Hello!
This week on The WP Week Newsletter, we cover the latest layoff at Automattic affecting 16% of their workforce across 90 countries. WordPress 6.8, releasing next week, will be the last major release of this year, as shared by Mary Hubbard.
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 Kinsta, Omnisend, and WP Job Openings
🗣️TALK OF THE TOWN
The company has cut its workforce by around 16% across 90 countries, reducing the total number of employees from 1,777 to 1,495. CEO Matt Mullenweg informed employees of the decision, citing the need to improve productivity, streamline operations, and ensure long-term financial sustainability.
📰 WORDPRESS & AROUND
All the updates around WordPress and its closely related technologies
Mary Hubbard shared that Gutenberg releases will continue on the current two-week schedule and minor releases will take place as needed throughout the year. Minor releases will continue and happen as necessary with a more relaxed barrier for inclusion of enhancements, but the “no new files in minor releases” rule should continue to be followed.
- WordPress 6.8 Release Candidate 2 is out: If you encounter an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums or directly to WordPress Trac.
- WooCommerce 9.8 and 9.9 release cycle update: The team decided to postpone the stable tag update of WooCommerce 9.8 to Wednesday, April 9th, 2025, pending the results of internal testing of an upcoming 9.8.1 stable version. WooCommerce 9.9 will be delayed by approximately one month to allow teams more time to focus on quality and stability following discovery of a rare situation where the Store API could trigger a fatal error in a user’s cart.
- Aggregate data for March 2025 about WordPress Core contribution on Trac published: In March, the WordPress Core team shipped 226 commits. 190 people contributed to WordPress source code using Trac and 34 people made their very first contribution to WordPress Core. Most contributors were from India (43) followed by USA (19).
- Volunteers at WordCamp events will now receive a dedicated profile badge on WordPress.org: This update recognizes the invaluable contributions of volunteers who help make WordCamps successful worldwide. WordCamp organizers can assign volunteer badges through the WordCamp site.
- New Core Performance Team Reps for 2025 announced: Aditya Dhade and Shyamsundar Gadde are the new Team reps. Both are working at rtCamp.
- WordCamp Europe 2025 is looking for Contributor Day table co-leads: The event is on 5th June, 2025.
- Privilege Escalation vulnerability patched in Uncanny Automator WordPress plugin: This vulnerability could be used by authenticated attackers, with subscriber-level access and above, to grant themselves administrative privileges by updating the user role.
- WPML 4.7.3 released with a security patch: The identified issue poses a low risk for most websites, but the team strongly recommends upgrading sites.
- Google has upgraded its AI Mode in Search with new image search features: You can now upload pictures and ask questions about what you see. The feature combines Google Lens with Gemini’s reasoning abilities. AI Mode is rolling out to more people.
- Microsoft launches Copilot Search in Bing: Microsoft has released Copilot Search in Bing combining AI-generated summaries with regular search results. Copilot Search aims to give users quick answers with clear source links.
- Studies reveal consumers easily detect AI-generated content: Two new studies reveal that most consumers can easily spot AI-generated content, both images and text, which may be more than marketers expected.
💵 INVESTMENTS, ACQUISITIONS & PARTNERSHIPS
- Cloudflare acquires Outerbase: As part of this transition, the hosted Outerbase cloud will shut down on October 15, 2025, and Outerbase’s core features will be integrated into Cloudflare’s platform.
👥 COMMUNITY NEWS
Updates and News from the WordPress Community
Smart automation meets AI agents with this rebranding. The name “Otto” is Inspired from automation, embodying their core mission while Kit refers to toolbox for automation—everything you need, all in one place.
- Michelle Frechette joins the Do the Woo Hosting Team for WordPress Event Talk: Stay tuned to meet Michelle and jump into conversations about the community and the events.
- Post Status has re-enabled Slack Pro: Use discount ‘poststatus50’ for a $50/year membership.
- WordCamp Europe 2025 schedule is out: The event is from 5 – 7 June 2025 at Basel, Switzerland. There are 52 speakers from 23 countries. It concludes with a Fireside chat with Mary Hubbard and Matt Mullenweg.
- WordCamp Canada is looking for Volunteers: If you join the WCEH25 team, you will be needed to work throughout WordCamp Canada over the two days it takes place at Carleton. All volunteers will get free admission and an event t-shirt.
- WP Accessibility Day Call for Speakers is open: Submissions close May 26. This year will have a new format for the event. Your talk will need to be pre-recorded and submitted beforehand.
- Gumroad is officially open source: After 14 years of helping creators earn over $1,000,000,000, they’re giving everyone direct access to their entire codebase.
- 2025 WordPress Professionals Survey is open: This is the 4th Annual WordPress Professionals Survey from The Admin Bar — a short, anonymous survey to collect real data on what freelancers and agencies charge, how they work, and what tools they use.
- Ads injected in WordPress block editor?: Morgan Hvidt drew the community’s attention to plugin ads being shown in the editor.
- Gravity SMTP turning one: They are giving away three Gravity Forms 12-month Elite licenses to mark the occasion.
- Vishal Mukadam receives the Yoast Care fund: Vishal has been an active member of the WordPress Mumbai community. He has volunteered at WordCamps and helped people solve their WordPress-related issues.
🚀 NEW PROJECTS
- WPCoven: a new voice for WordPress technical insights and practical guidance: It will focus heavily on the WordPress block editor ecosystem from a strategic perspective and will cover block plugins, block-based themes, and development techniques that maximize Gutenberg’s potential.
- New open-source Github-mcp-server released: GitHub released a new open source, official, local GitHub MCP Server. They worked with Anthropic to rewrite their reference server in Go and improve its usability.
- Hassan El Mghari released self.so: It is an open source personal site builder powered by Together.ai.
- OpenAI released OpenAI Academy: This platform has dozens of hours of content and is free. You can learn basically any AI knowledge or skill with videos and events.
- Cloudflare AutoRAG released: a fully managed Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline powered by Cloudflare, designed to simplify how developers integrate context-aware AI into their applications.
🔖 INTERESTING READS & PODCASTS
More posts and podcasts from the WordPress Community you don’t want to miss
- Making WordPress play nicely with AI through MCP: Jamie Marsland explains how to make platforms like WordPress ready to work with AI Assistants.
- The real impact of a WordPress ban: Taco Verdonschot breaks silence on Matt Mullenweg removing Joost de Valk from the speaker lineup at WordCamp Asia and not allowing him to contribute to the WordPress ecosystem in any formal way and Progress Planner being prevented from sponsoring any WordPress events.
- Why enterprises should be all-in on WordPress Multisite: Simon Cooke on why enterprises love WordPress Multisite. From Human Made.
- 20 years of Git. Still weird, still wonderful: History of Git through the eyes of Scott Chacon, the former cofounder of GitHub.
- A WordPresser goes to DrupalCon Atlanta 2025: Pantheon’s Chris Reynolds shares his experience attending the event.
- Etch’s “Auto Block Authoring” feature is … MAGICAL!: Kevin Geary on how EtchWP is transforming the WordPress experience.
- AI answering service for websites?!: WP Minute Tutorials on how Rosie, an AI phone answering service, can simplify your web agency or freelance business inbound phone calls.
- Birgit Pauli-Haack on the magic of the WordPress Playground: She joined Nathan Wrigley of WP Tavern for an in-person conversation, recorded at WordCamp Asia in the Philippines about Playground.
- Two decades running a WordPress agency: On this episode of the WP Minute+ Podcast, Matt chats with Toby Cryns, founder of Minneapolis-based agency The Mighty Mo!, about what it’s like to run a WordPress agency for 20 years.
🛠 GUIDE ZONE – HOWTO’S and MORE
Handpicked fresh guides from WordPress circle
- Easy ways to edit your WooCommerce product page design: From Codeable
- Making block content hide or appear in WordPress: From Kinsta
- How to use GitHub Deployments on WordPress.com: From WordPress.com
- What is cPanel (& Why doesn’t WordPress.com use it)?: From WordPress.com
- How to troubleshoot & debug WordPress code with AI: From Speckyboy
📆 SAVE THE DATES
Do not miss a WordPress event ever again
- DE{CODE} 2025 on April 15, 2025: The registrations are now open.
- Web Agency Summit on April 7-11, 2025: The registration is now open.
- PressConf 2025 on April 23-26: A conference for WordPress Professionals and the tickets are now available.
- WordCamp Lisboa 2025 on May 16-17, 2025: Tickets are now available.
- WordCamp Europe on 5-7 June 2025: Tickets are expected to be available soon.
- WordCamp US on August 26-29, 2025: The call for organizers is now open.
- WordCamp Canada on October 16-17 2025: The call for sponsors is now open.
- WordCamp Asia 2026: It is tentatively planned for early February 2026 and the call for organizers is now open.
🎁 WORDPRESS DEALS OF THE WEEK
Again, these are the best deals of the week, handpicked by yours!
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- 4 Months free offer on hosting plans of WP Engine (Coupon Code- FREEDOMTOCREATE)
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MORE DEALS
- 50% off for the first 6 months on all monthly standard plans at Kinsta
- 50% off 3 months on Liquid Web’s Bare Metal server hosting
- 20% off for Constellation plugin
This weekly newsletter is kindly sponsored by awesome WordPress Companies 🦸♂️🙌
Last but not least, updates from WP-CONTENT.CO 👇
Automattic has undergone a major restructuring, cutting its workforce by around 16%, bringing the total number of employees…
In a joint white paper released by Patchstack and Sucuri, alarming new findings reveal that the increasing use…
WordPress 6.8 “Cecil”, the only major release of 2025, has finally arrived. This version brings style book support…
The WordPress Foundation has successfully obtained trademarks for “Managed WordPress” and “Hosted WordPress” in the UK and Australia…
Team WP-CONTENT.CO
This weekly newsletter is kindly sponsored by Kinsta, Omnisend, and WP Job Openings
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