WordPress introduces its toolkit for plugin developers to easily connect with different artificial intelligences, without needing custom integration work.
Remember that you can listen to this program from Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the feed directly.
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 November 16 to 23, 2025.
WordPress 6.9 Release Candidate 2 is now available for testing. It’s an important milestone in the release cycle, but still a test version, so it’s not recommended for production sites.
The final release date for WordPress 6.9 remains December 2, 2025, and with only a week to go, it’s recommended to start testing functionality on staging or pre-production sites.
Continuing with WordPress 6.9 updates, although most visible features have already been presented, additional details continue to appear.
External libraries such as PHPMailer and SimplePie have been updated, transparent PNG handling has been improved, and 21 new hooks and 13 new actions have been added.
The cache system has also been improved to avoid relying on timestamps as seeds, introducing new functions that significantly enhance caching, especially on high-traffic sites.
Performance work has focused heavily on optimizing the fetchpriority system and improving CSS and JavaScript resource management. Additionally, classic themes now load only the block styles used on each screen, improving load times by an average of 25% to 50%.
A new class called WP_Block_Processor is introduced, designed to provide a streaming interface for parsing block content. Unlike parse_blocks(), which loads everything into a large array and requires a complete traversal, this tool processes the document block by block, in order, without creating intermediate structures or duplicating HTML.
Thanks to this approach, tasks such as counting block types, extracting metadata, or processing only the first N blocks of a post become far more efficient. This means lower memory usage, faster execution times, and reduced server load.
All legacy code related to Internet Explorer has been removed from core, including scripts, styles, and conditional logic. With this, WordPress definitively drops support for these obsolete environments, reducing execution weight and CSS/JS complexity.
Version 6.9 includes more than 33 accessibility improvements in core and 44 in the Gutenberg editor, aimed at meeting web accessibility standards and improving the authoring experience for users of assistive technologies. Key changes include new screen-reader notifications, better focus management, cleaner generated CSS, improved contrast, correct ARIA labels, and reliable keyboard navigation.
The HTML API is further expanded to make it more robust and secure when processing HTML across core, themes, and plugins. A key improvement is more accurate detection and handling of non-standard HTML structures, reducing errors when filtering content, sanitizing data, or manipulating blocks. A stricter attribute validation system is also introduced.
Another important advancement is better interoperability with the block editor. The API now understands Gutenberg-generated HTML more reliably, making it easier to transform content, clean up HTML from older blocks, or perform migrations. These improvements create a solid foundation for more advanced transformations in future versions.
WordPress 6.9 also moves toward supporting modern PHP versions by including polyfills for PHP 8.5 functions, such as array_first() and array_last(). This does not mean PHP 8.5 is fully supported yet, but core is now prepared so developers can start using these functions without writing manual fallbacks.
For site administrators and developers, this means that if your host already supports PHP 8.5, core compatibility is now more predictable. Still, staging tests remain essential, as themes and plugins may not yet be updated.
Gutenberg 22.1 introduces block-editing and performance improvements. Drag-and-drop has been optimized to avoid jumpy movements, and pattern duplication behaves more consistently without breaking custom props.
Styling options for group and column blocks have been expanded, allowing custom gaps, more precise alignments, and inheritance of global typography styles. This gives theme designers greater layout control without additional CSS.
A new Tabs Block is also introduced, allowing tabs to be added natively to posts, pages, and even templates.
The Core-AI team has introduced the WordPress AI Client SDK, a library that lets developers add AI capabilities to WordPress sites without depending on a single provider. With this SDK, plugins simply define what they need (for example, “generate text” or “extract keywords”), and the SDK handles communication with the AI provider configured by the user.
For WordPress developers, this means no more building entire integration layers from scratch: authentication, provider differences, and format handling are managed in a unified way. Users configure their credentials once, and compatible plugins work immediately.
The Abilities API has also been officially introduced, representing an important step toward describing what a WordPress site can do in a structured, machine-readable way. Each “ability” defines its input, output, permissions, and execution logic. This unified registry makes abilities easier to discover, validate, and execute from PHP, JavaScript, or external integrations.
For plugin and theme developers, the main advantage is being able to register their features in a standardized way. For example, defining that a plugin “analyzes content for SEO” or “generates sales reports” — making it discoverable by other tools or AI agents. This unlocks more interoperable workflows and prepares WordPress for a future with deeper automation and AI integration.
Although the initial version is already included in WordPress 6.9, development of the Abilities API will continue. Improvements in documentation, full JavaScript support, and broader adoption among plugins and themes are expected.
On the Developers Blog, a post discusses the importance of writing a proper changelog for a plugin or theme.
A good changelog goes far beyond listing version numbers and patches. It serves as a statement of transparency and professionalism: when users click “update,” they trust that nothing will break. A clear record of what changed, why, and when turns blind trust into informed confidence, reduces repeated support questions, and prevents future confusion over development decisions.
The Accessibility team has launched its official website at wpaccessibility.org, where team documentation is now hosted, and new features such as a search tool are being integrated.
The site includes both WordPress-specific content and general accessibility resources, from beginner guidance to legislation and best-practice materials.
As with the recent addition of new OpenAI models to the WordPress translation platform, the Polyglots team has updated the system to support models from version 3.5-turbo through 5.1 following the release of GPT-5.1.
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!
Leave a Reply