When a new version of a plugin is released, you’ll be able to decide whether to launch it immediately or delay automatic updates for up to 24 hours.
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Program transcript
Hello, I’m Alicia Ireland, and you’re listening to WPpodcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
In this episode, you’ll find the information from August 11 to 17, 2025.
The initial rollout of phased releases for plugins is now live as a new feature that allows updates to be deployed first to a subset of sites before reaching everyone, reducing risks. For now, it only applies to plugins using the “Release Confirmation” system and works on installations running WordPress 6.6 or higher.
The strategy is to delay automatic updates for 24 hours, while admins can still update manually from the dashboard, allowing the more proactive users to catch potential issues early.
This measure aims to mitigate common problems such as incompatibilities or undetected errors that usually surface once an update has already been massively deployed across all sites. By prioritizing those who update manually, WordPress gets early and useful feedback.
Technically, WordPress.org handles the instruction to not auto-update only on sites that meet the minimum version requirement, meaning WordPress 6.6+, but it still can’t distinguish between manual and automatic updates. Also, only automatic updates are blocked—it doesn’t prevent plugins from being updated altogether, relying instead on third-party tools to respect that signal to hold back auto-updates.
The release of Gutenberg 21.4 brings important improvements to DataViews. Tables can now group by fields—a feature that was previously limited to grid views—along with other enhancements: grids use responsive images for better performance, filters can be locked to create preconfigured views, date filtering is smoother thanks to the integrated calendar, and the empty-results state can now be customized.
Meanwhile, Writing Mode gains a creative touch with the new “mix styles” button, which generates random variations to experiment with your site’s look. This mode, along with Design Mode, remains experimental and aims to clearly separate content editing from visual customization, encouraging users to try it out and share feedback.
The Performance team is focused on ensuring that support for FetchPriority is ready for WordPress 6.9, which would then be included in WordPress core. They’re also continuing work on OPcache insights and making progress on the View Transitions and No-cache BFCache plugins.
And finally, this podcast is distributed under a Creative Commons license as a derivative version of the podcast in Spanish; you can find all the links for more information, and the podcast in other languages, at WPpodcast .org.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
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