Issue #263 | March 17, 2026 | Reading time: 20 mins
Hello!
This week on The WP Week Newsletter, we cover the three WordPress releases in a week, WPackagist being acquired by WP Engine, the launch of WP Composer, call for volunteers and organizations to support the Plugins Team, Zeel Thakkar Memorial Scholarship for WordCamp Asia 2026 new projects, and more.
Don’t forget to subscribe and listen to the podcast version of this newsletter, where you can hear more details and discussions about these topics and more.
See you next week!
Team WP-CONTENT.CO
🙌 This weekly newsletter is kindly sponsored by ProfilePress and WP Job Openings
🗣️TALK OF THE TOWN
WP Engine has acquired WPackagist, the widely used Composer repository that allows WordPress plugins and themes to be installed via Composer. Created by UK-based digital cooperative Outlandish, the service will continue to operate as a free resource following the acquisition.
WordPress.org’s X account responded to the acquisition, sharing a sharply critical message, “The parasite continues to eat the host. The cancer is trying to spread.”
He also stated that he had already started the work on a prototype WordPress Composer registry last year, and the acquisition has made him more motivated to launch it sooner and keep it community-owned.
Now, a few days after the acquisition, the team at roots.io has released WP Composer, a new community-funded Composer repository for WordPress plugins and themes. When compared to WPackagist, this offers 17x faster Composer resolve times.
📰 WORDPRESS & AROUND
All the updates around WordPress and its closely related technologies
WordPress rolls out three releases in just one week
The team first released WordPress 6.9.2 to address 10 security vulnerabilities, but it inadvertently caused a front-end bug. They followed up with WordPress 6.9.3, which fixed the front-end bug and included the 10 security fixes. However, it was later discovered that not all security fixes had been applied correctly in 6.9.3, prompting the release of WordPress 6.9.4 to fully resolve the issue.
- WordPress 7.0 Beta 5 released: This contains more than 101 updates and fixes since the Beta 3 release.
- WordPress 7.0 updates: The upcoming version adds a new textIndent typography support, enabling blocks to opt in to CSS text-indent functionality, with the Paragraph block being the first core block to implement it. Besides, the first major release of 2026 will also bring new changes, such as custom CSS for individual block instances, expands contentOnly editing to unsynced patterns and template parts align, and also include dimensions support enhancements.
- Contribute to the Plugins Team: Francisco Torres shared that the Plugins Team is seeking both volunteers and organizational support to keep up with rapidly growing plugin submissions. Volunteers can join the team and help by reviewing plugins, while organizations can get involved by dedicating team members or supporting contributors. The deadline to submit the application is 27 March 2026.
- WordPress launches my.WordPress.net: This is a browser-based environment that lets users run WordPress directly in their browser with no sign-up, hosting plan, or domain setup required, and it will remain available when users return, even after closing the tab. The platform is built using WordPress Playground.
- Monthly Education Buzz Report – February 2026: Key updates include continued growth of WordPress Campus Connect, with 28 events reaching nearly 4,000 students across 51 institutions, and new series planned in Spain, Indonesia, and other regions.
- Call for volunteers: Twenty Twenty-Seven default theme: The theme will ship with WordPress 7.2, set for early December 2026. Interested contributors wishing to participate should comment by March 27th.
- WordPress Test Team opens call to test real-time collaboration: WordPress 7.0 introduces real-time collaboration (RTC) in the block editor, and testers are invited to try it and provide feedback.
- AI Experiments 0.5.0 released: This updates the plugin to align with WordPress 7.0, removing its own AI client dependencies in favor of core AI functionality and setting WP 7.0 as the minimum supported version. The release also improves Connector integration, migrating AI credentials to the Connectors screen.
- What’s new for developers? (March 2026): Key updates include progress toward the WordPress 7.0 release, with features such as real-time collaborative editing, AI provider connector packages, and visual in-editor revision tracking. The update also highlights updates to plugins, tools, and more.
- WordPress Playground reduces PHP.wasm size by 122 MB: The team reduced the size by 122 MB (13.7%) through compiler optimizations that eliminate unused code while keeping all features intact.
- WordPress Photo Directory crossed 30k photos: The WordPress Photo Directory has reached 33,067 published photos with contributions from 2,846 contributors and moderation by 34 moderators. The Top contributors are Bigul Malayi (3,117 photos), Topher DeRosia (1,227 photos), and Manjil Aryal (923 photos).
- WooCommerce 10.6.1: Dot Release: This is a maintenance release that fixes issues with product attribute handling in the Add to Cart block, improves payment gateway ordering in settings, and corrects how shipping package titles are displayed.
- 30,000 WordPress sites affected by authentication bypass vulnerability in Tutor LMS Pro WordPress plugin: The vulnerability allowed unauthenticated attackers to access any account, including administrators. The flaw impacted versions up to 3.9.5 and was patched in version 3.9.6. Users are urged to update immediately.
- 400,000 WordPress sites affected by unauthenticated SQL injection vulnerability in Ally WordPress plugin: This vulnerability allowed attackers to extract sensitive database information. The flaw impacted versions up to 4.0.3 and was patched in version 4.1.0. Users are to update immediately.
- Wordfence Intelligence Weekly WordPress Vulnerability Report (March 2, 2026 to March 8, 2026): There were 201 vulnerabilities disclosed in 84 plugins and 107 themes.
🔧 TIP OF THE WEEK
Use ACF Options Page for Global Settings
Stop hardcoding theme settings across multiple templates. ACF’s Options Page lets you manage global fields from one central place—perfect for site‑wide content.
What to Store in Global Options
Use it for anything reused across your theme:
- Header phone number
- Footer social links
- CTA button text
- Logos or brand assets
Once added via ACF Options Page, retrieve values like this:
get_field(‘phone’, ‘option’);
👥 COMMUNITY NEWS
Updates and News from the WordPress Community
A fully funded initiative aimed at supporting women from India and Nepal who wish to attend the event in Mumbai from April 9–11. The scholarship plans to support up to 10 women who have never been to WordCamp Asia.
- WordPress 7.0 is scheduled to be released on Contributor Day at WordCamp Asia 2026: The event will give attendees a chance to learn about the WordPress release process, participate in testing and collaboration, and engage directly with members of the release squad.
- The Elementor Partner Program for agencies and freelancers launched: The program offers benefits such as early access to product updates, priority support, increased visibility through a partner directory and marketing opportunities, tools for managing client sites, and potential new revenue streams.
- rtCamp turned 17: As rtCamp marks its 17th anniversary, the company outlines a major shift toward integrating AI across its business, from engineering and delivery to marketing and operations.
- Website Accessibility Testing Checklist: Interested folks can request access to Equalize Digital’s Accessibility Testing Checklist by Component Google Sheet, which includes 626 checks for 33 components, a Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Quick Reference, and a checklist building tool.
- Introducing Gravity Perks Sliders: This adds interactive, draggable sliders to Gravity Forms, giving users a more natural way to input values.
- Modular DS introduces updates to the uptime monitor and Patch & Protect: The various improvements to the uptime monitor now feature a more reliable downtime detection, detailed check logs, real-time uptime stats, improved email alerts, extended SSL information, and flexible customization options. Patch & Protect add-on also gets enhancements, including a centralized security dashboard, configurable security rules, and white-label support. Also, now over 40k websites are connected to Modular DS.
- SEOPress 9.6 released: The latest update added the ability to freeze a post’s modification date to avoid unnecessary SEO updates, an option to add a Facebook domain verification meta tag, and support for importing global settings from the SmartCrawl plugin. The release also includes AI model updates, migration improvements, and multiple bug fixes.
- Plugin Check Plugin 1.9.0 released: This adds support for WordPress 7.0 AI connectors, improves block metadata and admin menu checks, new checks for external admin menu links, fixes issues with PayPal URLs, and so on.
- Duplicator Pro introduces one-click staging and cloud site recovery: The update adds one-click staging sites created from backups and remote cloud restores, allowing users to test changes safely and recover sites even if their server becomes completely inaccessible.
- MemberPress AI Course Generator is now available: The add-on offers a chat-based interface, with which users can generate course structures, lesson content, and quizzes in minutes, then edit and refine the material before publishing.
- New debugging features in WordPress Studio: The update adds support for Xdebug, along with easier access to debug logs.
- New milestone for WP 2FA: The plugin now has over 100,000+ active installations.
- Ollie now fully supports WooCommerce: The release includes templates, tools, blocks, patterns, and a set of designs.
- Turbo Admin development to resume: Ross Wintle announced that development of the Turbo Admin WordPress browser extension will resume after a period of limited activity due to work, events, and personal commitments.
- Lauren Dierschke calls for transparency on the maintenance and future of Kadence WP: She expressed concerns over slow support, limited development visibility, and urged the Kadence team to clarify who is maintaining the product and its future direction for the community. Jack Kitterhing, Director of Product at Liquid Web, responded that the team is committed to Kadence and plans to share updates soon.
- Revamped WordPress.org featured plugins tab boosts visibility for new plugins: Nick Hamze shared how his recent initiative, which pushed an update to the Featured Plugins tab, rotating newer, lesser-known plugins, has significantly improved their visibility. Early results show sharp increases in installs, demonstrating how in-dashboard placement can help independent developers reach more users.
- Bigul Malayi receives the Yoast Care fund for his contribution to the WordPress community: Bigul Malayi, a member of the WordPress Community Team is the latest recipient of the Yoast Care fund.
- Jeff Paul is supporting the Open Source Endowment: As a founding donor, he is backing the initiative aimed at creating a sustainable, long-term community funding model for critical open source infrastructure.
🚀 NEW PROJECTS
| “I wanted to turn my WordPress sites into shareable demos without the pain of writing Blueprint JSON by hand.” Ciprian Popescu about creating the Blueprint Exporter. |
- Blueprint Exporter: Created by Ciprian Popescu, the plugin allows you to export your WordPress site configuration as a WordPress Playground Blueprint JSON file.
- Two new plugins by Wbcom Designs: WB Member Wiki plugin adds a collaborative wiki to your WordPress site, and the SnipShare plugin turns your site into a full code-sharing platform, versioned, searchable, and integrated with BuddyPress.
- Local-wp-mcp: A MCP server developed by Christopher Smith, providing WP-CLI, MySQL, and filesystem access for Local by Flywheel WordPress sites.
- Smart Social Schedule: The plugin developed by Veena Prashanth allows users to completely automate their social media marketing. It offers features such as AI content creation, ability to publish to 10 platforms, competitor research, and much more.
- Smart Sale Scheduler for WooCommerce: The plugin allows users to schedule multiple WooCommerce product sales with precise start/end times.
- Purrlink: The plugin by Boyd BcodeCraft uses AI to automatically generate natural bridge sentences for internal links.
- RetainWoo: Developed by Bikash Pun, the plugin allows store owners to intercept WooCommerce subscription cancellations and show a beautiful pop-up with retention offers before the subscriber leaves.
- WP Button Variations Checker: A plugin by Aki Hamano to visually verify button design variations in bulk.
- Monitor: The plugin by Stefano Lissa adds monitoring features to a WordPress site that are useful when trying to identify an issue. It logs events with context (like frontend, backend, or cron), monitors emails, HTTP monitoring, and more.
- Wannacheckout: The plugin by Jose Tamu provides beautiful modal checkouts for SureCart.
- ABC Integrity: A new file integrity monitoring plugin for WordPress.
- Orbisius Markdown: The plugin by Orbisius lets users paste markdown from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, or any other markdown-first writing tool into supported Gutenberg blocks and render it as clean HTML on the frontend.
- Wp-cli-local: An AI agent skill by Per Søderlind that runs WP-CLI commands against Local (by Flywheel) sites on macOS.
- CampaignBay: The plugin allows users to create automated discount campaigns directly from their WordPress dashboard.
- Sortacular: The plugin by Ronald Huereca sorts the admin menu and submenu items alphabetically while excluding core WordPress items.
🔖 INTERESTING READS & PODCASTS
More posts and podcasts from the WordPress Community you don’t want to miss
- Coen Jacobs reflects on the fear of voicing the unpopular opinion within the WordPress ecosystem.
- In this episode of Seriously, Bud?, Bud Kraus conversed with Joost de Valk about his journey into WordPress, the creation of Yoast SEO, and his life after selling the company. They also discuss his current projects, including Progress Planner.
- On The WP Minute’s Agency Action Podcast, Kurt and Toby discuss the impact of AI on agency strategies, the challenges of complex projects, and the value of productizing services, and more.
- Robby McCullough conversed with David McCan about how he built and manages the Dynamic WordPress Facebook group, which has grown to more than 14,000 members.
- For International Women’s Day 2026, WebDevStudios highlighted the women behind its enterprise WordPress work and their journey into tech, noting that women make up 50 percent of its team, well above the industry average.
- Mike McAlister shared his honest thoughts on how AI is going to affect WordPress and what it means for products like Ollie.
- Ciprian Popescu explored the new PHP-only block registration feature coming in WordPress 7.0, which allows developers to create Gutenberg blocks without relying on JavaScript tooling like React, Node.js, or build pipelines.
- Derek Hanson shared practical, real-world tips for building custom WordPress blocks using Telex AI.
- Crafted with Code showcased standout WordPress sites recognized in the 2025 Webby Awards, and notably, 30 percent of all Webby-recognized websites and mobile sites were built on WordPress, and 43 percent of those were powered by WP Engine.
- Andrija Vucinic from Automattic’s Systems Operations team shared a case study on upgrading the company’s large fleet of database servers to MariaDB 11.8 with almost no downtime.
- Jamie Marsland argues that the most effective way to scale WordPress education is to embed learning directly into the product. Instead of relying on tutorials and courses, he highlights how AI can let users learn by building.
- Gaurav Tiwari shared a complete technical breakdown of his WordPress block editor setup.
🛠 GUIDE ZONE – HOWTO’S and MORE
Handpicked fresh guides from WordPress circle
- Speed up your designs with WordPress patterns: From WordPress.com
- Creating ACF Blocks with Novamira and Claude Code: From David McCan
- PHP-only Blocks + AI Skills: Zero-build WordPress development in 7.0: From Brian Coords
- How to Connect Claude AI to WordPress using MCP: From WebDevStudios
- How to add a custom AI provider to WordPress 7: From Per Søderlind
📆 SAVE THE DATES
Do not miss a WordPress event ever again
- WordCamp Asia 2026 on April 9-11: The call for sponsors is open. The tickets are available, and visa information details have been published, and also the list of speakers has been announced.
- Pressconf 2026 on April 8-11, 2026: The tickets are now available, and the first round of speakers has been announced, with more to be revealed soon. The schedule is out.
- WordCamp Vienna 2026 on April 10-11: The tickets are now available, and the call for sponsors is also open. The schedule has been published.
- Checkout Summit 2026 on April 23-24, 2026: The call for sponsors is now open. The tickets are now available.
- WordCamp Europe 2026 on June 4-6: The call for sponsors and volunteers is now open. The tickets are also now available.
- WordCamp US, Phoenix on August 16 -19 2026: The call for organizers is now open.
- WordPress Accessibility Day 2026 on October 7th-8th: The call for sponsors is now open.
🎁 WORDPRESS DEALS OF THE WEEK
Again, these are the best deals of the week, handpicked by yours!
EXCLUSIVE DEALS
- 4 Months free offer on hosting plans of WP Engine (Coupon Code- FREEDOMTOCREATE)
- 10% off on monthly & annual plans at SureTriggers (Coupon Code- WPCONTENT10)
- Up to 84% off at Hostinger (Code NYSALE for an extra 10% off)
- 15% off yearly plans at Videvo (Coupon Code – WPV15)
MORE DEALS
- 30% off for 4 months on Cloudways + 10 Free migrations ( Promo code- TREAT25).
- Up to 50% off on BookingPress plugin
- Up to 50% off on Paid Membership Pro plans.
- Up to $100 OFF Essential Blocks PRO plugin.
- 50% off 3 months on Liquid Web’s Bare Metal server hosting
- 20% off for Constellation plugin
- 28.65% off for the lifetime plan for the Modern Cart for WooCommerce plugin.
- 33% off for the Uncanny Automator plugin.
This weekly newsletter is kindly sponsored by awesome WordPress Companies 🦸♂️🙌
Last but not least, updates from WP-CONTENT.CO 👇
WordPress 7.0 will be the first major release of 2026, scheduled for release on April 9, 2026, live…
The WordPress Contributor Dashboard pilot is now live, mapping contributor activity across Make WordPress teams into a contributor…
State of WordPress Security In 2026 report by Patchstack in partnership with Monrax reveals that a total of…
Joost de Valk and Karim Marucchi, co-founders of FAIR, announced that they are stepping back from the FAIR…
Team WP-CONTENT.CO
Issue #263 | March 17, 2026 | Reading time: 20 mins
This weekly newsletter is kindly sponsored by ProfilePress, and WP Job Openings
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