WPBeginner Spotlight 27: WordPress 7.1, WPVibe AI Everywhere, and a New Way to Record Your Screen
August was a big month for WordPress. WordPress 7.1 arrived on schedule, and WordCamp US brought four days of AI-focused talks to Phoenix. WPVibe doubled its install base in a single month. There is also a brand-new screen recording tool that we think you will… Read More » The post WPBeginner Spotlight 27: WordPress 7.1, WPVibe AI Everywhere, and a New Way to Record Your Screen first appeared on WPBeginner.
Hostinger Ecommerce Review: Is This the Fastest Way to Launch an Online Store in 2026?
Hostinger Ecommerce offers a fast, easy way to build an online store. I recently used it to create a mockup shop called Apex Warrior Training, and the whole process took me about two hours. Compared to more established options like Shopify and WooCommerce, I found Hostinger Ecommerce to be more beginner-friendly and easier to navigate…. The post Hostinger Ecommerce Review: Is This the Fastest Way to Launch an Online Store in 2026? appeared first on Themeisle Blog.
Gutenberg Times: Building blocks without JavaScript, Accessibility Lab, AI plugin showdown and more —Weekend Edition 375

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 Table of Contents Developing Gutenberg and WordPress Plugins and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners Theme Development for Blocks Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor WordPress and AI 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. “Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2026” A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test, and Meta team from Jan. 2024 on. Updated by yours truly. The previous years are also available: 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 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
How to Gamify an Online Course in WordPress (Points, Badges, Ranks)
Learn how to gamify your online course in WordPress with points, badges, and ranks using free tools, plus the honest limits of when it works. The post How to Gamify an Online Course in WordPress (Points, Badges, Ranks) appeared first on Themeisle Blog.
Open Channels FM: Signal – Caring in Creation, Partnerships and Trust, Autonomy, Acceleration, Responsibility
A focus on guiding new contributors in open source, discussing AI’s impact, and adding insightful commentary.
Open Channels FM: A Look at WordCamp US Including Events, Sessions, and Community Highlights
An informal look at WordCamp US featuring hackathon day, community feedback, networking, and thoughts on the new event structure.
Open Channels FM: Evolving Our Content to Embrace the Bigger Story in Open Channels FM
Bob Dunn discusses the move from highlighting builders to engaging with open source’s wider future.
How to Create an Online Course Marketplace in WordPress (Multiple Instructors)
Build a Udemy-style course marketplace on WordPress: instructor registration, revenue sharing, and payouts with Masteriyo, plus the honest workload involved. The post How to Create an Online Course Marketplace in WordPress (Multiple Instructors) appeared first on Themeisle Blog.
WordPress.org blog: WordPress Signs the Open Weights and American AI Leadership Letter
We’re proud to announce that WordPress has signed Open Weights and American AI Leadership, an open letter asking US policymakers to not place early restrictions on open weight AI models. These are artificial intelligence models that anyone can download, inspect, modify, and run on their own infrastructure. The letter was published on July 24, 2026, and more than 270 companies and organizations have added their names. Its argument will be familiar to anyone who works in open source: technology gets better and safer when more people can study it and build on it. That belief is the foundation WordPress is built on. Anyone can run the software, look at how it works, change it to suit their needs, and share what they make. Those freedoms are why WordPress has become a foundational part of the open web and why people trust it with their work. Open weight models bring that same kind of access to AI. A model that anyone can download and adapt becomes something people can shape around their own work and improve for everyone who comes after them. The next generation of innovation won’t come from models alone. It will come from millions of people building with them. Open weights help make that possible. WordPress is proud to support the Open Weights and American AI Leadership letter. – WordPress Executive Director, Mary Hubbard Requests to US Policymakers The requests in the letter are practical ones. As signatories, we ask policymakers to expand access to computing power for startups and researchers, to invest in shared resources like public datasets and evaluation tools, and to keep more than one kind of model available rather than narrowing the field to a handful of closed systems. We also ask that common development practices, such as using one model’s output to improve another, not be treated as theft by default. Each of these requests follows the pattern that has made open source software dependable for decades, where many people test, improve, and secure the same technology in public view. For more than 20 years, WordPress has run on the idea that the people using a technology should be free to shape it. AI is becoming part of how people publish, and open weight models are one way that freedom carries forward. Keeping them available gives the next generation of builders, the people now learning WordPress, the same starting point that open source gave everyone before them. Read the Letter
Open Channels FM: X vs Nitter and XCancel, AI Middleware, and Accelerated Online College Degrees
Hear about X and Nitter, how AI changes human roles with meat proxies, and the shift toward rapid online degree programs