Issue #251 | December 23, 2025 | Reading time: 16 mins
Hello!
This week on The WP Week Newsletter, we cover the 2026 WordPress release schedule, the contributor dashboard pilot project, WP Gives A Hand 2026, ACF Pro 6.8 beta 1 release, 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 Kinsta, and WP Job Openings
🗣️TALK OF THE TOWN
Jonathan Desrosiers outlines the proposed WordPress 2026 release schedule with three major releases: 7.0 on April 9 during Contributor Day at WordCamp Asia, 7.1 on August 19 on the final day of WordCamp US, and 7.2 in early December around the State of the Word event.
📰 WORDPRESS & AROUND
All the updates around WordPress and its closely related technologies
Kel Santiago-Pilarski shares details on the Contributor Dashboard Pilot, a project to track and visualize contributor activity across WordPress Make teams. A limited pilot launch is planned for the end of February 2026. Contributors can get involved by helping build, test, and refine the dashboard and plugin, or by reviewing contribution signals.
- WordPress 6.9 Release Retrospective: Akshaya Rane invites the community to provide feedback on the WordPress 6.9 release cycle, processes, and release squad. All perspectives are welcome, whether from active contributors or casual observers. Feedback will be collected via a form, open until January 15, 2026 and anonymized for a follow-up summary post. This helps improve future releases.
- Call for volunteers to support WordPress Education Programs: Pooja Derashri invites the community to volunteer for WordPress Campus Connect initiatives. Volunteers are needed to assist with design work, including website themes and badges, as well as documentation tasks like reviewing the Education Handbook, Community Handbook program pages, drafting the WPCC Office Hours guide, and creating a Resources page. Interested contributors can comment on the post or join the discussion in the #campusconnect Slack channel.
- What’s new in Gutenberg 22.3: This release adds a dedicated Fonts page for easier typography, improved image editing with persistent crop and zoom, and a responsive Grid block for layouts across devices along with several other bug fixes and improvements.
- WooCommerce 10.4.3: Dot Release: This includes a security patch for the Store API, bug fixes for cart and HPOS sync issues, and automatic Euro currency support for Bulgaria.
- Critical arbitrary file upload vulnerability in Motors Theme affecting 20k+ sites: The flaw allowed any logged-in user, including Subscribers, to install and activate plugins, enabling full site takeover. It was patched in version 5.6.82 by and users are urged to update immediately to prevent exploitation.
- Google files DMCA Suit targeting SerpApi’s SERP Scraping: Google sued SerpApi in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging the company developed methods to bypass protections Google deployed to prevent automated scraping of Search results and the licensed content they contain.
🔧 TIP OF THE WEEK
Use inc/ folder for all functions
Instead of stuffing everything into functions.php, split logic:
require get_template_directory() . '/inc/theme-support.php';
require get_template_directory() . '/inc/post-types.php';
require get_template_directory() . '/inc/acf-options.php';
Cleaner, modular, easier to debug.
👥 COMMUNITY NEWS
Updates and News from the WordPress Community
Through the initiative, participating companies donate a percentage of their sales to charity. To date, the movement has raised close to 60000 dollars for 19 different charities. In 2025, a total of 9 WordPress companies are participating, contributing donations during the final week of the year from December 22 to December 28 2025.
- Introducing CSS Grid Lanes: This introduces a native, standards-based way to build masonry-style layouts directly in CSS without JavaScript. Built on top of CSS Grid, it lets browsers automatically place items into flexible lanes (columns or rows), balancing content by height while preserving accessibility and source order.
- Sybre Waaijer on WooCommerce sending data without opt in: He highlighted that WooCommerce makes requests to a WooCommerce endpoint that return promotional rules and include user data, despite no opt-in. He argues this violates WordPress plugin guideline 7 on undocumented external data usage and criticizes how the guidelines are enforced.
- Stephen Wolfram has joined as a special advisor to Automattic: He is known for creating Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha, and the Wolfram Language, and brings decades of experience in computational thinking and scientific research.
- Do the Woo Podcast is back, returning as a dedicated WooCommerce show: Hosted by James Kemp and Katie Keith, the podcast will focus on WooCommerce topics, from product strategy and industry trends to technical workflows through lively, community-driven conversations with merchants, developers, and agencies. Episodes will be live-streamed monthly, allowing audience interaction and Q&A. The relaunch kicks off with Matt Mullenweg, WordPress co-founder, discussing WooCommerce’s future, and listeners are encouraged to suggest topics, guests, and questions.
- GoDaddy launches ANS Marketplace for Trusted AI Agents: The platform showcases ANS-verified AI agents with cryptographically verifiable identities. It features tools for businesses like brand advisors, homepage analyzers, and social media generators, along with 20 WooCommerce agents.
- Elementor 3.34 developers update: The update continues developing the Editor V4 with atomic design principles, introducing Nested Tabs, Entrance Interactions, and improved core systems for consistent, predictable styling. The update enhances layout control, accessibility, and CSS-first workflows while refining editor performance and frontend output. Features remain experimental as Editor V4 is still in Alpha.
- ACF PRO 6.8 Beta 1 released: This release introduces support for the WordPress Abilities API, enabling structured, secure, and machine-readable access to ACF field groups, custom post types, and taxonomies.
- Accessibility Checker v1.36.0 released: Steve Jones announced the release, featuring more accurate passed-test percentages, improved detection of invalid alt text, smarter link validation for menu items, and more reliable scan settings.
- James LePage invites feedback on new AI WordPress Plugin experiments: He highlighted a set of experimental ideas and pull requests for the AI WordPress plugin, inviting feedback from the community. The updates explore adding more AI providers, request logging, typeahead functionality, MCP support, and AI-assisted comment moderation.
- WP Engine’s 2025 Website Traffic Trends Report: The report shows the web is increasingly dominated by AI-driven and automated bot traffic, with 76% unverified. This shift makes intelligent traffic management essential for controlling costs, improving performance, and delivering stable user experiences. Sites that adopt HTTPS, proactive security, and CDNs load faster and handle automation-heavy traffic more efficiently, while mobile performance and high-growth regions like Asia and Latin America lag behind.
- WordPress.com migrated 3600 Typepad blogs: When Typepad announced its shutdown, WordPress.com helped 3,684 blogs migrate before the 30-day deadline. Many archives included thousands of posts, images, and comments dating back years. The team handled tricky exports and ensured creators’ work was preserved, giving bloggers a stable new home and a fresh start on WordPress.com.
- How AI helps you capture and convert more leads guide: This guide explains how AI can help marketers capture and convert more leads by tracking and optimizing every campaign. It shows how to identify top-performing channels, eliminate wasted spend, uncover content opportunities, and accelerate lead-to-customer conversions using real-time data, helping businesses make smarter, revenue-focused marketing decisions.
- Telex can now see image references: Jamie Marsland highlighted an experimental feature where Telex can now see. He uploaded an image reference and it instantly built a Pinterest-style masonry grid and even set the columns and gaps.
🚀 NEW PROJECTS
| “I built an app. The other day I wanted to test how link previews would look across as many social platforms as I could. I’d love your feedback about the entire vibe-coded app. Pros & cons.” –Courtney Robertson about developing the OG Preview Lab |
- Simple block animations: The plugin created by Valentin Grenier, adds scroll-triggered animations to WordPress Gutenberg blocks without any coding required.
- The Simplest of Popups: Created by Matt Cromwell, the plugin displays modal popups with content from WordPress Synced Patterns and with no build process required.
- OG Preview Lab: The new project by Courtney Robertson shows how link previews will look across different social media platforms along with quality scoring and smart validation.
🔖 INTERESTING READS & PODCASTS
More posts and podcasts from the WordPress Community you don’t want to miss
- Bud Kraus, on this episode of Seriously, Bud? conversed with Brian Coords about family, music, and his journey from teaching English to becoming a WooCommerce developer advocate.
- In this episode of WP Legends, Gautam Khurana spoke with with Kevin MacGillivray, CMO at Pressable, about his journey from Shopify to leading marketing at a high-performance WordPress hosting platform. Kevin shares insights on marketing in the WordPress ecosystem, WooCommerce adoption, AI in eCommerce, and how Pressable is driving growth and innovation.
- Matt Medeiros, on this episode of The WP Minute+, hosts a panel discussing WordPress predictions for 2026. Panelists Raquel Manriquez, Kurt Von Ahnen, and Eric Karkovack explore changes to WordCamps, the rise of plugin suites, AI’s impact on hosting, and the evolving WordPress community, offering insights on legal battles, user experience, and the future of the platform.
- Matt Cromwell explored why sales for WordPress products may feel tougher and why the market isn’t to blame. He argues that in a maturing ecosystem, good enough products no longer guarantee growth. Instead, success in 2026 will favor shops that create truly remarkable products and adopt continuous, customer-focused go-to-market strategies.
- Marko Ivanović reflects on the power of details in design, using the WordPress 6.9 release as a canvas to explore the intersection of craftsmanship, music, and collaboration.
- David Allsop advises taking proactive steps to prevent WordPress and WooCommerce issues from ruining your Christmas. Key tips include avoiding last-minute updates, ensuring reliable backups, testing checkout and email workflows, clearly communicating holiday hours to customers, securing your site, and tidying up for a smoother start to the new year.
- Joost de Valk explores whether WordPress’s “generalization tax” is a liability or a long-term advantage in an AI-driven world and why he believes it remains the smartest architectural base.
- Dries Buytaert (founder of Drupal) argues that much of Drupal’s most useful code never gets shared because of the generalization tax. In this post, he explores a new idea, adaptable module, site-specific, production-tested code meant to be adapted with AI, not installed as-is, and why this model may better fit the future of Drupal development.
- What happens when you try to build a website using nothing but your voice? In this video, James Welbes takes on a challenge from Mark Zemansky, ditching the keyboard to test whether AI-powered tools can really turn spoken design instructions into a working website.
- After hands-on experimentation with multiple CMSes, Aurooba Ahmed reflects on the growing gap between the theory of fully decoupled, headless content and how content teams actually work.
- Hosting reviews can be some of the most profitable affiliate content, but only when they’re written with trust and clarity in mind. This guide from Automattic Affiliates breaks down how to structure honest, reader-focused hosting reviews that provide real value and consistently drive higher conversions.
- Kevin Geary shows that in modern visual development environments, BEM often outshines Tailwind, with cleaner workflows, automated naming, and easier CSS management.
🛠 GUIDE ZONE – HOWTO’S and MORE
Handpicked fresh guides from WordPress circle
- How to create a high-converting landing page with WordPress (Free Blueprint): From Jamie Marsland
- Build a complete WordPress website in Studio – No server setup required : From Elliott Richmond
- Using WordPress Playground to work with AI agents: From WordPress.tv
- Creating commands for the Commands Palette: From JuanMa Garrido
- How to add automated unit tests to your WordPress plugin: From WordPress Developer Blog
- Word Switcher: Extending Core Blocks with Interactivity: From WordPress Developer Blog
- How to protect your site from content sniffing with HTTP security headers: From Sucuri
📆 SAVE THE DATES
Do not miss a WordPress event ever again
- WordCamp Nepal 2026 on January 23-24: The early bird tickets are now available, and the call for sponsors is now open.
- WordCamp Asia 2026 on April 9-11: The call for Wapuu designs and sponsors is 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 early bird tickets are now available.
- WordCamp Europe 2026 on June 4-6: The call for speakers, sponsors, and media partners is now open. The tickets are also now available.
🎁 WORDPRESS DEALS OF THE WEEK
Again, these are the best deals of the week, handpicked by yours!
EXCLUSIVE DEALS
- Black Friday and Cyber Monday WordPress Deals 2025 are now live.
- 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).
- 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 👇
Sybre Waaijer, the founder of The SEO Framework, has launched Troy, an open-source system for distributing WordPress plugins…
WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg delivered the annual State of the Word address on December 2, 2025, in San…
The WordPress AI team has released version 0.1.0 of its new AI Experiments plugin, marking the first public…
The WP Community Collective (WPCC), in collaboration with GoDaddy, has launched the 2025 Contributor Day Table Lead Appreciation…
Team WP-CONTENT.CO
Issue #251 | December 23, 2025 | Reading time: 16 mins
This weekly newsletter is kindly sponsored by Kinsta and WP Job Openings
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