149. Playlist and Tabs Blocks

WordPress 7.1 will include two new blocks: Playlist, an expansion of a media list, and Tabs, which after several iterations achieves enough maturity to be released.

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 July 20 to 26, 2026.

WordPress 7.1 Beta 3 is here, with over 71 tickets resolved since beta 1. The most visible styling update is that applying changes globally is no longer all or nothing: the “Apply globally” option in the block inspector now opens a review step where you choose which specific properties are applied globally, leaving the rest as local overrides. Several media upload issues are also fixed: long animated GIFs no longer hang, images rotated by EXIF metadata are processed correctly, and uploading a single HEIC image in Safari no longer creates two duplicate entries. Note an important cut: Unicode email address support that had been announced finally does not make it into 7.1, and its development continues as a separate community plugin.

This beta also brings a batch of technically substantive notes. The star is client-side media processing: WordPress 7.1 moves compression, resizing, format conversion, rotation, and thumbnail generation for images to the browser, instead of relying on GD or Imagick on the server. It only works in Chromium browsers; for now in Firefox and Safari it automatically falls back to the old server processing, without the user noticing any difference.

On the styling front, text shadow support arrives for global styles: for now only as a style value, without a graphical interface, which will come in the next version. The default behavior of the Media Library also changes: infinite scroll, which has been disabled by default since WordPress 5.8 for accessibility reasons, is now enabled by default.

The custom HTML block gains the ability to mix static markup with real editable blocks within the same block, locked so they can’t be moved or deleted — something explicitly designed so AI tools can generate safe-to-edit structures without needing to create a custom block.

Two other substantive updates: the React 19 upgrade is not coming to 7.1 after discovering unexpected incompatibilities between plugins and the two React versions coexisting; it remains as an activatable experiment in the Gutenberg plugin so developers can test their plugin compatibility.

SVG icons, which in 7.0 were a closed set, become a complete public API: any plugin or theme can register its own icon collection, render them in PHP, and query them via REST, with the Icon block’s icon picker already organized by collection tabs.

Gutenberg 23.6 is here, and it brings two blocks that have been hidden behind an experiment and finally move to the stable library without needing to enable anything: the Playlist block, with audio track playback, configurable metadata, album art, and waveform visualization, and the Tabs block family, which organizes content into tabs following the W3C ARIA accessibility pattern recommended by the spec, with its own controls for color, typography, and borders for navigation buttons.

Notes continue building muscle on their way to becoming a complete comment system, with two important additions: inline notes, which anchor to a specific text selection within a block rather than the entire block, and at-mention autocomplete for mentioning someone.

The Gallery also debuts a dynamic variation that automatically displays all media attached to the post, both in the editor and on the frontend, while remaining the same Gallery as always.

We also have the AI 1.2.0 plugin. The most visible update is the Suggest Reply experiment for comment moderation: from the comments screen or the activity widget, a moderator can generate a contextual response that takes into account the comment itself, the post it belongs to, and optional editorial guidelines. The suggestion is inserted directly into the inline reply form, but always remains as a proposal. Bulk content summary generation also arrives — being able to select multiple posts or pages from the list and launch the “Generate Summary” action for all of them at once, without having to enter each one individually in the editor.

The Accessibility team has a proposal to reorganize the Get Involved page, replacing the old working groups with three clearer focus areas: WordPress Core and the block editor, the Accessibility-ready program, and documentation on web accessibility in general. In parallel, the team’s handbook is being migrated to GitHub and simplified to focus on team information and onboarding for new contributors, leaving the technical accessibility guide at wpaccessibility.org.

With WordPress 7.1 betas already published, the team’s focus has shifted to bug fixes and testing heading into RC. They’re asking for help carefully reviewing newly arrived features like Notes, client-side media processing, lightbox captions, Tabs and Playlist blocks, the identity panel, or Command Palette updates.

Another important element involves the Accessibility-ready theme program. When new requirements were announced in May, the team set June 30 as the deadline for completing reviews and requiring action from theme authors; that date has already passed weeks ago without any themes being removed from the directory, so the deadline is extended to September 30, 2026. In the meantime, it’s enough for a theme author to have filled out the review request form and be working on adapting it to avoid removal from the listing; starting October 1, any theme tagged as accessibility-ready that hasn’t requested that review will be removed from search results, though existing installations will continue receiving updates normally. Pay attention, also, to an important nuance: meeting old requirements doesn’t guarantee meeting new ones, so it’s expected that practically all authors will need to make changes to their themes.

The Community team is rethinking how their monthly meetings work. Their conclusion is blunt: if a meeting can be completely replaced by a blog post, it’s not really a meeting anymore.

The proposal is to split that single meeting into two separate things. On one hand, maintain a written monthly update, published at the start of each month, collecting policy changes, WordCamps, meetups, Campus Connect summaries, and education program updates; it stops being “a meeting agenda” to become its own format. On the other hand, they propose coworking sessions: one or two-hour blocks where a group works together, in real time, on a specific team task. The underlying idea is that people don’t connect for information they can read elsewhere, but when there’s something to do together or someone to ask in the moment.

In parallel comes another related proposal: bringing back the meetup organizer newsletter, which has been inactive since July 2025. This first version proposes keeping it simple — a monthly post with upcoming and recent events from meetups, WordCamps, Campus Connect, and “next gen” formats, focusing on what organizers are actually doing. To prevent it from shutting down again from manual workload overload, as happened to the previous one, it wants to rely on Slackbot, Slack’s built-in AI, to track event channels and generate a first draft in minutes, leaving the human touch to polish, verify data, and select photos.

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!