In the past year, there has been an 80% increase in new plugin submissions for approval, many of them related to artificial intelligence.
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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 May 19th to 25th, 2025.
In the past year, new plugin submissions to the WordPress directory grew by 87% compared to the previous year, practically doubling the rate observed since September 2024. This growth is largely attributed to the introduction of automated tools, improvements in the internal scanning system used by the review team, and the increasing impact of artificial intelligence in the evaluation and publication process. The scanner’s capabilities have been enhanced with AI to detect issues and duplicate names, and the integration of the Plugin Check Plugin tool since September 2024 has reduced approval issues by 41%, keeping initial review times minimal despite the surge in submissions.
Plugins including “AI” in their title have experienced exponential growth, especially in categories such as chatbots, content generators, ecommerce, SEO, and multimedia generation.
In recent weeks, two new Gutenberg versions were released, 20.7 and 20.8, and version 20.9 will soon follow.
In Gutenberg 20.7, previously when coloring text in WordPress you were limited to choosing a solid color, but now the formatting library allows adjusting the transparency level—the “alpha channel”—making colors as soft or intense as desired.
Additionally, in the navigation view, you no longer need an extra click to display submenus; they now appear expanded by default.
And when pasting a table in Markdown, it instantly converts to a table block, preserving column alignment.
In Gutenberg 20.8, the definition of text-domain has been included with Create Block, an important enhancement for translations.
Also, in template or pattern listings, you now have an integrated search box to filter by name instead of scrolling endlessly.
Several bugs were also addressed: you can now edit the HTML of invalid blocks to fix incorrectly closed tags, and the Spacer block within a Row no longer adopts negative margins.
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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