WordPress 7.0 arrives on May 20 and brings many updates, though some of the most notable have been left out. Here’s a rundown of everything in this new version.
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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 May 11 to 17, 2026.
This week, after the release of RC3 and RC4 that were actual release candidates, WordPress 7.0 ships, and it’s not just any release. With over four hundred closed tickets in Core, nearly five hundred editor improvements, and nearly five hundred bug fixes, it’s the most feature-packed launch since Gutenberg was integrated.
Let’s run through everything it brings, starting with what users will notice first and ending with what matters to developers.
The first thing users will notice when updating to 7.0 is that the WordPress admin has a fresh look. The default color scheme, called “Fresh,” has been replaced with a new one called “Modern”: cleaner, with better contrast, improved typography, and a look more consistent with the block editor. This change is purely visual — no structural changes or CSS class renames. Additionally, navigating between admin screens now includes smooth transitions thanks to the browser’s View Transitions API, though they only activate if the user hasn’t configured a motion reduction preference in their operating system. The result is an admin experience that, finally, doesn’t look like it’s from a decade ago.
Another change that will be immediately noticeable is quick access to the command palette from the admin bar. A simple click on the search icon, or the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+K on Windows or Command+K on Mac, opens the command palette from any admin screen — while editing a post, while reviewing the plugin list, or from anywhere else. Small change, big impact on productivity.
One of the standout features of this release is Visual Revisions. WordPress’s revision system has been completely reimagined. No need to leave the editor to compare versions: everything now happens inside the block editor itself, with a revision mode that activates without changing screens. A slider in the header lets you navigate through the version history, seeing changes in real time directly on the content. The system uses intuitive color coding: yellow for modified blocks, red for deleted text, and green for added text. For long documents there’s a minimap next to the scroll bar indicating where changes are, and clicking jumps directly to that section. When reviewing history, the publish button becomes a restore button. There are also updates to Notes: data now syncs automatically, you can add notes to multiple blocks at once with partial selection and rich text editing, there’s a new dashboard widget, email notifications when someone leaves a comment on your content, and a keyboard shortcut for quickly adding notes.
The other major push in WordPress 7.0 is AI integration directly into core. WordPress now includes an AI client and a connectors screen, found at Settings → Connectors. From there you can manage connections with AI providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google: WordPress automatically detects the provider, installs the corresponding plugin, and requests the API key. The architecture is provider-agnostic, meaning it works the same regardless of which service the user chooses. This infrastructure isn’t limited to AI: any plugin needing to connect to an external service can leverage this centralized system for key and connection management. To see AI in action, the AI plugin is available in the repository with features like generating titles, excerpts, and alt text for images.
Font management also has important updates. Previously, the font manager lived buried inside the global styles of the block editor. In WordPress 7.0 there is a dedicated page under the Appearance menu, available for all theme types, both block and classic. From there you can install, manage, and preview fonts in a single space, without having to navigate through several nested panels.
For new blocks, WordPress 7.0 includes two. The first is the Breadcrumb block, which automatically generates the navigation hierarchy of the current page: it works with hierarchical pages, taxonomies, category archives, search results, 404 error pages, and custom post types. It has alignment options and lets you configure whether the last element appears as text or as a link. The second new block is the Icon block, which lets you add decorative icons from a collection built directly into WordPress core. Extensibility for third-party collections is planned for WordPress 7.1.
There are many improvements to existing blocks. The Gallery block now has full lightbox navigation: you can view images large and move between them with buttons, keyboard, or touch on mobile, with screen reader support included. The Cover block can now use embedded videos from platforms like YouTube or Vimeo as section backgrounds, without needing to upload the video file to the server, significantly reducing bandwidth and storage consumption. The HTML block has been redesigned: it now opens in a modal with separate tabs for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, making it a much more useful tool for advanced customization. The Image block has improved inline editing, with more accessible controls for cropping, rotating, and zooming, plus support for focal point and aspect ratio adjustment in wide and full alignments. The Grid block is now responsive even when a fixed number of columns is defined: before you had to choose between responsive or fixed; now you can define both, and the column count acts as a maximum while the grid adapts to available width. The Paragraph block gains support for text indent, configurable at the individual block level or globally from theme styles, as well as for text in columns. The Verse block has been renamed to Poetry. And Query Loop now allows excluding terms from results.
Two features deserve special mention for their impact on site building. The first is per-device block visibility: from any block you can choose whether it shows on desktop, tablet, or mobile, without affecting other sizes. Blocks with active visibility rules show an indicator in the editor’s list view. The second is customization of mobile hamburger menus: the Navigation block now lets you create fully custom overlays from the Site Editor, with their own patterns, styles, and even a dedicated close button block. WordPress includes four predefined overlay templates to get started quickly.
Pattern editing has also changed significantly. By default, patterns now enter content-only mode when selected: instead of seeing all individual blocks, you see a panel showing text and image fields directly for editing, without touching the design structure. If you need to modify the full design, you can access it through the edit pattern button. The goal is for patterns to function as smart design objects: content is editable, structure is protected by default.
Other quality-of-life improvements for all users: the color picker now allows pasting values directly from the clipboard, without manually selecting the shade; the link control validates URLs before saving to prevent broken links; and new user registration is more secure because admin and editor roles have been removed from the default role selector, so a new user can no longer accidentally receive elevated permissions.
To close out the user-facing section, it’s worth mentioning accessibility improvements: password reset now prepopulates with the username to meet WCAG 2.2, there’s a new feature to import alt text from image IPTC metadata, and the CSS for screen-reader-only text has been improved to prevent some readers from reading the text letter by letter.
Moving to the developer side, WordPress 7.0 includes an AI client accessible from PHP through a centralized function that completely abstracts the provider: plugins don’t need to manage keys or worry about what service the site owner uses. There is also a client-side Abilities API, as a complement to the server-side API that arrived with WordPress 6.9, allowing you to register capabilities accessible from JavaScript.
For block developers, the most important update is block registration exclusively in PHP: with the autoRegister flag and a render callback, you can create a block without writing JavaScript, and WordPress automatically generates inspector controls from the declared attributes.
The Pattern Overrides system now extends to any block, not just the four core blocks that supported it before. DataViews and DataForms receive new layouts, validation, and grouping improvements. The Interactivity API adds a watch() function to reactively respond to state changes. The editor now forces the iframe when all post blocks use Block API version 3 or higher.
CodeMirror updates to version 5 with ES6 support. The minimum required PHP version is now 7.4. backbone.js, the Requests library, and PHPMailer are also updated. There’s a new filter to customize the plugin list tabs, Block Hooks logic moves to the REST controller, and the foundations are laid for an extensible routing system for the Site Editor that will underpin new admin pages in future versions.
WordPress 7.0 will launch on Wednesday, May 20, around 17:00 in universal time.
The official WordPress AI plugin has reached version 0.9 and brings two new experiments centered on editorial workflows.
The first is AI comment moderation: the system automatically analyzes each comment using sentiment and toxicity detection before it reaches the moderation queue, helping administrators identify spam, harassment, or low-quality content without manually reviewing each one.
The second experiment is content resizing: from the editor toolbar you can select text and ask it to shorten, expand, or rephrase it on the fly, with a modal showing the original and new version so you can decide whether to accept. Both are functions aimed at streamlining everyday editorial tasks without leaving the editor.
On the more technical side, version 0.9.0 adds a developer mode in the plugin’s settings page that lets you choose AI provider and model independently for each function. This makes it easy to compare how different models or providers behave on specific tasks — useful for optimizing cost and performance.
There’s also a new WP-CLI command, wp ai alt-text generate, that lets you generate alt text in bulk for an entire media library without going through the graphical interface — ideal for migrations, accessibility audits, or editorial automation pipelines.
The team aims to publish version 1.0 on Tuesday, May 19, one day before WordPress 7.0 launches, so early adopters have the stable plugin version available as a companion to the new core release.
One of the experiments planned for version 1.0 is the connector approval system: by default, no installed plugin can use AI connectors or access stored API keys without explicit administrator approval. The reason is that, unlike traditional plugin risks with database options, language models have the particularity of being able to absorb and transmit context nondeterministically, making access control especially important.
The team openly acknowledged that this system doesn’t eliminate all risks, since a malicious plugin could still read keys directly from the database, but the decision was to move forward with the experiment now and build on it in future versions, rather than waiting for a perfect solution.
The second experiment being included is request logging to AI, using a dedicated database table to avoid performance issues, with truncated context to prevent bloated storage, and optional cached token tracking to simplify cost analysis with providers like Anthropic or OpenAI.
Additionally, the Developer Blog has published a practical tutorial showing how to build an image generation plugin using the new AI client in WordPress 7.0: the plugin adds a button to the Media Library, the user writes a prompt, an image is generated, and can be saved directly as an attachment — all without the plugin managing API keys or being tied to any specific provider. What’s interesting about the example is that it makes clear how much code is actually AI and how much is standard WordPress: the AI client integration takes just a dozen lines; the rest is REST route registration, media management, and script loading — exactly like any other plugin.
The Polyglots team brings two proposals.
The first is a usability improvement in the translation editor: validators used to have to switch tabs to review the context of a string and then switch back to the Meta tab to approve, reject, or mark as fuzzy, because action buttons only appeared there. Now there’s a fixed bar at the top of the editor that replicates those buttons and stays visible regardless of which tab is active, eliminating that unnecessary back-and-forth.
The second update is the refresh of available OpenAI models for automatic translation suggestions: the previous list of twelve models has been reduced to five, grouped by price, with gpt 5.5 pro at the highest tier, gpt 5.5 and 5.4 at the mid tier, and gpt 5.4 mini and 5.4 nano at the lowest tier.
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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