Hi,
There is good news for me and good news for you.
The good news for me: with my five-year anniversary at Automattic, I get to go on a 3-month sabbatical, starting this week. It also means not only a break from Automattic but also from the WordPress community, a place that kept me engaged for the last 17 years. So that’s going to be a little weird for me. When I get back, I’ll let you know how it went.
The good news for you: my colleague Justin Tadlock will keep publishing Weekend Editions on Gutenberg Times while I am away. If you’ve read his tutorials on the WordPress Developer Blog or his earlier posts here on the Gutenberg Times, you know you’re in excellent hands. Not every week, but enough to tide you over during my pause.
And, just to give serendipity a chance, I will be at WordCamp Athens in December. Until then, all the best to you, your business and your family. I’ll be back.
Yours, 
Birgit
Developing Gutenberg and WordPress
Karol Król‘s first look walks you through six features of WordPress 7.1 worth your attention: responsive styles, the new Tabs block, the Media Editor, the admin bar’s wider reach, hover and focus pseudo states, and the latest Notes updates. A useful orientation if you’ve been meaning to sit down with the release but haven’t had a chance to click around in the editor yet.
The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #134 – Gutenberg 23.7, 23.8, WordPress 7.1 and more with special guest Jessica Lyschik, Greyd.
Plugins and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners
Change one header and it changes everywhere — that’s the part templates make easy and the part that trips people up. Wes Theron’s seven-minute walkthrough on editing WordPress templates covers the difference between editing a page and editing its template, how to tell which template a page uses, and how to work through List View. Along the way you’ll remove titles across pages, add a site-wide banner, drop featured images from all posts, and reset a template when you’ve gone too far.
Your wp-admin, but as a desktop: OpenStation opens admin screens as draggable, resizable windows with a dock built from the admin menu, plus virtual desktops, snap-to-grid, wallpapers, and a Cmd+K palette. It’s opt-in per user, patches nothing in core, and reverts completely on deactivation — the classic admin stays untouched for everyone else. Bundled extensions add a Monaco code editor, a cron manager, and an RSS reader. Available on the plugin directory as Desktop Mode, or try it in Playground. The plugin also inspired contributors to create three additional features for the Desktop mode:
- ODD — Apps for OpenStation by Nick Hamze
- AllTerrain Photo Editor for OpenStation by Daniel Lopez Sanchez
- Deskbeat for OpenStation by alexismp
Built at WordCamp US Contributor Day, the Photo Directory Importer lets you search wordpress.org/photos from inside wp-admin and pull CC0 images into your Media Library. No API key, no account, and imports are deduplicated. In the block editor it’s a tab inside the Media Library modal rather than an entry next to Openverse and Pexels — so look one level deeper. Topher DeRosia and six co-contributors want testing before it goes to the .org repo.
The admin bar takes up viewport space and makes every page you view slightly not the page your visitors see. The official WordPress browser extension hides it while keeping the shortcuts in your browser toolbar, and adds block outlines, a phone-sized preview, cache-busted reloads, and cookie clearing. Jake Goldman of HumanMade writes that nothing leaves your device. Chrome and Safari now, Firefox next. Ray Morey of The Repository has more on its origins as Goldman’s WP Detective side project.
Anne McCarthy‘s Accessibility Lab plugin prototype arrives with the Accessibility Team’s buy-in and a clear boundary: it’s a testing ground for features headed to core, not a substitute for fixing core. Three modules so far — Media Library view controls, real-time heading-order validation, and Troy Chaplin’s Block Accessibility Checks. Rae Morey traces how the idea won conditional support after 2025’s pushback, and where you can contribute.
Theme Development for Blocks
Mitch Canter‘s field guide to responsive block styles in WordPress 7.1 gets into the details the announcement posts skipped: the theme.json syntax, the two default viewports (@mobile at 480px and @tablet at 782px), and how to set your own breakpoints. You’ll also see :hover and :focus states — official only on Button and Navigation Link blocks so far — how the feature coexists with fluid typography and clamp() tokens, and a quick-reference table worth bookmarking.
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Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor
“This block contains unexpected or invalid content“; if you maintain custom blocks, you’ve met that message. Paulo Carvajal collected five WordPress block deprecation patterns in a GitHub Gist that cover most real cases: markup-only changes, attribute renames paired with isEligible() and migrate(), source changes, InnerBlocks restructuring, and stacked deprecations ordered newest-first. Each comes with copy-ready code, plus a reminder to test against real database content and keep old save() functions intact.
You might have heard that building a custom block no longer requires React or a build pipeline. Fränk Klein tests PHP-only block registration in WordPress on CSS-Tricks: an autoRegister flag generates the editor JavaScript and sidebar controls for you, straight from the PHP registration. He’s honest about the limits (no in-preview editing, no live post data, three attribute types) and argues the real win is porting legacy widgets, shortcodes, and template parts into block themes with PHP skills you already have.
WordPress and AI
Ask ten agencies whether they use AI and you’ll get ten yeses, Brad Williams, Co-Founder of WebDevStudios, notes in explaining what agentic AI development means for your WordPress project. Building on Alfredo Navas‘s WordCamp US talk, “the model knows WordPress, it doesn’t know your WordPress”, William’s the post lays out three prerequisites: written project rules, documented processes, and scoped tool access, with a human reviewing everything. You also get five questions to ask any agency, including where your project’s knowledge lives when people leave.
Jonathan Bossenger‘s latest live stream puts three viewer-suggested plugins through a WordPress AI plugin showdown: Cross AI MCP Manager, Albert, and WP Vibe, judged on whether you can set each up without reading docs, connect it to a local site, and tell what data it sends home. WP Vibe routes everything through a third-party server, Albert won’t connect locally at all, and Cross AI — after real troubleshooting of its separate abilities and tools — is the only one working end to end.
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Questions? Suggestions? Ideas?
Don’t hesitate to send them via email or
send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.
For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog,
send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com
