The event creation plugin, designed specifically for the WordPress community, has been approved to begin its rollout on WordPress.org and replace Meetup.com.
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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 July 6 to 12, 2026.
WordPress 7.0.1, the first maintenance release, includes fixes for 31 bugs across Core and the block editor. The most important for those with open registration sites is the closure of a vulnerability that allowed abusing the registration page to send spam emails with the subject “Access Details” from your own domain, with resulting damage to your mail server’s reputation. A bug in the wp_kses function is also fixed — since WordPress 7.0 RC4 it was corrupting CSS declarations with background-image: url, turning them into broken attributes. Additionally, the ability to dequeue global styles inline has been restored, which was blocked in 7.0, and better compatibility with PHP 8.5 is added.
For end users, the release cleans up several visual defects from the WordPress 7.0 admin redesign: the publish buttons that were getting cramped in the settings panel, the misaligned spinner in the media library, the search bar jumping position after a search, and a black flash that briefly appeared when loading any admin screen. Emojis work correctly again, both in detection and replacement with Twemoji images. And Visual Revisions, one of the standout features of 7.0, receive several accessibility improvements: focus moves correctly to the slider when entering revisions mode, and modified blocks are now marked with a CSS outline as well, not just by color, which is important for users with low vision or color blindness.
A few weeks ago we mentioned that the Classic block was going to disappear from the WordPress 7.1 insertion system. Well, the Core team has reversed course. The Classic block will continue appearing exactly as it has until now, with no changes for users or developers. The filter that had been announced is eliminated before ever reaching a stable version, and the Enable Classic Block plugin that had been published for those wanting to restore the previous behavior no longer has a reason to exist and will be closed.
The reason for the rollback came after gathering feedback: the team acknowledges the measure had things backwards. Hiding the block worsened the experience without moving WordPress closer to the real goal, which is to stop loading TinyMCE when it’s not needed. The conclusion is that the Classic block should become obsolete by user choice, not by imposition. Going forward, the effort is directed toward better understanding why people keep using the Classic block, improving the “Convert to Blocks” function which still has quite a few bugs, working on mechanisms for mass content migration, and exploring how to load TinyMCE asynchronously or on demand, among other performance improvements.
The Gutenberg Components team has published a merge proposal for WordPress 7.1 that is one of the most important infrastructure-wise in years: a token-based design system that lays the groundwork for making the entire WordPress admin coherent, customizable, and sustainable in terms of accessibility. The idea, in a nutshell, is to replace the color, typography, border, and elevation values that are currently hand-coded in each component with a system of semantic CSS variables — design tokens — that can be changed centrally.
For users, the immediate impact in WordPress 7.1 is that the Site Editor will adopt the admin color scheme each user has configured, something that’s been pending for a while. For plugin developers, it means being able to express their own brand identity within the WordPress admin without having to fight Core styles or maintain those styles on their own; anyone adopting the token system automatically inherits any future improvements.
One of the most interesting parts of this system is the color scale generator based on two base colors, which produces visually harmonious palettes with guaranteed accessible contrast, paving the way for features like a true dark mode in future versions.
The AI team has launched the official AI plugin in version 1.1.0, which now has over 30,000 active installs and 100,000 cumulative downloads. The two big new experiments in this version are predictive writing, which suggests text inline as you write in the block editor with intelligent context, keyboard control, and respect for the site’s Guidelines, and API key encryption, which encrypts connector keys before saving them to the database and restores them if the experiment is disabled. There are also improvements in comment moderation, which now lets you decide whether comments from anonymous visitors are automatically analyzed, and in content resizing, summarization, and classification flows, which now wait for enough text before enabling themselves, avoiding useless results.
As for what may or may not make it to WordPress 7.1, the team agreed that if embeddings, streaming, or work related to Abilities aren’t ready before the day before the first beta, they’ll be pushed directly to WordPress 7.2 rather than forcing code with insufficient review.
Embeddings technically work, but they need the AI client, the provider plugin, and storage in WordPress to be synchronized to be tested end-to-end, and that hasn’t yet been demonstrated in practice. Streaming is also open and awaiting review. As for the Abilities API, the team has made clear that abilities must be functional primitives independent of the transport layer, whether REST, MCP, or anything else, and there’s no plan to silently refactor the REST API to pass through abilities.
The Accessibility team has an interesting debate about the use of pure white and pure black in color combinations: there’s growing evidence, supported by discussions around WCAG 3 and the APCA algorithm, that extreme contrast doesn’t always offer the best experience for people with astigmatism, dyslexia, or other visual conditions.
The team proposes opening a Trac ticket to document the research and propose that WordPress adopt softened whites and blacks, something Gutenberg already does in many places and which suggests that the pure white in WordPress 7.0’s new “Modern” admin color scheme may have been unintentional.
As for ongoing work, the review of themes with the “accessibility-ready” label has over a hundred pending themes, seventy-nine of them without initial review, so the deadline has been extended to absorb the volume. In Gutenberg, the focus is on the unified admin bar being prepared for 7.1, and still pending accessibility review are the lightbox with captions, client-side media processing, and the media editor modal.
BuddyPress has published security and maintenance updates for three active branches: versions 14.5, 12.7, and 11.6. It’s recommended to update as soon as possible.
The two security issues fixed are insufficient validation in the messaging API that allowed user ID spoofing, and incorrect permission handling in component administration that failed to properly check user capabilities. In addition to the security fixes, the new versions improve compatibility with WordPress 6.9, including support for block style load optimizations and replacement of deprecated APIs, and resolve several bugs in Nouveau, Groups, Friends, Activity, and general administration, along with PHP 8 compatibility improvements.
News that many in the community have been waiting for: the WordPress project has officially confirmed it’s working on moving away from Meetup.com. The platform costs WordPress Community Support approximately 250,000 dollars a year, and on top of that it doesn’t well cover the community’s real needs. The chosen replacement is GatherPress, an open source plugin built by and for the WordPress community, already available in the plugin directory.
The plan is to use GatherPress as a foundation and build on top of it the WordPress.org-specific pieces, contributing improvements back to the plugin where possible. Anne McCarthy is coordinating the project, with initial work from Dion Hulse and contributions from the GatherPress team. There’s no concrete timeline yet, but the direction is clear.
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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