If you have your own local community and want to take advantage of the benefits of global communication, WordPress has already begun integrating multiple communities into the global Slack.
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 June 8 to 14, 2026.
The Core team has integrated into the WordPress 7.1 development branch the system that enables user registration with email accounts compatible with UTF-8 characters.
The is_email() and sanitize_email() functions now natively accept these addresses, and a new WP_Email_Address class is added that allows access to both the ASCII representation of the address — useful for HTML attributes like the href of a mailto link — and the Unicode representation, designed to be displayed to the user.
Support can be disabled via filters for cases where a plugin integrates with an external service that doesn’t yet support this type of address.
Important notice for those using WP Now in their local development flow: the package is officially deprecated and will not receive further updates.
The recommended replacement is Playground CLI, the official command-line tool for WordPress Playground. The migration is deliberately straightforward for common use cases.
The most notable difference in workflow is that instead of passing a parameter for where the project is, you enter the project directory and run the command from there, since site persistence is tied to the current working directory.
The Marketing team has published a review of how AI and automation are changing the way WordPress gives visibility to its community’s work. There are three specific areas.
The first is social media: the project has presence on eleven different platforms, each with its own conventions, and managing that volume of content manually was not feasible. Now there are automated flows with Zapier that collect content from dozens of sources and generate drafts adapted to each network, so when someone in the community publishes a release, an event, or a Showcase entry, that reaches 2.4 million followers across all platforms with almost no human intervention.
The second area is WordPress.tv and YouTube: since a Trac ticket that had been open for seven years was closed, WordPress.tv videos are now automatically published to the project’s YouTube channel with thumbnails and metadata included. The result is that the channel grew from 14,000 subscribers to over 117,000, and annual watch hours multiplied by five.
The third is the Showcase: inclusion requests are verified automatically, AI scores each site on a five-star scale with a written justification, and those that pass the filter are sent as GitHub issues already with the generated text. What used to take weeks now happens in minutes.
The WordPress.org plugin directory has debuted a refreshed screenshot gallery, closing a Meta ticket that had been open for nine years.
The most visible change is that galleries now adapt to the content: image sets with similar proportions display in a clean grid, while mixes of tall, wide, and panoramic images use a masonry-style layout that respects original proportions without cropping important interface details.
Galleries now render with WordPress’s native Gallery and Image blocks, with the standard lightbox included, and captions stay attached to each image.
A few weeks ago we mentioned that the Make WordPress Slack was opening its doors to local communities from around the world. Now the Community team has published the concrete instructions for taking that step.
The process is straightforward: join the #community-slack-migration channel in the Make WordPress Slack and leave a request with the group name, the Meetup.com URL or equivalent page, and the channels you need created.
Message history from existing workspaces can be imported, though attachments don’t have direct support and are exported as HTML to Google Drive so they’re not lost. You can request multiple channels or a private channel for organizers, and everything is managed on a case-by-case basis. The only requirement for members is to have a WordPress.org account.
Among the communities that have already signed up are those from Spain, Brazil, Japan, Italy, India, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Pakistan, as well as BlackPress, which gives an idea of the international scope the initiative is taking.
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