Arguably one of the most complicated versions to launch, but it’s finally here. WordPress 7.0 is now a reality, and AI integration in WordPress is too.
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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 18 to 24, 2026.
It’s here. On May 20, WordPress 7.0 “Armstrong” was officially released, named in honor of Louis Armstrong, the jazz trumpeter who transformed the genre into a soloist’s art and introduced improvisation as a universal musical language.
The launch was coordinated by Matias Ventura as release lead and involved more than 875 contributors from around the world, over 200 of them participating for the first time, resulting in more than 420 improvements and fixes.
We’ve already covered this version’s updates in detail, so if you want to review them, check out the previous episode where we walked through everything thoroughly. And if you haven’t updated yet — now’s the time.
The same day WordPress 7.0 shipped, the development branch was already open for WordPress 7.1, something that normally happens earlier, but was kept closed during this cycle to better manage the removal of real-time collaboration and the extension of the release window.
The next day saw the call for volunteers for the WordPress 7.1 release team, with a proposed final release date of August 19, 2026, coinciding with WordCamp US, though attending the event is not a requirement to participate on the team.
The schedule calls for the first beta on July 15 and the first release candidate on August 5.
And we have something that might come in WordPress 7.1. Testing has been requested for the Media Editor Modal, a Gutenberg experiment that has been in development for some time and aspires to replace the current inline crop tool on the image block with something far more comprehensive.
The proposal is to open a dedicated modal that brings into a single flow free and proportional cropping, flipping, rotation with fine control and step-by-step adjustments, and metadata editing like alt text and captions — all built on WordPress’s own components rather than relying on the external library currently used.
Gutenberg 23.2 has also arrived, the first plugin version already oriented toward the WordPress 7.1 cycle.
The most notable feature is the ability to customize block styles by screen size directly from Global Styles: in the blocks section a new state selector appears with options for tablet and mobile, allowing you to define different styles based on viewport without leaving the editor.
There are also two relevant changes in the components package: modals now display as bottom sheets on mobile devices, greatly improving touch usability, and standardized animation tokens are added for durations and easing curves that are already applied in components like dialog, menu, and the modal itself.
In the experimental department there’s considerable activity on two fronts. On one hand, the Content Types management screens continue to mature: slugs now auto-populate from the singular name, there are visibility fields for taxonomies, counters for posts and terms, and actions for duplicating, viewing, and quick editing.
On the other, the customizable dashboard experiment with widgets is progressing with its own rendering engine, a modal for inserting widgets, layout persistence through WordPress’s preferences system, and animations using the new motion tokens.
The official AI plugin has reached version 1.0.0, published one day before WordPress 7.0 shipped.
The two most relevant updates in this version are two new experiments. The first is request logging for AI, which lets administrators review what operations are being run, which providers and functions are being used, and if there are performance issues or errors, laying the groundwork for greater transparency in AI use within WordPress. The second is connector approval, which gives administrators control over which installed plugins can access AI connectors configured on the site, adding an important governance layer as more plugins start integrating with AI services.
The Core team announces that the “beta” label for PHP version support is being permanently retired, and is also being removed retroactively from all historical documentation.
In practice this means WordPress 6.9 and 7.0 are now documented as fully compatible with PHP 8.5, WordPress 6.8 and later as compatible with PHP 8.4, and WordPress 6.4 and later as compatible with PHP 8.3.
The reason for this change is twofold: on one hand, since PHP 8.0 the updates within the 8.x branch have been stable and the adaptation work for plugins and themes is far less than the jump to PHP 8.0; on the other, the “beta” label was having the opposite of the desired effect, generating doubt among users, hosting providers, and plugin and theme developers that delayed updating as a precaution.
Another future update will allow WordPress to accept email addresses with Unicode characters — that is, addresses containing letters outside the ASCII range, such as Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, or any other non-Latin alphabet.
Today major email providers already support UTF-8 in addresses natively, and the standard is documented in RFC 6530, but WordPress still validates and sanitizes email as if only letters A through Z existed.
Support would be restricted to installations with utf8mb4 databases, which today represent the vast majority of WordPress sites, and plugins could disable it via a filter.
The AI team has new leadership. James LePage and Felix Arntz, who have served as co-leads of the team since its formation in May 2025, have announced they are stepping back, though they will remain involved with the team as advisors.
James reflects on the past year: the Abilities API arrived in WordPress 6.9, the AI client integrates into WordPress 7.0, and the MCP adapter and official AI plugin have matured considerably with contributions from hundreds of community members.
Jason Adams takes on the Team Rep role and will lead the team going forward.
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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