Introducing a new team within WordPress: Make Core AI.
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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 25th to June 1st, 2025.
WordPress has announced the creation of a new team dedicated to artificial intelligence (AI) within its ecosystem. This team aims to accelerate and coordinate AI projects across the entire platform, ensuring innovation aligns with community values and core WordPress standards.
Forming this team aims to avoid fragmented efforts and provide a unified strategic approach to developing AI-powered functionalities. Additionally, it will adopt a development approach based on canonical plugins, similar to the Performance team’s method, enabling rapid iteration, collecting feedback, and delivering real value without relying on core releases.
The AI team consists of members with extensive experience in open source, performance, and product development, including James LePage from Automattic, Felix Arntz and Pascal Birchler from Google, and Jeff Paul from 10up. James and Felix will initially act as team reps, supporting organization, communication, and coordination with other Make WordPress teams.
The community is invited to join the “core-ai” Slack channel to participate in conversations and contribute to the development of the initial roadmap, contribution guidelines, and other organizational aspects, which will be shared in the coming weeks.
Gutenberg 20.9 introduces significant improvements to the editing experience and accessibility of the block editor. Highlights include enhancements to the contentOnly editing mode, which now allows direct editing of blocks such as Code, More, and Table, facilitating a more fluid, content-focused writing experience. Additionally, role attributes have been added to various blocks, including Custom HTML, RSS, and Details, improving accessibility for users relying on assistive technologies.
In terms of user interface adjustments, post-view links from the publish panel now open in a new tab, and the block settings for the Search block have been reorganized into the sidebar inspector.
The Community team has announced that the GatherPress project has adjusted its strategy following discussions with the Meta team, since, although the technical tests conducted in 2024 were useful, they were not sufficient for a complete evaluation. Thus, they have decided to begin a real-world test with selected local communities, using a self-hosted GatherPress installation that will also include BuddyPress. This phase will commence with the release of plugin version 0.33.0.
Additionally, new features are under development, including recurring event management, email notifications at event start times, and event federation via ActivityPub. Plugins to integrate GatherPress with other plugins are also being created.
This week, WordCamp Europe 2025 takes place in Basel, Switzerland, with approximately 2,000 attendees expected. All teams are ready for Contributor Day and two intense days of talks and networking.
Tickets have also gone on sale for WordCamp US 2025, scheduled for late August in Portland, Oregon.
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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