WordPress will depend on artificial intelligence models for practically everything, or at least that’s the message between the lines from both the State of the Word and what is coming in WordPress 7.0.
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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 December 1 to 7, 2025.
WordPress 6.9 “Gene”, released after a Release Candidate 4, brings major improvements that enhance collaboration and content creation. The new Notes feature allows leaving block-level comments directly in the editor, ideal for reviews or teamwork.
For those who manage many pages or work with templates, the integration of the Abilities API opens the door to automation and intelligent tools, enabling stronger future AI integrations.
The dashboard experience also improves: the Command Palette has been expanded, allowing quick access to functions from anywhere in the admin — especially useful for advanced users.
Overall, WordPress Gene not only introduces visible new features but also strengthens the technical foundations for a more collaborative, flexible, and automation-ready system.
This new version launched during the State of the Word 2025, which reviewed a pivotal year for WordPress marked by progress in collaborative editing, expansion of AI across the ecosystem, and investments in developer tooling.
Looking ahead, the project enters a phase where real-time collaboration, the admin redesign, and the Interactivity API will take center stage. Matt Mullenweg, co-creator of WordPress, also highlighted global community growth, the role of education initiatives like Learn WordPress, and the evolution of contribution and sponsorship programs supporting contributors worldwide.
The message was clear: 2026 will focus on making WordPress faster, more accessible, more collaborative, and more intelligent, combining usability improvements with a renewed technical base for building modern experiences inside and outside the editor.
In terms of adoption, WordPress now powers more than 43% of the web, and over 60% of the CMS market.
Multilingual usage continues to grow. More than 56% of WordPress sites now operate in languages other than English. Japan stands out: WordPress powers 58.5% of all Japanese websites and 83% of the country’s CMS market. Japanese also became the second most-used WordPress language at 5.82%, followed by Spanish, German, French, and Portuguese.
Meanwhile, Gutenberg continues advancing with new features in Gutenberg 22.2.
The Cover block now supports embedded videos as backgrounds — not just uploaded media library files. Videos from YouTube or Vimeo can now be used as Cover backgrounds, reducing server bandwidth usage and enabling better use of external video platforms.
The experimental Breadcrumbs block becomes much more complete. It now handles home pages, the last hierarchy item, 404/search/archive pages, adds archive links for post types, and supports paginated content. In short, breadcrumbs are now more contextual and accurate to the site’s structure.
The Math block receives dedicated styling options. This fixes the inconsistency where inline formulas inherited paragraph styling but display formulas could barely be customized. Now they receive standard styling controls just like other blocks.
WordPress is also defining a clearer strategy for integrating artificial intelligence into the project.
First, core proposes AI as a foundational layer, not as an isolated feature. The goal is for WordPress to interact with AI services in a secure, predictable, and standardized way. Two pillars have been created for this: the Abilities API, allowing plugins, themes, and core to declare actions that AI assistants or agents can use; and the MCP Adapter, which bridges WordPress with external tools while ensuring compatibility and avoiding reliance on a single provider.
From the developer side, the intention is to make working with AI in WordPress far simpler and more consistent. The new WordPress AI Client SDK provides a common method for connecting to different models without writing custom integrations. Developers can request tasks like analyzing content, generating text, processing data, or executing site abilities, all through a standard community-maintained framework.
Meanwhile, hosting companies also have a defined role. WordPress wants hosts to provide AI to users securely, offering centralized credentials, models, and usage limits. The MCP Adapter helps hosts expose AI capabilities to customers without altering WordPress internals or creating proprietary lock-in. The goal is responsible AI availability with strong privacy controls.
In short, WordPress is not sprinkling random “AI magic features” into core. It is building infrastructure, standards, and APIs so that the entire ecosystem — core, plugins, hosts, and users — can integrate AI coherently, interoperably, and sustainably.
Playground has also had a decisive year in 2025. It achieved over 99% compatibility with directory plugins and expanded to run full PHP applications like phpMyAdmin, Composer, or even Laravel, becoming a real browser-based development environment. Performance also improved dramatically: OPcache activation nearly halved response times, and multi-worker support accelerated simultaneous processes for a smoother experience.
Support for modern PHP extensions expanded to include Xdebug, SOAP, OPcache, ImageMagick, Intl, Exif, and WebP/AVIF formats. Default networking and the new dynamic extension system allow Playground to simulate hosting environments more realistically. The new MySQL-on-SQLite simulation became one of the most complete available, compatible with phpMyAdmin and Adminer, both accessible directly from Playground.
The platform also evolved as a developer toolkit, adding a file editor, a Blueprint editor, one-click managed databases, quick PHP tests, and previews of Gutenberg branches. The CLI matured with features like automatic plugin/theme mounting, Xdebug debugging, multi-worker support, and integration in Node.js applications via runCLI.
Blueprints received a massive boost: a visual editor, packages with media, an explorer of ready-to-launch Blueprints, .git support, and a clearer version 2 specification suitable for AI. Combined with improvements like better error screens, more reliable URL migration, and the new Ask AI button, Playground closed the year with 1.4 million uses across 227 countries, cementing itself as a key tool for teaching, testing, and developing WordPress without local installs.
The Documentation team proposes a complete overhaul of the current workflow, identifying it as a major reason why user documentation often arrives late on release day.
The existing system uses a GitHub board with 13 status columns and expects multiple review rounds. In practice, this causes bottlenecks: drafts begin in Google Docs, wait days or weeks for a first review, then wait again for a second, and often get published after the WordPress version has already launched. This results in growing backlog, articles published out of order, and outdated documentation at the moment users need it most.
The proposed workflow, tested during WordPress 6.9, worked far better: documentation was written directly in WordPress, scheduled for release day, and did not require pre-publication reviews. Reviews happened afterward, correcting anything necessary without delaying publication. GitHub issues were maintained, but without blocking the process.
The recommendations are clear: remove most review stages, create a small dedicated team per release, make pre-review optional, schedule complete articles for release day, review afterward, and simplify the GitHub board by removing unnecessary columns. This shifts documentation from a slow, bottlenecked system with perpetual backlog to a faster process with on-time releases and continuous improvement.
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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