95. Maintenance mode for components

Some core WordPress components have become outdated in functionality, prompting consideration of a “maintenance mode,” keeping them stable without introducing new features.

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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 June 30th to July 6th, 2025.

The new version of Gutenberg 21.1 adds extensibility to the Social block, allowing developers to register new social networks as block variations, including custom icons.

Additionally, other blocks are adopting the new Tools Panel interface, such as the Author, Avatar, Navigation Link, and Site Logo blocks.

The Core team has proposed introducing a “maintenance mode” concept for components: an official status marking WordPress components that, although continuing to receive security updates and bug triage, will no longer accept new feature requests or enhancements unless strictly necessary for backward compatibility.

Initial candidates proposed for maintenance mode include:

• TinyMCE, now mostly limited to Classic Editor support with very few open tickets.
• Customize, largely replaced by the Block Editor, seeing activity mainly focused on triage.
• Shortcodes, whose fragile API no longer justifies additional functionality.
• Pingbacks and Trackbacks, untouched by improvements for over five years.
• XML-RPC, crucial for external integrations but unchanged significantly for more than a decade.

The Playground team introduced several updates, notably enabling network connectivity by default without compromising performance, improving PHP instance management through the PHP Process Manager to support secondary instances, and allowing simultaneous asynchronous network calls between multiple PHP instances within the same web worker.

They have integrated the Blueprints Runner version 2, paving the way for the next generation of Playground Blueprints, while version 1 remains the default.

The new SQLite driver adoption and plugin compatibility testing are also highlighted; the system could potentially run plugin tests like Plugin Check within the CLI. The strategy to phase out older PHP versions, such as 7.2, was discussed.

The release of bbPress 2.6.14 includes 20 fixes, featuring improvements for BuddyPress integration and PHP 8.2 compatibility, among other enhancements, already implemented in the upcoming bbPress 2.7 branch.

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!