Issue #258 | February 10, 2026 | Reading time: 19 mins
Hello!
This week on The WP Week Newsletter, we cover Automattic partnering up with UIC, the release of WordPress 6.9.1, a proposal for merging WP AI Client into WordPress 7.0, two plugins up for sale, 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, ProfilePress and WP Job Openings
🗣️TALK OF THE TOWN
The funding will help power the UIC Tech Solutions Open Source Fund and its first offering, AI Leaders. The hands-on course provides training in generative AI, offers participants a WordPress micro-credential, includes paid training, and connects students to jobs that require practical AI skills.
📰 WORDPRESS & AROUND
All the updates around WordPress and its closely related technologies
This minor release fixes 49 bugs across Core and the Block Editor, improving the block editor, mail, and classic themes.
- Proposal for merging WP AI Client into WordPress 7.0: Felix Arntz has put forth a proposal that suggests merging the WP AI Client into WordPress 7.0 to provide a provider-agnostic AI foundation in Core.
- Content Guidelines: A Gutenberg experiment: This experiment proposes introducing Content Guidelines in WordPress as a central place to define site-wide content standards. The goal is to keep content consistent across authors and tools while laying a foundation that future AI features can rely on, without being AI-dependent itself.
- Marketing Lessons from WordCamp Asia: Nicholas Garofalo shared key marketing insights from WordCamp Asia 2026, highlighting that timely News posts, cultural content, and Showcase entries drove engagement and traffic but had little impact on ticket sales.
- Hosting Team Reps for 2026 announced: Zunaid Amin will continue his role and will be joined by returning rep Amy Kamala and new rep Chris Reynolds.
- Voting open for WP Community Team Reps for 2026: The nominees are Mary Mojisola Job, Lidia Arroyo Vargas, Mariano Pérez Caro, Luis Miguel Climent, Alex Cuadra, and Juan Hernando. The voting closes on 24 February 2026.
- What’s new in Gutenberg 22.5: This release brings custom CSS support for individual blocks, List View Improvements, and so on.
- Call for Testing: Exploring New AI Experiments: Jeffrey Paul is calling for testing of new AI features in the AI Experiments plugin, and these experiments cover user-facing features, developer tools, and a hybrid experiment.
- WordPress Campus Connect: January 2026 feedback highlights: Destiny Kanno shares key feedback from January 2026 WordPress Campus Connect events, highlighting strong hands-on learning, effective facilitators, and growing global reach. She also outlines recurring challenges around technical setup, content accessibility, and post-event engagement, along with planned improvements to strengthen future events and create more sustained student involvement.
- Wordfence Intelligence Weekly WordPress Vulnerability Report (January 26, 2026 to February 1, 2026): Last week, there were 120 vulnerabilities disclosed in 107 plugins and 10 themes.
- WooCommerce 10.5 released: This brings scalable analytics for high-volume stores, better multi-package shipping display, performance improvements, API updates, and so on.
- WordPress.com has launched an official Claude connector: This lets users securely connect Claude to their sites for read-only access to real site data, enabling insights like traffic, comments, and content performance.
- Introducing OpenAI Frontier: A new enterprise platform built to help organizations create, run, and scale AI agents that handle real tasks.
🔧 TIP OF THE WEEK
WP Performance Tip: Turn Off Unnecessary WordPress Bloat
WordPress loads a lot by default—much of it isn’t needed for every site. Cleaning this up reduces clutter and speeds up the frontend.
Remove Unused Head Elements
Disable unnecessary scripts and metadata added to <head>:
remove_action( ‘wp_head’, ‘wp_generator’ );
remove_action( ‘wp_head’, ‘rest_output_link_wp_head’ );
remove_action( ‘wp_head’, ‘wp_oembed_add_discovery_links’ );
Why This Matters
- Reduces extra HTML output
- Improves page load performance
- Lowers security exposure (version info, unused endpoints)
Pro Tip: Only remove features you’re sure your site doesn’t use (like REST links or oEmbed). Less bloat = cleaner markup + faster themes. Small tweaks like this make a big difference in theme performance.
💵 INVESTMENTS, ACQUISITIONS & PARTNERSHIPS
- Atarim has a new investor: Eugene Levin, President of Semrush, is the new investor.
- Two WordPress plugins up for sale: Çağdaş Dağ has announced the sale of two WordPress plugins currently listed on WordPress.org. Both plugins are stable, freemium products with over 10,000 active installs each. Interested folks can DM him for more information.
👥 COMMUNITY NEWS
Updates and News from the WordPress Community
WP Engine unveiled a new publishing platform called Newsroom, aimed at helping media companies manage content creation and newsroom operations through a single platform. The launch comes a month after WP Engine acquired Big Bite, bringing the company’s newsroom workflow expertise and editorial technology into WP Engine’s platform.
- WPGivesAHand 2025 Recap: The fifth year of the WPGivesAHand initiative brought together participating WordPress companies to collectively donate $ 7,135 to five charities, highlighting the community’s ongoing commitment to giving back.
- WP Engine and DreamHost bag Stevie Awards: DreamHost received a Bronze Stevie Award for Best Use of AI in Customer Service for its AI-assisted website builds, and WP Engine earned a Silver Stevie Award for AI and Tech Focused Digital Transformation Team of the Year.
- ForthFocus is now an official WordPress.com partner: This development marks a new milestone in its 10-year journey.
- Groundworx Core has been restructured: What was once a single all-in-one plugin is now a bundle of four focused plugins: Query Filters for interactive Query Loop filtering, Showcase for carousels and sliders, Cards and Sections for hero layouts and scroll animations, and Tabs and Accordion for responsive tabs with an accordion fallback.
- Winden is now available in the plugin repository: The Tailwind CSS Compiler for WordPress was open-sourced a few weeks earlier.
- Scanfully has introduced Broken Media Monitoring: This helps site owners detect failing images, scripts, videos, and more.
- BackupBliss relaunched: It is the first WordPress backup and migration plugin to offer free cloud backup storage (1GB) as part of their own cloud solution. The relaunch includes a major overhaul of the plugin, with the free version now offering free integrations for Google Drive and other cloud storage providers. Lifetime license options are now available for the pro version.
- DesignSetGo 2.0 launched: The update introduces three new blocks, 150+ patterns, 12 homepage templates, shape dividers, and many more.
- WP Test Utils 1.2.1 is here: The PHPUnit Polyfills and BrainMonkey dependencies were updated, along with compatibility verified for PHP 8.4/8.5.
- MailerPress v1.3 is now available: This version adds integration for FluentForms, embeddable forms support, automatic double opt-in reminders, and several other enhancements.
- Fluent Support 2.0 released: This version introduces a completely redesigned interface, improved ticket management, smarter reporting, workflow enhancements, and so on.
- WPCodeBox v1.3.1 is now available: This release adds AI code execution, Gemini and OpenRouter model support, custom model options, and much more.
- FluentCart 1.3.10 released: This release adds Full Site Editing support, introduces new Gutenberg blocks, and several styling improvements. The release also includes important tax, renewal, and theme compatibility fixes.
- Simple Download Counter v2.3 launched: The update adds a Micro API for download counts, new shortcodes for categories and multiple links, and so on.
- SureForms 2.5.0 released: This update adds more control and security, with select features available only in SureForms Premium, including custom lost and reset password forms, field-level restrictions, and expanded IP and keyword restrictions. It also improves translation support, prevents empty form pages, and includes several other fixes for a smoother experience.
- Press This 2 0 with Gutenberg: Press This is back with a modern rebuild using the Gutenberg block editor. It keeps the same fast bookmarklet workflow while adding real blocks, better content handling, and a cleaner modern foundation. The Alpha release is now available on GitHub.
- Quiz add-on for WPForms: The add-on makes building quizzes fast and easy, offering graded, personality, and weighted quizzes.
- Marcel Bootsman highlighted the upcoming WordPress Admin refresh: He highlighted a visual refresh for WordPress 7.0 admin aimed at modernizing the look, aligning with the WordPress Design System, and maintaining backward compatibility.
- All new Textream: This is a free macOS teleprompter app for streamers, interviewers, and presenters. It highlights your script in real-time as you speak, displayed in a beautiful Dynamic Island overlay.
🚀 NEW PROJECTS
| “The hardest part of adopting the Abilities API isn’t writing wp_register_ability(). It’s figuring out which of your 200+ hooks actually deserve to be an ability. That’s a manual, boring, error-prone task.” Lax Mariappan about creating Abilities Scout. |
- Abilities Scout: The plugin built by Lax Mariappan scans any installed WordPress plugin and discovers potential abilities for the Abilities API.
- Image to Design Tokens: Created by Breon Williams, this is a privacy-focused tool for designers and developers who need to extract color palettes from images and generate design system tokens.
- Central WP: A new platform launched by Jordan Unegbu, this is a managed WordPress hosting dashboard that brings all customer sites into a single unified interface, replacing cPanel with a purpose-built WordPress experience that includes staging, backups, CDN integration, and built-in security.
- Strakture: This is an AI-powered WordPress pattern generator developed by Aleksandr Samokhin, and the waitlist is now open.
- Two new plugins by Jonathan Bossenger: WP Ollama Model Provider provides local and cloud AI model support (Ollama) for the WordPress AI Client, and WP OpenRouter Provider plugin provides OpenRouter as an AI model provider for the WordPress AI Client library.
- Two new plugins by Per Søderlind: Admin Coach Tours is an AI-powered interactive tutorials for the WordPress block editor and PS Design System plugin allows users to extract design systems from WordPress themes using deterministic parsing and AI synthesis.
- WooDev Extension Starter: Developed by Brian Coords, this is a scaffold for building modern WordPress/WooCommerce plugins with React admin interfaces, REST APIs, and Gutenberg blocks.
- Elevated Extensions launched: Created and launched by Soflyy, Elevated extensions feature three plugins, Elevated Discount Rules for WooCommerce, Elevated Product Search for WooCommerce, and Elevated Instagram Feed.
- WP-OpenClaw: Developed by Chris Huber, this allows users to deploy a WordPress website that is fully controlled by an AI agent.
- WordPress.com MCP Skill: Developed by Tom Willmot, this allows connecting Codex (and other MCP-capable clients) to WordPress.com using OAuth 2.1 + PKCE, then run site/content/account workflows through the official WordPress.com MCP server.
- WP Git Sync: The plugin by Brad Vincent allows users to sync posts/meta to a Git repo and pull changes back with diffs.
- Dynamic Inspector for Elementor: A powerful frontend inspector and navigator for Elementor that helps developers debug, inspect elements, and analyze performance.
- Site RPG Block: A new project by Justin Nealey, gamifies website growth by transforming your site into an RPG character with stats, levels, and mini-games. The block was showcased during the Plugin Jam Hackathon.
- Cloudflare Made Easy course: This new course by Jonathan Jernigan teaches how to set up domains, manage client DNS, understand core concepts, and apply security and performance essentials without plugins.
- Free Website Assessment Tool by Clio Websites: Nat Miletic announced the launch of the tool on X, which provides reports highlighting website performance, accessibility, SEO, content freshness, and best practices.
- Daily OS: Developed by James Giroux, this is a productivity system built on Claude Code.
🔖 INTERESTING READS & PODCASTS
More posts and podcasts from the WordPress Community you don’t want to miss
- On The WP Minute+ podcast, Matt Medeiros talks with Kevin MacGillivray of Pressable about his moving from Shopify to WordPress, marketing challenges, AI’s impact, and Pressable’s plans for partnerships and community in 2026.
- Pat Walls spoke with Katie Keith, who explained how she built a portfolio of 19+ apps, common misconceptions about app portfolios, and more.
- This episode of WP Tavern Jukebox podcast features Miriam Schwab discussing Elementor’s decade of growth and how AI is shaping the future of WordPress.
- James LePage highlighted a surge of visible AI progress in WordPress, pointing to new proposals, APIs, experiments, and tooling that are rapidly shaping the platform’s AI foundations. He also discussed Agent Building in WordPress.
- 2025 was a year of momentum for Kinsta, marked by leadership changes, meaningful product updates, and a continued focus on fast, reliable WordPress hosting as the team looks ahead to 2026.
- Johanne Courtright explains why she chose Gutenberg over Elementor.
- Rino de Boer streamed a live session experimenting with Elementor V4, building a section with an overflowing image and animated text slider, showing the process in real time.
- Nick Hamze argues that AI isn’t a replacement for WordPress, but a powerful addition to it.
- Pablo Postigo shared his experience of experimenting with Studio & Claude Cowork.
- Jonathan Desrosiers shared thoughts on offering criticism in open source projects.
- Ambiya Siddiqui shared her journey and lessons from the first WordCamp Nepal 2026.
- A travel guide for WordCamp Asia 2026 attendees, highlighting easy and popular getaways from Mumbai for those extending their stay before or after the event.
- The 2026 Agentic Coding Trends Report by Anthropic identified eight trends that they predict will define agentic coding in 2026.
🛠 GUIDE ZONE – HOWTO’S and MORE
Handpicked fresh guides from WordPress circle
- How to block AI crawler bots on WordPress to reduce bandwidth: From HostWP
- From Abilities to AI Agents: Introducing the WordPress MCP Adapter: From WordPress Developer Blog
- Debugging WP-Cron with WP-CLI: From Delicious Brains
- WordPress Full Site Editing (FSE): Complete Guide 2026: From AttoWP
- How to stop spam orders on your WooCommerce website: From Speckyboy
- Why Google indexing is slow (and what you can do about it): From CrawlWP
📆 SAVE THE DATES
Do not miss a WordPress event ever again
- WordPress DevDay on February 21, 2026: The tickets are now available.
- WordCamp Nice on March 06, 2026: The call for sponsors and volunteers is now open.
- WordCamp Madrid on March 06-07, 2026: The call for sponsors, speakers, and volunteers is now open. The tickets are also available now.
- WordCamp Asia 2026 on April 9-11: The call for sponsors and participants for the Speed Build Challenge is open. The tickets are still available, and visa information details have been published, and also the list of speakers has been announced.
- 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 sponsors is now open. The tickets are also now available.
- WordCamp US, Phoenix on August 16 -19 2026: The event is in the early planning stages.
🎁 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 👇
After a long break, we’re excited to welcome readers back to our WP-Professional of the Month series. We’re…
Automattic has backed a new open-source education initiative at the University of Illinois Chicago, supporting the launch of…
WP Engine unveiled a new publishing platform called Newsroom, aimed at helping media companies manage content creation and…
The FAIR Project has published its 2026 roadmap, outlining three major milestones scheduled for April, August, and December…
Team WP-CONTENT.CO
Issue #258 | February 10, 2026 | Reading time: 19 mins
This weekly newsletter is kindly sponsored by Kinsta, ProfilePress, and WP Job Openings
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