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Matt: Homework from WordCamp

A few times during the WordCamp US keynote, I asked for a show of hands and got mostly blank stares back, especially on the AI questions. That’s not a criticism — it’s a reading list. If the future is going to be built on this stuff, the WordPress community should be fluent in it. Here’s the homework. How models are actually trained When I asked who knew about the reinforcement learning models go through, Robert looked out and said “I see no yeses.” Base models are trained to predict the next word across huge amounts of text; the friendly, helpful behavior comes after, in post-training, where human/AI feedback reinforces some responses over others. If you use these tools every day, understanding that pipeline changes how you prompt them and what you expect from them. Start with Hugging Face’s Illustrating RLHF, a visual explainer. Chip Huyen’s RLHF deep dive is the best longer read, and Anthropic’s Constitutional AI paper shows where post-training went next. If you only have time for one thing, watch Andrej Karpathy’s Deep Dive into LLMs — pretraining, fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and why models behave the way they do, all in one sitting. Uncensored models Almost nobody had tried an OBLITERATED model. Since refusal behavior is added in post-training, researchers found it can also be removed — it turns out to be, roughly, a single direction inside the model that you can subtract out. Maxime Labonne’s Uncensor any LLM with abliteration explains the technique, and the paper behind it, Refusal in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single Direction, is short and genuinely fascinating. Whatever you think of the applications, it’s worth understanding that open weights mean the community can modify these models, the same way the GPL means you can modify WordPress. The open-weight wave Only a few hands went up for Qwen 3.8. The open-weight models coming out of Chinese labs — Qwen, DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM — are at or near the frontier at a fraction of the cost, and the smaller ones run on a laptop. I demoed one from this MacBook on stage. Token costs have dropped about 20x, and that curve isn’t slowing down. The easiest way to feel this for yourself is to run one locally tonight: install Ollama or LM Studio, pull a small Qwen model, and talk to an intelligence that lives entirely on your own machine, no cloud required. For a community built on the four freedoms, that should feel familiar — and exciting. Read one, watch one, run one. Then bring what you learned to your next meetup. It is really important to me that WordPress community members ride this AI wave.

Open Channels FM: AI for the Rest of Us

An update on Open Channels News, new fall series (including “AI for the Rest of Us”), and a preview of the Open Channels FM 5.0 release coming in September.

WordPress.org blog: AI Creates Opportunity While Artists Ship at WordCamp US 2026

WordCamp US (WCUS) 2026 just wrapped up after 4 days at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona. Over 1,100 people from around the world registered to attend, and thousands more watched online through livestreams. Contributor Day and Showcase Day opened the week before two main conference days, featuring over 50 speaker-led sessions across 4 tracks, including multiple workshops. The temperature reached 111°F (44°C), but golf carts ferried travelers between the Sheraton Phoenix Downtown and the convention center. Inside, attendees moved between session rooms, the Sponsor Hall, and the Happiness Bar. It’s hot, but it’s not Florida hot. – Loyal Pyczynski Sessions covered artificial intelligence (AI), accessibility, publishing, business, site ownership, and the open web. Speakers in different rooms often found common ground, noting the importance of good judgment and trust-building in the age of AI. Real Artists Ship Contributor Day followed the motto “Real artists ship,” and a new format to match. The 425 participants, including 29 first-time contributors, formed 26 teams around goals they could complete that day. Experienced contributors moved between groups and helped newer participants shape goals. Then, goal owners gave 30-second pitches, and contributors could move between teams when that work caught their interest. By day’s end, contributors had closed tickets, opened and shipped pull requests, and reviewed themes for accessibility. One team created description-list blocks for glossaries and product details, and another added email settings, a test tool, and checks for account, password-reset, and recovery messages. Other teams built a Photo Directory importer and updated Notes in the WordPress dashboard and Multisite documentation. More work covered PHP, PHPUnit testing, and guidelines for AI work within the project. New contribution pathways became a course on Learn WordPress, open to people who could not be in Phoenix. Every team ended the day with a 30-second presentation of what it had made, tested, fixed, or moved closer to release. Showcase Day Put Real Sites First If Contributor Day was about shipping in a day, Monday’s Showcase Day was about what happens after the shipping. Sites have to keep working smoothly for the people who publish, maintain, and depend on them. The case studies came from public services, independent publishers, community platforms, training systems, and large content operations. Manny Costa covered the first of those: civic websites where residents find services, apply for programs, read emergency information, and report problems. In that work, accessibility, governance, and editor workflows are part of the service rather than a final check box. Two of the case studies were about publishers taking back ownership of their content. Both sites now appear in the WordPress Showcase. See The Ankler in the WordPress Showcase Nicola Catton’s session described how The Ankler moved 15 newsletters to WordPress and took direct control of its content, subscriber data, revenue rules, and reader experience. Nicola detailed the massive migration, the thousands of rebuilt paywall boundaries, and the site’s brand-new block theme. See Daily Kos in the WordPress Showcase The Daily Kos migration was a similarly large-scale move. Ben Greeley and Allison McHenry centered their session on a community that writes as well as reads: 1.5 million posts, 88 million comments, and 2.7 million users, with a public beta that involved more than 500 community members. Other sessions dealt with the people who do the publishing once a site is live. In Aviral Mittal’s session, an AI agent built a page from a Google Doc using patterns the team had already defined. Andrew Adam described a library of about 100 written and video guides, with accessibility guidance included. Shared foundations covered repeat questions, while project-specific help and tips inside the editor handled the rest. Human Judgment in the Loop Early on, Bo English-Wiczling had opened Showcase Day by addressing the gap between rapid AI adoption and trust. Her keynote covered the move in developer work toward setting intent and supplying context. AI doesn’t remove your work. It moves it. – Bo English-Wiczling A first draft can now arrive in seconds, but an almost-right block of code may still miss keyboard navigation, use the wrong theme styles, or bring an unsafe dependency into a project. The importance of good judgment is familiar to the WordPress community. Bo tied it to habits WordPress contributors already have: reading other people’s code, submitting small changes, reviewing pull requests, and accepting critique in the open. The next morning, Loyal Pyczynski drew on his work at Disney and Meta for a keynote about tests, time, and creative confidence. His talk returned to a phrase from an Imagineering colleague. We need to make sure that we make better mistakes tomorrow. Success is an iterative endeavor, and time is our most precious resource. – Loyal Pyczynski Loyal described Disney teams that paired creative and technical leads early, then brought in experts for work another team could do better or faster. The goal was not to know everything but to know what the team should own. Design and publishing sessions drew similar conclusions as the keynotes. Michelle Hunt framed design systems as living feedback systems that need to preserve intent as production gets faster. K Adam White’s session centered on moving large stores of content into block patterns, with editors staying involved where automatic conversion still needed judgment. Nik McLaughlin’s Abilities API session looked beyond AI integrations to the broader structure the API gives WordPress developers. Brian Coords made a related case through block themes: approved patterns, templates, and real content offer a starting point, and design tokens add guidance that a blank-page prompt cannot provide. Machine translation got the same treatment. In a multilingual WordPress multisite case study of AI translation for technical content, native-speaking colleagues found output that was correct word by word and could still miss the intended meaning. Human review covered the gap between translating language and translating intent. The judgment question even reached hiring. The Making of a WordPress Certification introduced a standards-based certification and covered how the credential was created, checked, governed, and delivered. Trust Becomes a Product Practice Wednesday morning

What’s New in WordPress 7.1? (Features & Screenshots)

WordPress 7.1 is finally here 🥳, and we have been closely following its development. The new version launched on August 19, 2026, timed with WordCamp US. Its focus is on how you collaborate, style, and manage media on your WordPress website, and it fixes a long list of everyday annoyances along the way. Whether you run a small blog or a large multi-author site, WordPress 7.1 has changes that will affect how you work every day. ℹ️ Important: As always, please don’t forget to create a complete WordPress backup before updating to the new release. If you are not using managed WordPress hosting, then you will need to run the update yourself. Here is everything that’s new in WordPress 7.1: Collaborate Better With the Upgraded Notes Share a Link to Any Revision Responsive Styling Without Writing CSS Style Hover and Focus States for Buttons New Tabs Block New Playlist Block A New Image Editor in WordPress 7.1 Smoother and Smarter Media Handling The Admin Toolbar Now Stays Visible When Editing A More Personal And Easily Navigable Admin Block Improvements in WordPress 7.1 Changes to Look Out for Before the Update What Didn’t Make It Into WordPress 7.1? Under the Hood (Developer & Performance Updates) Final Thoughts on WordPress 7.1 Collaborate Better With the Upgraded Notes The Notes feature arrived in WordPress 6.9 as a simple way to leave comments on blocks. WordPress 7.1 turns it into a proper feedback system. The most useful addition is @mentions. You can type ‘@’ inside a note to bring up a searchable list of collaborators and tag someone directly. Even better, WordPress now sends an email notification to the person you tagged. This addition landed late in the release cycle, and it completes the feature. Your teammate no longer needs to keep the editor open to know that feedback is waiting. The email brings them straight back to the right post. You can also leave inline notes. Instead of attaching a comment to an entire block, simply select a specific sentence or phrase and leave a note on just that text. The selection stays highlighted, so everyone can see exactly which words the note refers to. In our testing, this removed a lot of guesswork from editorial feedback. Other Notes improvements include: Multiple threads: You can start more than one conversation on the same block. Text formatting: Notes now support bold, italic, code, links, and emoji. Show more / show less: Long notes collapse by default to keep the sidebar tidy. Private by design: WordPress stores notes as a special comment type, and 7.1 now excludes them from your public comment feeds. These changes make Notes genuinely useful for teams, agencies, and multi-author blogs. It is a solid step toward a better editorial workflow inside WordPress itself. Share a Link to Any Revision Visual revisions, which were introduced in WordPress 7.0 have been improved as well. They now include a new feature to share links to individual revisions. For example, let’s say that you want to show a team member which changes were made to an article. You can now open the revisions screen, pick the exact version, and copy the link from your browser toolbar. You can then share that link and when opened, the link will take users to the exact revision with changes highlighted. Visual revisions also get a new picker layout in this release. It makes browsing your edit history easier, with color-coded changes carried over from WordPress 7.0. Responsive Styling Without Writing CSS This is the feature we are most excited about. Responsive styling has been one of the longest-standing requests in the block editor, and WordPress 7.1 finally delivers a first version. You can now define how a block looks at different screen sizes directly in the editor. For example, you can set a smaller font size for headings on mobile without writing a single line of CSS. Here is how it works: Click the device preview icon in the editor’s top toolbar and turn on the new ‘Responsive styles’ option. Now, switch the preview to Tablet or Mobile. From this point, any style change you make applies only to that screen size. During testing, we selected a smaller font size for a button in the Tablet view, and the desktop design stayed untouched. WordPress also shows a small badge in the block settings panel, so you always know which viewport you are styling. It works on two levels. You can set responsive styles in Global Styles, which apply to every instance of a block across your site, or you can style an individual block on a specific page. The editor canvas is also more flexible. Instead of being limited to the Desktop, Tablet, and Mobile presets, you can drag the canvas to any width and watch your blocks respond in real time. Theme developers can even define their own breakpoints in theme.json. That way, the preview widths match the theme you are actually using. Style Hover and Focus States for Buttons Alongside responsive styling, WordPress 7.1 introduces interactive state styling. A new ‘State’ dropdown lets you visually style how blocks respond to interaction. For example, you can set a different background color for a button’s hover, focus, or active state and preview the change live in the editor. Previously, changing a button’s hover color required adding a custom CSS snippet. Now, it can be easily done inside the editor itself. There is also a thoughtful refinement when you apply local style changes globally. WordPress now shows a quick review step, so you can choose exactly which modified styles to apply across your site and keep the rest as local overrides. New Tabs Block WordPress 7.1 adds a Tabs block that many users have been asking for. Tabs let you organize content into clickable panels instead of showing everything at once. They are great for product specifications, FAQs, or comparing options without making a page feel long. The final release has also added toolbar buttons for reordering

#230 – Adrian Sticea on Navigating the Decline of WordPress Work on Upwork and the Rise of New Opportunities

Transcript [00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley. Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, the decline of WordPress work on Upwork, and the rise of new opportunities. If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players. If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox and use the form there. So on the podcast today, we have Adrian Sticea. Adrian has been working in the WordPress space since 2013, starting out as a developer for small companies. Then moving into freelancing, agency roles in the US, major projects at IBM, a, stint at StellarWP, and extensive work with enterprise level clients. Most recently, Adrian’s post on LinkedIn about the dramatic drop off in WordPress work through the Upwork platform, went viral, sparking many conversations and comments. I suspect that many WordPress professionals listening have seen shifts in their freelance workloads, and maybe wondering what’s behind these changes. And Adrian is here to share his own data-driven account. He talks about his experience using Upwork as a primary source of project leads. How for years it was a reliable fountain of work, but recently the flow has all but dried up. We dive into the possible causes, the impact of AI making developers more efficient, and thus reducing hiring demand, changes in the broader economy, increasing competition from rival platforms, and how the nature of WordPress work itself is changing. Adrian mentions the difference between simple website builds, which are still in demand on Upwork, and complex plugin or enterprise projects, which he thinks might have migrated elsewhere. We also talk about diversification, whether it’s a mistake to rely on just one marketplace for freelance work, and the importance of building real relationships, collecting testimonials, and seeking recommendations. Adrian shares how he’s pivoted, leveraging LinkedIn for networking, connecting directly with agencies, and building partnerships with recruiters and temp agencies. If you’ve ever felt your freelance pipeline shrink, are curious where the most interesting WordPress work has gone, or want to hear how other professionals are adapting to marketplace shifts, this episode is for you. If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well. And so without further delay, I bring you Adrian Sticea. I am joined on the podcast by Adrian Sticea. Hello, Adrian. [00:03:34] Adrian Sticea: Hey. [00:03:34] Nathan Wrigley: Very nice to have you with us. Adrian is joining us today because of something that he posted on LinkedIn, which captured my attention. I’m not a frequent lurker on LinkedIn, and so I don’t really know how the algorithm works. But Adrian and I have, as far as I know, not been in communication with each other before. But, Adrian’s post went really viral, I think it’s fair to say, and it certainly caught my attention and got into my feed. And it’s all about the state of work in the WordPress space at the moment, particularly through a particular platform. And we’ll get into that in a minute, though. Adrian, if it’s okay with you, do you want to just tell us a little bit about your backstory? What it is that you’ve been doing these many years and so on? [00:04:15] Adrian Sticea: Sure. I started working as a WordPress developer in 2013. I worked for a couple of small companies, local companies that needed kind of customer support, and also web development. And after that I started doing freelancing for about two years. I moved to the US in 2016, that’s when I started to look around for better paid jobs.. And I started working as a WordPress developer for a digital marketing agency, and I did that for, about a year and something. In 2018, I joined IBM to work on one of their WordPress projects. I think it was the largest WordPress one that they had at the moment. Basically it was a learning platform, and the courses were about technology, programming and other stuff. I left IBM at end of 2020 because of multiple factors, and I started doing freelancing. I freelanced for about three years and after that I joined StellarWP, where I worked in the marketing department as one of their web engineers. And I worked there for about a year and a half. And at start of 2025 I started doing freelancing again. And since 2018, I mostly worked with enterprise-level companies and more complex work than just building websites. That’s the stuff that I’ve been doing for the past. [00:05:40] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you for that, and all of that really plays into what we’re going to talk about because, what I’ll do is I’ll link to the post that Adrian wrote, which kind of went viral on LinkedIn. And the first thing you’re probably going to capture is there’s a graph at the bottom, and it’s a line graph, and it’s not pleasant to look at this line graph. Because it starts off and there’s this blue line and it’s fairly high up on the on the axis and it moves across horizontally. And it just goes along and along and then it just starts to tail downwards until finally, it hits the axis and it basically zeros out. And so I caught sight of that and I thought, “okay, that’s interesting.” And then caught sight of the word WordPress, you know, and you being a WordPress developer, and then noticed that this

Programmatic SEO for WordPress: An Honest Guide (2026)

Curious about programmatic SEO on WordPress? Learn how it works, what Google’s scaled content policy means for you, and a realistic 6-step workflow to try it. The post Programmatic SEO for WordPress: An Honest Guide (2026) appeared first on Themeisle Blog.

Matt: Surprise DM

When I saw the Slack notification preview, “Matt, I’m literally crying right now,” I must admit my first reaction was “Oh no, what happened…” Matt, I’m literally crying right now. I just read the Baby & Caregiver Attendance policy that Automattic will fly your baby and whoever is caring for them to be with you at a meetup while you’re breastfeeding. Everyone talks about closing the gap for women in the workforce after kids. This is the first time I’ve seen a company actually pay for the answer. I don’t think you hear this enough, so I want to say it plainly: thank you, THANK YOU. Forever grateful. Stephanie Ospina also posted about it on LinkedIn. This benefit isn’t even on our public benefits page! From our Field Guide post revisions I found it was added in 2018 by Ingrid Miller of our Human Wrangling team, and it’s a great example of the care and effort they put into shaping what we call the Automattic Operating System.