Issue #243 | October 28, 2025 | Reading time: 19 mins
Hello!
Halloween is just around the corner and there are only two months left in 2025! Today we cover Automattic/WP Engine legal battle, Matt’s anniversary, acquisitions, new products and security issues.
If you are planning a Black Friday sale for your WordPress product, let us know it here and we’ll spread the word.
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 and WP Job Openings
🗣️TALK OF THE TOWN
On Friday, WordPress.com maker Automattic filed its counterclaims in the lawsuit initiated by hosting company WP Engine in October 2024. Mullenweg tweeted “After a year of just playing defense, @automattic has finally had a chance to file its counterclaims against @wpengine and @silverlake_news.” WP Engine released the following statement: “WP Engine’s use of the WordPress trademark to refer to the open-source software is consistent with longstanding industry practice and fair use under settled trademark law, and we will defend against these baseless claims.” Duane Storey also tweeted his thoughts on this development.
📰 WORDPRESS & AROUND
All the updates around WordPress and its closely related technologies
WordPress 6.9 Beta 1 was released last week. WP 6.9 will be the second major release of WordPress this year, expected to be released on 2 December 2025. Krupa Nanda of Testing Team has published a detailed guide on testing WordPress 6.9.
- Matt Mullenweg celebrates 20th anniversary at Automattic: It’s been 20 years since he began building Akismet and WordPress.com. Though the founder, Automattic’s HR system lists him as the second employee — he had to complete a few projects at CNET before officially joining in October.
- Gutenberg 21.9.0 released: This release introduces three new blocks – MathML, Term name and Term Count blocks, and 16 bug fixes.
- WooCommerce 10.3 released: Brian Coords shared that COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) is now part of WooCommerce core, and WooCommerce MCP is available for testing in beta. COGS introduces backend UI enhancements alongside REST API and programmatic API changes while Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that allows AI applications to securely connect to external data sources and tools. Jamie Marsland’s shared 10 ways WooCommerce MCP could make your storefront actually exciting.
- Matt Mullenweg calls Tumblr acquisition his biggest failure: Mullenweg shared his concerns at WordCamp Canada Town Hall session, “I need to switch [Tumblr] over to WordPress, but it’s a big lift. It’s over 500 million blogs, actually, and, as a business, it’s costing so much more to run than it generates in revenue.” “It’s probably my biggest failure or missed opportunity right now, but we’re still working on it,” he added.
- The Community Team is looking for help from developers: The areas they need help are in improving their ticketing system – CampTix, advancing GatherPress, so official WordPress Chapter Meetup groups can use an open-source solution and expanding the events platform and add new features like a WordPress events app.
- New WP Coding Standard Proposal to make it explicit that PHP files must use the .php extension: The current WordPress Coding Standard does not specify which file extensions should be used for PHP files. This proposal establishes that only the
.phpfile extension should be allowed for PHP files. - Mass exploit campaign targeting Arbitrary plugin installation vulnerabilities: Wordfence reported Arbitrary Plugin Installation vulnerabilities in the GutenKit and Hunk Companion WordPress plugins making it possible for unauthenticated threat actors to install and activate arbitrary plugins. Update to at least GutenKit version 2.1.1 and Hunk Companion version 1.9.0 as soon as possible.
- FAIR and Patchstack to introduce FAIR Software Security Assistant at CloudFest USA 2025: A conversation at LoopConf earlier this year has led to a new open-source security initiative called FAIR Software Security Assistant, connecting FAIR with Patchstack’s vulnerability intelligence platform. The collaboration will debut at the inaugural CloudFest USA Hackathon on November 4, 2025, in Miami.
- Amelia and Seahawk: Partnering to empower the WordPress community: Through this partnership, they’ll work together on education and awareness, ecosystem building and community collaboration.
- Tatva is now open source: It’s a lightweight library of custom elements ready to drop into your project with simple tags.
- AI assistants show significant issues in 45% of news answers: A cross-market study of 2,709 AI-assistant responses found 45% had significant issues and 81% had some issue. Gemini had the most issues with sourcing.
- OpenAI expands ChatGPT’s collaboration features to all users: OPenAI announced that it is upgrading all ChatGPT accounts to be eligible for the project sharing feature, which enables users to share a ChatGPT project with others who can then participate and make changes.
- Surfer SEO acquired by Positive Group: The French technology group Positive acquired Surfer, the popular content optimization tool. The acquisition of Surfer extends Positive’s reach from marketing software to AI-based brand visibility.
- Utopian Labs joins Zapier: As part of the transition, Utopian Labs will wind down its operations in the coming weeks and its founders Steven Nelemans and Robin Salimans will join Zapier.
- Perplexity responds to Reddit lawsuit over data access: Reddit sued Perplexity and three data-scraping firms in New York federal court, alleging the companies bypassed access controls to obtain Reddit content at scale. Perplexity posted a public response, saying it summarizes Reddit discussions with citations and doesn’t train AI models on Reddit content.
👥 COMMUNITY NEWS
Updates and News from the WordPress Community
WordPress Bhopal marked its 10th anniversary with the WP Build Tour 2025, visiting six colleges across Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. The sessions helped students build websites from scratch while introducing them to the WordPress community, career paths, and ways to get involved.
- 2025 WordPress Youth Day, Nicaragua hosted 75 people aged 8–20 years: The event was organized by a group of volunteers from the Nicaraguan WordPress community, and supported by the WordPress LATAM community. The highlight was three teenage speakers, aged 12-14, who led talks on security, finance, and web tools.
- Michelle Frechette nominated for the WomenTech Global Awards 2025: The Executive Director of Post Status is nominated in the WomenTech Network Speaker of the Year category. The virtual ceremony on December 04 will honor the most accomplished women in tech and allies.
- Crocoblock State of Dynamic WordPress Survey 2025 launched: It’s a a quick 5–10 minute study exploring how developers build and manage dynamic WordPress sites.
- State of Web Designer Pricing Survey 2025 results are out: This report is based on 208 survey responses from web designers. Nearly 34% of respondents earn $50k+ annually; 12% report $100k+ annual revenue. Project-based pricing leads at 82% across all revenue bands.
- The Divi 5 Beta has arrived: Divi 5 has entered its Public Beta, the final stage before launch. While it’s been available for new sites, some key features needed for existing sites were previously missing.
- AIOSEO 4.8.8 released: It introduces AI Assistant Block (that writes entire blog posts in your editor) and AI Image Generator (that creates custom visuals and images from text prompts).
- WS Form’s integration with Elementor’s Angie AI: You can now create and edit forms in WordPress using Angie and WS Form. This collaboration showcases the potential of MCP-based automation within WordPress.
- Get ready for LearnDash 5.0: This version introduces a modernized REST API, built to make LearnDash more reliable, scalable, and ready for the next generation of learning tools. LearnDash will connect seamlessly with Elementor’s Angie and other AI tools too.
- InstaMCP adds “MCP Server” capability to any WP site: It’s entirely written in PHP, so need for local/remote node server. Add it to your Chat clients or IDEs in 1-click.
- Document Library Pro now comes in two versions – Essentials & Advanced: Essentials is for simple document libraries; Advanced is for larger organisations that need features like access control, bulk import, version control, and more.
- Five year anniversary of the Gutenberg Nightly plugin: Birgit Pauli-Haack celebrated the 5-year anniversary of the Gutenberg Nightly. The first version was released on October 15, 2020.
- AmiWorks turns 16: AmiWorks is an Indian firm building integrated web based solutions and is behind WPoets, BasicPlot, Awesome Enterprise and WisdomTab.
- GoSMTP crossed 500K Active Installs on WordPress: GoSMTP allows you to send emails from your WordPress over SMTP or many of the popular email sending services.
- Cristian Raiber is looking to acquire WordPress plugins: He does not want any AI wrappers or addons for pagebuilders and/or extensions for other plugins. He’s also offering a $500 finders fee.
- WordCamp Canada 2026 is looking for new co-leads: They’re also welcoming new volunteers who want to contribute in smaller but equally meaningful ways. If you’re interested, fill out the interest form by October 30th.
- Md Shahjahan Jewel points out location-based product comparison: “Comparisons can be full of crap. That’s understandable. Everyone wants to look good. But turning someone’s home country into a negative? That’s low. That’s not competition. That’s not marketing. That’s small, childish, and honestly? It feels like racism… Let’s keep WordPress kind. No borders. Just heart.”, he tweeted.
🚀 NEW PROJECTS
- Brand Assets plugin from Joost de Valk: A WordPress block plugin that allows you to easily display your company’s brand assets on your website. Perfect for showcasing your brand identity, color schemes, and design guidelines.
- David Allsop’s Plugin Boilerplate for WordPress (PB4WP): A lightweight, best-practice boilerplate for building WordPress plugins quickly and cleanly.
- Fresh Rank plugin from Themeisle: Automatically find, analyze, and update your underperforming articles with AI-assisted content optimization.
- Free Shipping Excluder for WooCommerce plugin from Nagesh Pai: It gives you granular control over which products count towards your free shipping minimum amount.
- VebAPI Keyword Research plugin from VebAPI: A simple admin-only keyword research plugin.
- New Progressify plugin: Progressify is an all-in-one plugin that empowers your website with Progressive Web App (PWA) features, to make it faster, smoother, and feel like a real app.
- Pixar Labs beta launches Orkap: Orkap is an all-in-one outreach and link building platform. They are looking for Beta Testers to test the features, report feedback, and enjoy special early-bird benefits like discounted plans.
🔖 INTERESTING READS & PODCASTS
More posts and podcasts from the WordPress Community you don’t want to miss
- Things you might have missed about the Playground project over the past few months: Automattic’s developer advocate Fellyph Cintra lists the new features you may have missed over the past months.
- Automattic’s legal claims about SEO… Is this real?: Search Engine Journal looks into Automattic’s counterclaim against WP Engine citing SEO, arguing that search engines consider keyword frequency.
- Wordfence Intelligence Weekly WordPress Vulnerability Report (October 13, 2025 to October 19, 2025): Wordfence reported that 118 vulnerabilities were disclosed last week across 99 WordPress plugins and 7 themes, all of which have been added to the Wordfence Intelligence Vulnerability Database.
- How to do WordPress & security: Remkus de Vries warns that if you’ve been relying on a single plugin to “handle” security for you, it’s time to rethink the approach entirely.
- The glaring security risks with AI browser agents: TechCrunch shares cybersecurity experts believe AI browser agents pose a larger risk to user privacy compared to traditional browsers.
- ChatGPT’s Atlas: The browser that’s anti-web: Anil Dash talks about the dangers from an anti-web browser made by an AI company — one that probably needs a warning label when you install it.
- How to choose a web design company you’ll love working with: WordPress.com explores how much it costs to build a website in today’s market, highlight key considerations in your evaluation, and recommend questions to ask potential providers.
- Do lifetime licenses really cost more to support? We finally have the data: WP Product Talk analyzed six years of Barn2’s real support data to discover how long lifetime customers actually need help, and whether the higher price truly covers the long-term cost.
- Revitalizing the stagnant web: Reflections from WordCamp Canada: Jonathan Desrosiers shares his experience at WC Canada.
- How to resolve pain points in your client’s WordPress workflow: Speckyboy’s Eric Karkovack explores some techniques for identifying and resolving your client’s WordPress pain points.
- How to become a WordPress developer: A zero-to-hired roadmap: Nick Schäferhoff discusses in WordPress.com about everything you need to begin developing with WordPress professionally.
- Seth Rubenstein on Block Composability in WordPress’ Future:Seth Rubenstein, Head of Engineering at Pew Research Center, shares his work stories with WP Tavern and highlights why this is the perfect time for developers and plugin builders to experiment, get involved, and help shape WordPress.
- The PressConf Story: How Raquel Manriquez launched the best WordPress business conference: In this episode of the PublishPress Podcast, Raquel joins Dan and Steve to chat about bringing PressConf to life. PressConf is the spiritual successor to Pressnomics, a business-focused WordPress conference.
- How to add value-based pricing to your WordPress agency: Kurt von Ahnen and Toby Cryns discuss the complexities of pricing strategies for agencies in this episode of The WP Minute’s Agency Action podcast.
- Attribution: Jonathan and Luke of Crossword podcast discuss the copying of plugins and the history of doing so in the WordPress ecosystem.
- An unexpected conversation with Jamie Marsland: In this episode of Seriously, Bud?, Jamie explains his career in content creation, attributing his success to his extensive teaching background and passion for the process of creating informative and engaging videos.
🛠 GUIDE ZONE – HOWTO’S and MORE
Handpicked fresh guides from WordPress circle
- Styling accordions in WordPress 6.9: From WordPress Developer Blog
- Malware using variable functions and cookies for obfuscation: From Wordfence
- How to Create Transparent Sticky Header in WordPress? Dhruv Rathee Style: From TechGrill
- Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) explained: What it is and how to defend against it : From Wordfence
- WordPress Code for Adaptive reading time calculator: From WP Solver
📆 SAVE THE DATES
Do not miss a WordPress event ever again
- WordCamp Bhopal 2025 on December 20-21: The premier WordPress conference in Central India is looking for Sponsors, Speakers and Volunteers.
- WordCamp Nepal 2026 on January 23-24: The early bird tickets are now available, and the call for speakers is now open.
- WordCamp Asia 2026 on April 9-11: Share your ideas now to make Contributor Day unforgettable. The call for speakers, sponsors, volunteers and media partners is also now open.
- SomeConf 2026 on April 22-23: The tickets are now available.
- Checkout Summit 2026 on April 23-24, 2026: The call for sponsors is now open. The second batch of 50 tickets is on sale now
- WordCamp Europe 2026 on June 4-6: The event is in the early planning stages, and the venue will be the ICE Kraków Congress Centre Kraków, Poland.
🎁 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)
- 15% off yearly plans at Videvo (Coupon Code – WPV15)
MORE DEALS
- 30% off for 4 months on Cloudways + 10 Free migrations ( Promo code- TREAT25).
- 25% off on WS Form
- 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
- 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 👇
A conversation at LoopConf earlier this year has led to a new open-source security initiative called FAIR Software…
WordPress 6.9 Beta 1 is now available and is open to testing and feedback. This will be the…
WordCamp Nepal 2026, scheduled to take place from January 23–24, 2026, in Butwal, has opened calls for speakers…
When developing a website, the areas of focus are the content, design, performance, and security to make sure…
Team WP-CONTENT.CO
Issue #243 | October 28, 2025 | Reading time: 19 mins
This weekly newsletter is kindly sponsored by Kinsta and WP Job Openings
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