settings > Connectors, and they’re saved encrypted using the battle-tested Crypt for WordPress library, with the decryption key stored outside the database in wp-config.php, an MU plugin or a custom file. No settings page, just one filter hook if you need to customize the encryption method.

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If you’ve ever asked an AI to write a post for your WordPress site, you’ve probably seen what happens: the content looks fine at first glance, but once it’s in the editor, the blocks are a mess. That’s because AI tools are great at plain HTML and Markdown, but Gutenberg’s block format — with its mix of HTML and JSON-formatted comment tags — is just quirky enough to trip them up regularly.

Block Format Bridge, a new open-source plugin by developer Chris Huber, offers a sensible fix. Instead of wrestling AI into producing perfect block markup, it lets AI do what it’s good at and handles the conversion to blocks itself, server-side. It works the other way too, so you can pull post content back out as Markdown or HTML whenever you need it. If you’re experimenting with AI-assisted publishing on WordPress, this one’s worth a look. Install it and it automatically makes the conversion.

In this post, i dived a bit deeper into the matter: Block Format Bridge: A Practical Solution for AI-Generated Content in WordPress

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Greg Ziółkowski maps out what he’d like to see land in WordPress 7.1 for Core AI, building on the Abilities API and server-side WP AI Client shipping in 7.0. You’ll find proposals across four areas:

• a refactored Guidelines system (with a wp_guideline_type taxonomy and a wp_register_guideline() plugin API),
• execution lifecycle filters and filtering support for the Abilities API,
• new site-orientation abilities like core/get-active-theme and core/list-plugins, and
• a JavaScript @wordpress/ai client still awaiting a merge strategy for 7.1.

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Questions? Suggestions? Ideas?
Don’t hesitate to send them via email or
Send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.

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For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog,
send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com

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