#234 - WordPress 6.9 Release Squad, Voting Open For WP Accessibility Team Reps

Issue #234 | August 26, 2025 | Reading time: 16 mins

Hello!

This week on The WP Week Newsletter, we cover the WordPress 6.9 release squad, voting now open for WordPress Accessibility Team reps, the release of WooCommerce 10.1.1, 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

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🗣️TALK OF THE TOWN

WordPress 6.9 release squad announced

The release squad has been announced with Matt Mullenweg as Release Lead; Akshaya Rane and Amy Kamala handling Release Coordination; David Baumwald, Ella van Durpe, and Héctor Prieto as Tech Leads; Francisco Vera as Design Lead; Aki Hamano and Ryan Welcher as Triage Leads; and Jonathan Bossenger and Krupa Nanda as Test Leads.

📰 WORDPRESS & AROUND

All the updates around WordPress and its closely related technologies

WordPress Credits Program update

The WordPress Credits program, piloted with the University of Pisa, is moving from alpha to beta as it prepares to scale. Updates include finalizing infrastructure, refining student materials, and testing virtual classrooms on Learn.WordPress.org. Fidélitas University will join this fall with 15 students, with broader participation planned by 2026.

Voting now open for WordPress Accessibility team reps: The WordPress Accessibility Team is seeking two new Team Reps to join their ranks. The voting is open until Tuesday, August 26, 2025.
SQL injection vulnerability found in LifterLMS Plugin affecting 10K+ sites: The vulnerability that allowed unauthenticated and also authenticated users to inject a malicious SQL query into a WordPress database query execution was patched recently.
An unauthenticated arbitrary file deletion vulnerability was patched in Redirection for Contact Form 7 plugin: The vulnerability allowed unauthenticated attackers to delete arbitrary files on the server, which can easily lead to remote code execution when the right file is deleted. Users are urged to update to the patched version immediately.
15,000 WordPress sites affected by privilege escalation vulnerability in Dokan Pro WordPress plugin: The flaw allowed authenticated users with vendor-level access to take over any account, including administrators, by exploiting the plugin’s staff management functions. The vulnerability was patched in version 4.0.6.
Help TDS and its malicious plugins redirect thousands of sites to tech support scams: GoDaddy researchers uncovered that the Help TDS operation uses a malicious WordPress plugin, woocommerce_inputs, to redirect site visitors to tech support, dating, and cryptocurrency scams. The malware, installed via stolen admin credentials, also harvests user data and auto-updates itself from Help TDS servers.
WooCommerce 10.1.1 released: This release delivers UI improvements, better checkout UX, safer background actions, improved payment flows, and enhanced shipping rate flexibility.
Non-profit organization announces free domain names: The open source domains are offered by DigitalPlat, a non-profit organization that’s sponsored by 1Password, The Hack Club (The Hack Foundation), twilio, GitHub and Cloudflare.
Google Ads rolls out Asset Studio beta: The new tool positions Google Ads as a built-in creative hub, streamlining how advertisers produce and scale ad assets with AI.
Ahrefs launches tracker comparing ChatGPT & Google referral traffic: Ahrefs released a public dashboard that tracks how much referral traffic websites receive from Google Search versus ChatGPT, with monthly updates. The first dataset covers three complete months across 44,421 sites connected to Ahrefs’ free Web Analytics tool.
Google quietly announces Search Partner network placement visibility: Google quietly rolled out a change advertisers have wanted for years, site-level reporting for the Search Partner Network. Until now, advertisers could only opt in or out, with little understanding of where their ads actually showed. This update finally gives visibility into where budgets are spent outside of Google.

💵 INVESTMENTS, ACQUISITIONS & PARTNERSHIPS

BigScoots and Memberful announce partnership: The collaboration will enable Memberful clients to use premium membership website hosting on BigScoots Managed Hosting services.

👥 COMMUNITY NEWS

Updates and News from the WordPress Community

Third-party trademark violation received for the Simple Cloudflare Turnstile plugin

Elliot Sowersby says he received the mail from WordPress.org, as the plugin name contains “Cloudflare Turnstile”. He also added that he might need to rename the plugin.

Preview of the all-new PHP AI Client SDK: Felix Arntz shared an early demonstration of the WordPress PHP AI Client SDK, showcasing AI prompts being sent with it. This new SDK will allow PHP developers to interact with multiple AI providers through a single API.
PressConf 2026 early bird tickets now available: Tickets are now on sale for the event, scheduled for April 8–11, 2026, and are available at the early bird rate through September.
Checkout Summit 2026 announced: A two-day international conference for WooCommerce makers has been scheduled for April 23-24, 2026, at Palermo, Italy. The early bird tickets will be released in September, and the event is organized by Rodolfo Melogli.
LifterLMS 9.0 released: The latest release focuses on security, ease of use, and student engagement by offering advanced content protection, enhanced spam and fraud prevention, engaging memberships with featured media, an improved mobile dashboard, and so on.
DevRel project now live: This is a new project under the Linux Foundation and aims to advance the practice of Developer Relations (DevRel) by providing a centralized, community-driven hub of resources, frameworks, and guidance.
ZipWP reached a major milestone: ZipWP, the AI-powered website builder and hosting platform, now has 1 million users.
WP 2FA celebrates a milestone: The plugin now has over 80,000 active installs.
Human Made is sponsoring Rian Rietveld’s documentation initiative: The initiative by Rian Rietveld is focused on improving the current documentation in the WordPress Accessibility Handbook.
Barn2 Plugins updates how they handle 404 pages: Katie Keith shared that with AI directing users to non-existent URLs, her team is revamping 404 pages. They’re implementing keyword-based redirects and redesigning 404 pages to act as helpful signposts, improving navigation and user experience.
Kaspars Dambis on the MemberPress plugin: On X, he highlighted that using the plugin without a valid license not only incurs additional transaction fees but also causes the plugin backend to become disabled.
Andras Guseo’s one-click Google Calendar script for WordCamp US 2025: A new Tampermonkey browser script created by Andras Guseo makes it easy to stay on top of WordCamp US 2025 sessions by adding a one-click “Add to Google Calendar” button on session pages.
Introducing Topher.How: Topher DeRosia has launched Topher.How, a personal portfolio site to consolidate his content from the past 15 years.
Nick Gernert steps down as WordPress VIP CEO: After serving as CEO of WordPress VIP since 2018, Nick Gernert has stepped down to focus fully on launching a new company. Steph Yiu will now take over as the new CEO, leading VIP into its next chapter.

🚀 NEW PROJECTS

All new AskaiWP: The plugin created by Bhargav Bhandari, adds an AI-powered chat assistant to your WordPress site, and visitors can interact with it to get a summary of the current page, ask questions related to the content, and more.
Introducing Chekideh: This is a new AI-powered summarizer for WordPress created by Mahyar Rezghi.
DBlocks CodePro: A new code editor for WordPress transforms the default WordPress block editor into a powerful development environment tailored for coding and content creation.
Strict CSP plugin: This plugin enforces a Strict Content Security Policy (CSP) on the frontend and login screen. This helps mitigate cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities.
Announcing Visibility Scheduler: A WordPress plugin to schedule the visibility of blocks created by Dhananjay Kuber.
A WordPress Book Club: Aaron Jorbin is starting a WordPress Book Club to create a space for discussion and gain multiple perspectives regarding an author’s work, inspired by his previous engineering book club experience.

🔖 INTERESTING READS & PODCASTS

More posts and podcasts from the WordPress Community you don’t want to miss

Nurturing new contributors: WordPress Kolhapur community’s online contribution series: After the success of WordCamp Kolhapur 2025, the local community launched a nine-event Online Contribution Series to guide new contributors into the WordPress project. Covering areas like Core testing, translations, patterns, and WordPress TV, the initiative introduced dozens of first-time contributors and strengthened community participation. From WordCamp Central.
Patchstack case study reveals 87.8% of WordPress exploits bypass hosting security: The case study tested 11 WordPress vulnerabilities across five hosting environments and found 87.8% of attacks bypassed standard defenses, with only Patchstack’s application-layer protection blocking all exploits.
WordPress page builder accessibility comparison 2025: The ranking places Kadence first with 100%, followed by GeneratePress/GenerateBlocks, Greyd, Elementor, Greenshift, Beaver Builder, Breakdance, Bricks, SiteOrigin, Astra/Spectra, Avada, Themify, WPBakery, Thrive Architect, Oxygen, SeedProd, Divi, Live Composer, and Brizy.
The journey of building an agency: Toby and Kurt discuss the journey of agency ownership. They explore the transition from feeling like a hobbyist to establishing a legitimate business. They also examine the importance of mindset shifts, resilience, and creating boundaries for work-life balance. From The WP Minute.
Website security – What can we learn letting hackers attack test sites? – interview with Max Matłoka: The podcast explores why WordPress advocacy matters, what Max learned from letting hackers attack honeypot sites, and how the upcoming WordCamp Gdynia is opening its doors to an international community. From Osom to Know.
Post Status Happiness Hour with Remco Nieuwenhuizen: Michelle Frechette interviews Remco Nieuwenhuizen, a WordPress professional from the Netherlands and founder of WPSupporters and WPoptic. From Post Status.
A decentralized future for WordPress distribution: Chris Reynolds conversed with Ryan McCue, one of the lead software architects on the FAIR project about what FAIR is, how it works and why decentralization is a good thing. From Pantheon.
Deep-diving into AI automations: Zack Katz sits down with Jack Arturo, founder of Very Good Plugins and WP Fusion, to dig into the real-world impact of AI automations. From WP Product Talk.
Ollie’s new menu designer brings intuitive menu creation to the block editor: Built in just two weeks with the help of AI, the plugin introduces block-based mobile and dropdown menus, tackling a long-standing gap in WordPress site building. From The Repository.
WordPress VIP demos its new enterprise suite: Remote blocks and Parse.ly AI updates: A WordPress VIP webinar put the spotlight on Remote Data Blocks, Parse.ly’s new headline testing tools, and AI workflows aimed at stripping away “toil” so editorial teams can focus on their craft. From The Repository.
Weston Ruter on his blog’s web performance milestone: The blog has reached a new web performance milestone, now passing Core Web Vitals on both desktop and mobile in Chrome UX Report field data. The site’s performance optimizations are being used as a case study, with findings going into Performance Lab plugins and upcoming improvements in WordPress 6.9.
Fueled implements 140+ accessibility enhancements to WooCommerce: Fueled, in partnership with 10up, WooCommerce, and Equalize Digital, implemented over 140 enhancements across WooCommerce Core, improving screen reader support, keyboard navigation, color contrast, forms, and page structure. These updates bring WooCommerce closer to WCAG 2.2 AA compliance ahead of the European Accessibility Act. From Fueled.
Elliot Sowersby on 10 years of Coupon Affiliates: Elliot Sowersby reflects on 10 years of Coupon Affiliates, which began as a simple WooCommerce plugin to track coupon usage for a single client. Through user feedback and feature requests, it evolved into a full affiliate program solution used by thousands of businesses worldwide.

🛠 GUIDE ZONE – HOWTO’S and MORE

Handpicked fresh guides from WordPress circle

What are block patterns – A detailed breakdown: From DLX Plugin
Registering custom social icons in WordPress 6.9: From WordPress Developer Blog
Developer guide: Making WordPress block themes multilingual: From Kinsta
Block deprecation secrets only WordPress experts know: From Ryan Welcher Codes

📆 SAVE THE DATES

Do not miss a WordPress event ever again

WordCamp US on August 26-29, 2025: The call for organizers and sponsor applications is now open.
LoopConf 2025 on September 25: The full schedule is now available.
SomeConf 2025: The event is in the early planning stages. The call for sponsors and speakers is now live.
WP Suomi 2025 on October 10: The call for speakers is now open.
WordCamp Canada on October 16-17 2025: The call for sponsors is now open. The first round of the speaker list has been published.
WordCamp Asia 2026: It is tentatively planned for early February 2026 and the call for organizers is now open.
WordCamp Europe 2026 on June 4-6: The call for organizers is now open.

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