The so called Project Thread is being taken up again with a different team and a new vision, where from the admin dashboard it is possible to see the evolution of a person within each team they participate in.
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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 15 to 21, 2025.
The WordPress community has resumed an important new experiment, the Contributor Dashboard Pilot Project. This effort comes from ongoing requests within the ecosystem to gain better visibility into how people join, participate, and grow across the different contribution teams.
Until now, the activity of many contributors, especially outside of code, has been fragmented across different tools and sites, making it difficult both to recognize contributions and to understand participation paths over time. The goal of the dashboard is to bring those scattered signals together in a single place in order to understand contribution patterns and improve the experience of contributors themselves.
The central concept is a “contribution ladder” that goes from initial connection to leadership levels: Connect → Contribute → Engage → Perform → Lead. This structure does not rank anyone as better or worse, but instead describes how a person’s participation in WordPress evolves, regardless of whether their contribution is code, documentation, community support, or other valuable work. The idea is for teams to detect where support may be lacking, which paths are working, and how to foster a stronger and more sustainable community.
The project is currently in an active pilot development phase, with a launch planned for late February 2026. A limited version will be built using a custom plugin that organizes existing activity data without placing new burdens on contributors or replacing initiatives such as Five for the Future. The dashboard will initially be hosted on external infrastructure for testing before moving to WordPress.org systems in later phases, and the community is invited to take part in testing, validation, and the evolution of the approach.
Gutenberg 22.3 lands, introducing several improvements focused on usability and workflow within the block editor. A highlight is a dedicated Typography page, accessible from the Appearance menu, which centralizes font management for block based themes and makes it easier to install, preview, and organize fonts without navigating multiple panels. This page also debuts part of the new Site Editor routing infrastructure, paving the way for smoother admin screens in the future.
In image editing, the cropper inside the editor has been refreshed. It now preserves aspect ratios and zoom levels when rotating images, fixing a common usability issue and serving as a foundation for future improvements. The Grid block becomes truly responsive, adjusting its columns to different screen sizes, which makes it easier to build flexible layouts without external additions.
In addition to these visible improvements, the plugin includes other useful tweaks: email notifications when someone leaves a note on content, improvements to the Breadcrumbs block with alignment support and paginated comments, new template options for navigation menus, and clearer error messages when the connection is lost.
The WordPress project has proposed a plan for three major releases in 2026, with specific dates for planning, development, and release. The idea is to provide predictability for both developers and end users, ensuring that each release cycle has time for design, feature development, testing, and stabilization before reaching the general public. This calendar aims to balance innovation with quality, allowing all contribution teams to better coordinate their work throughout the year.
The proposed dates outline clear windows for each stage of the cycles. The first major release of 2026 is planned for late April, followed by a second release in July or August, and a third in November or December. Each of these cycles includes time for documentation, compatibility testing, and communication with the community.
This would mean WordPress 7.0 shipping on April 9, 2026, WordPress 7.1 on August 19, and WordPress 7.2 on December 8.
This approach reflects lessons learned in previous years. By having several well spaced major releases, it becomes easier to split more ambitious projects into manageable increments, allow documentation and support teams to prepare materials in advance, and provide users with continuous but stable updates.
And regarding WordPress 7.0, and its most anticipated feature, real time collaboration, which allows multiple people to edit the same content simultaneously in a Google Docs style experience, it is in development and has been in closed beta testing with WordPressVIP clients since October 2025 to gather real world data on its use in production environments.
Initial feedback from tests with 45 participants shows that when sites use the modern block editor and recommended best practices, collaboration works well even in demanding scenarios, such as multiple editors adding blocks at the same time or performing complex content copying.
The feedback also highlights areas to improve before wider inclusion, such as tracking change attribution when multiple people are editing, compatibility with legacy metadata, and accessibility. One of the next steps is to expand testing across more diverse environments to prepare the feature for general production use.
Over the past six months, the Core AI team has moved from being a small experimental group to becoming a central effort within the project to natively integrate artificial intelligence capabilities into the platform. Since its formation in mid 2025, the team has defined and built the foundational pieces needed, such as the Abilities API to describe and expose WordPress functions to AI systems, a unified PHP client to communicate with AI providers, and an adapter for the MCP ecosystem, and has created the AI Experiments plugin as a lab and reference for new features.
As a result, much of this infrastructure has landed in WordPress 6.9 or already exists in a usable state. The Abilities API is part of core, while the other components continue to evolve in their respective repositories. The focus has been on building a solid and flexible foundation before bringing concrete features directly into core, with a clear roadmap toward WordPress 7.0.
On the Developer Blog, a post titled How to add automated unit tests to your WordPress plugin has been published, with a practical and accessible approach for developers. It reviews why testing is key to maintaining quality and avoiding regressions, and walks step by step through setting up the testing environment using official WordPress tools, the basic test structure, and automated execution, laying a clear foundation for integrating testing into the regular development workflow.
Another post introduces Word Switcher as a practical example of how to extend core blocks using the Interactivity API. Through a real world case, it shows how to add dynamic behavior to existing blocks without rebuilding them from scratch, explaining the technical approach, the separation between markup and interactive logic, and how this API opens the door to richer and more maintainable experiences within the block editor.
The Test team acknowledges that its current activity depends on very few contributors, which creates bottlenecks and a risk of burnout. To improve sustained participation, they are revisiting how membership is defined. In 2026, clearer criteria for active participation will be introduced, shifting away from joining based solely on representation or one off achievements toward a model of ongoing commitment, and granting emeritus status to those who demonstrate consistent long term contributions.
As part of this change comes the new Test Team Training Program, a structured training program launching in January 2026. Its goal is to provide resources and training in four key areas: development of resources and handbooks, team collaboration and communication, testing fundamentals and best practices, and meeting and scrub management. The program will last around four weeks, requires about 20 hours of commitment, and while completing the training does not automatically guarantee a spot on the Test Team, it provides a clear path toward becoming an active contributor, with initial access limited to five seats.
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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