More and more new features are being discovered about WordPress 6.9, including the addition of the math formulas block.
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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 October 27 to November 2, 2025.
WordPress 6.9 beta 2 is now available for testing, with over 33 improvements in the editor and 28 core fixes since Beta 1. This version focuses on refining bugs and preparing for the final release.
It can be tested using the WordPress Beta Tester plugin, direct download, WP-CLI, or WordPress Playground, where it runs directly in the browser. The final release is still scheduled for December 2, 2025.
Gutenberg 21.9 arrives with several new blocks, such as the Math Block for LaTeX formulas, the Breadcrumbs Block to display navigation paths, and the Term Count and Term Name blocks for managing taxonomies. The Accordion Block is now stable and adds anchor support, ready for WordPress 6.9.
The drag-and-drop system has been improved — blocks now move directly instead of showing a placeholder. DataViews also gains persistence, so view customizations in templates or patterns are preserved between sessions unless manually reset by the user.
Discussions in the Core Program addressed how to better recognize contributor work in WordPress. Common challenges identified include defining what counts as valuable contribution, the lack of uniformity between teams, and the difficulty of tracking non-technical contributions.
Among the improvement opportunities, the team proposed documenting all existing recognition methods, updating the highlighted contributors section, and exploring recognition systems used in other projects like GitHub. The goal is to create a fairer, more transparent framework to acknowledge the efforts of those contributing to the ecosystem — especially in less visible roles.
The Core-AI team has celebrated an important milestone: the Abilities API has been officially merged into the WordPress 6.9 beta, marking its first integration into core. This API allows abilities to be registered and retrieved from the server, laying the groundwork for future artificial intelligence features in WordPress.
The next phase will focus on the client side (JavaScript), which did not make it in time for the beta. The team plans to move its development to the Gutenberg repository to take advantage of its infrastructure and maintain consistency with the block editor. Work is also underway on post-merge cleanup, documentation improvements, and defining the maintenance strategy for the new system within core and the AI Experiments plugin.
WordPress Playground introduces a new built-in file browser, allowing users to create, edit, and test files directly from the browser — without needing to upload or compress anything. Users can work on themes, plugins, or even WordPress core, as well as debug blueprints or review file structures.
The interface also improves with three major updates: a dedicated reload button that refreshes only the active instance without restarting WordPress, a repositioned settings panel to manage PHP and WordPress versions, and the ability to name saved instances for better organization.
The Plugins team announced that the Plugin Check plugin now automatically generates security reports whenever a developer updates their plugin on WordPress.org. This improvement analyzes both new and existing plugins, detecting potential security, compatibility, or compliance issues.
For now, the results are reviewed internally, but the goal is for authors to receive an immediate email report after each update. This aims to strengthen best development practices and prevent vulnerabilities before they reach end users, improving the overall security of the WordPress ecosystem.
The Polyglots team has updated the translation platform so that OpenAI’s GPT-4.1 and GPT-5 models are now available on translate.wordpress.org. Translators can choose between the nano, mini, and standard versions of each model from their account settings.
This integration expands automatic translation assistance options, improving the quality and speed of AI-generated translation suggestions for WordPress.
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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