AdultZone

Archives

Matt: Gabriel Dawe

New artist I’m obsessed with: Gabriel Dawe. I love the colors and craft, very Mesh. If his site were on WordPress, we’d definitely commission some pieces. Hat tip: Jason Nichols.

Gutenberg Times: Gutenberg Changelog #133 – Gutenberg 23.6 Release and WordPress 7.1

In episode 133 of the Gutenberg Changelog Podcast, Birgit Pauli-Haack hosts Faith Ruth Imokol, a Ugandan web developer and longtime Gutenberg advocate, to discuss the Gutenberg 23.6 release and the upcoming WordPress 7.1 update. The episode opens with insights into the WordPress community in Uganda, highlighting their active WordCamp scene and educational initiatives such as the Campus Connect program, which introduces WordPress to students across the country. Faith Imokol shares her experience on a recent WordCamp Kampala panel about AI in web development, noting divided perspectives: while some Ugandans are excited about AI’s possibilities, others are concerned about job security and adaptation. She describes her personal transition into using AI as a collaborative development tool, driven by the need for faster production due to heightened competition. Discussion moves to WordPress 7.1, covering new features such as customizable viewports via theme.json, expanded notes and commenting capabilities, enhanced SVG icon registration, and improvements to blocks like playlists and tabs. Both speakers are enthusiastic about the collaborative features and the evolving editorial workflow, particularly the granular notes system for streamlined feedback. The episode emphasizes community feedback’s role in shaping new releases and encourages listeners to help test upcoming WordPress versions to ensure quality and translatability. The episode closes with practical tips and excitement for ongoing educational outreach and future Gutenberg advancements. Show Notes / Transcript Editor: Sandy Reed Logo: Mark Uraine Production: Birgit Pauli-Haack Show Notes Special Guest: Faith Ruth Imokol WordPress profile LinkedIN Imokol Faith Ruth: Why & How to Create Gutenberg Blocks (2020) WordPress Events in Uganda Upcoming Events WordPress in Education Showcase 2026 August 7, 2026 WordCamp Lira 2026 29+ 30 August 2026 WordCamp is in Jinja 19th – 20th September 2026 WordPress Campus Connect Central and Eastern Uganda Schools 2026 Past 2026 Events Uganda Website Projects Competition | 2026 WordCamp Masaka  Campus Connect in Masaka  Campus Connect Kakumiro WordPress 7.1 WordPress 7.1 Beta 4 Help Test WordPress 7.1 WordPress 7.1 Source of Truth More Developer Notes for WordPress 7.1 Client-Side Media Processing Text shadow support in global styles Media library infinite scroll enabled by default Editable blocks inside Custom HTML block Editor Components updates Registering and rendering SVG icons Min width block support Background gradient block support What’s new of Gutenberg 23.6 The post editor is going full iframe: what block developers need to know before WordPress 7.1 Video w/ Ryan Welcher: iframed post editor canvas Stay in Touch Did you like this episode? Please write us a review Ping us on X (formerly known as Twitter) or send DMs with questions. @gutenbergtimes and @bph. If you have questions or suggestions, or news you want us to include, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. Please write us a review on iTunes! (Click here to learn how) Transcript The transcript is in the works.

Matt: Tesla Spyware

I noticed my Model X was uploading ~2.6gb of something to Tesla when it parked and connected to WiFi. Hopefully turning all these settings off stops it; otherwise, I might need a new car. But are any good?

Gutenberg Times: WordPress 7.1 is afoot, Gutenberg 23.6, iframed post editor, Abilities API, Studio Code and more — Weekend Edition 371

Hi there, This week I realized, I have been building websites for 30 years. from Notepad and hand-coded HTML to HomeSiteX over Coldfusion to WordPress, Nodejs and ReactJS to Python and Claude. It’s been a fantastic journey. It never gets old. I still learn new things every single day. I cherish most the friends I made along the way. I also found my notes about the WordCamps I attended, spoke at and organized. The first one was WordCamp Tampa in 2014. In 2026, I will probably attended my 30th WordCamp as well, Athens in December 2026. It’s a bit out, so let’s see if it works out. Back to the here and now: It’s finally here the WordPress 7.1 Source of Truth with all the big and small changes coming to a WordPress instance near you. It’s again more like a book. Digest in small dosis. Have a fabulous weekend! Yours, Birgit WordPress 7.1 updates WordPress 7.1 Beta 4 was release this week. It’s still time to Help Test WordPress 7.1 The WordPress 7.1 Source of Truth is out. On the WPBuilds podcast series At the Core, Anne McCarthy and I talked with Nathan Wrigley about WordPress 7.1. We cover responsive styling, the persistent admin bar, and richer inline notes, plus why the new image crop modal and customisable viewports change your day-to-day editing. You’ll also hear how community feedback saved the Classic Block, where the collaborative editing outreach stands, and which developer changes to test now. Responsive styling finally lands in the block editor, and The WP Minute+ podcast has release lead Anne McCarthy demoing it with Eric Karkovack. You’ll also get the reasoning behind what didn’t make 7.1, including collaborative editing, plus how Classic Block deprecation is being paced. Anne talks about her first turn as release lead and points out hidden gems like the ‘On This Day’ widget and custom icon registration for the Icon block. The episode Why WordPress 7.1 Will Improve Your Workflow is also available as video. More Devnotes: Filtering Site Editor Screens in WordPress 7.1 New Block Support: Minimum Width New Block Support: Background Gradient (background.gradient) Design System Theming in WordPress 7.1 JSON Schema preparation for client compatibility in WordPress 7.1 There are still more to come and they will be published next week, together with the WordPress 7.1 Field Guide. A list of all the dev notes can be reviewed from the Make Core blog Anne McCarthy gives a candid account of the punted inherited styles indicator and its design dead ends. If you’ve ever watched someone style a template expecting it to apply site-wide, that’s the problem she’s chased since the FSE Outreach Program. Blue dots, diamonds, tooltips versus infotips, two competing reset paths — none settled, and summer holidays thinned the reviewer pool. She’s aiming at 7.2. Gutenberg 23.6 released Last week, Gutenberg 23.6 was already released. The WordPress 7.1 tech co-lead. Aki Hamano highlighted in his post What’s new in Gutenberg 23.6? (July 22, 2026) The Playlist and Tabs blocks are now stable Enhancements to Notes A dynamic mode for the Gallery block Icon collections and a custom icon registration API This week on the Gutenberg Changelog podcast, my guest was Faith Imokol from Uganda. We began with the wonderful work of the WordPress community there, who have put together a series of events — WordCamps, Campus Connect, and a website competition — bringing WordPress to schools, colleges, and universities, and to thousands of students and users. Then we turned to the latest release and had a great time going through the details. As always, the episode drops in your favorite podcast app over the weekend. The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #132 – Proposals for Core, Calls for Testing, WordPress 7.1 and Gutenberg 23.4 and 23.5 Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners No PHP template, no shortcode, no custom block — Meta Box fields can now feed core blocks directly through block bindings for custom fields. Lua Nguyen shows the setup: select a Paragraph, Heading, Image, or Button, open Attributes in the sidebar, pick a Meta Box source, choose your field. Sources cover post, term, author, and settings-page fields, and an image field binds URL, alt, title, and caption separately. WordPress 6.5+, though the Attributes panel needs 6.9. Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks Coming to the Site Editor from Elementor or Divi means learning new vocabulary, and Ollie’s ground-up guide to the WordPress Site Editor by Gina Lucia covers it: templates, template parts, patterns, global styles, navigation, the Font Library, and each toolbar button, starting at Appearance → Editor. A comparison table weighs both approaches on performance, flexibility, and portability. Ollie-specific tips sit alongside the core explanations, so you can read past them if you use another theme. A typical Elementor page ships 200–400 KB of extra frontend assets, three to five times a native block build — the number behind Bikash Pun Magar‘s case for custom Gutenberg blocks over page builders on client sites. You get conditional per-block asset loading, HTML you control line by line, and content stored in native block grammar rather than a proprietary format. He’s fair about where Elementor still fits: prototypes and solo builders wanting pixel control without code. The theme.json schema resolves to more than 40MB across hundreds of nested properties, which is why Sérgio Santos built a form-driven visual editor for theme.json as a VS Code extension. Fields come from the official schema rather than hand-written forms, and a weekly scan of core and Gutenberg adds experimental properties with honest badges. The feature Santos says changed his workflow: every preset shows the CSS variable name it will generate as you type the slug. There’s also a companion WordPress plugin that mounts the same editor under Appearance. There will be dragons though: Santos flags it as an experiment as it overwrites theme.json in place with no revisions or backups. “Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2026” A chronological list of the WordPress Make

WPBeginner Spotlight 26: Form Analytics, More AI Tools, and Smarter SEO Monitoring

The main theme of this month’s WordPress news is measurement. Most of what shipped in July shows you something that your site was already doing without telling you. WPForms can now show which form field people abandon, and AIOSEO can tell you the day a plugin sets your homepage to noindex. On top of that, WPVibe crossed 5,000 installs, and HelpJet launched as a new AI support chatbot. Let’s take a look at what’s new in the world of WordPress for July. WPBeginner Spotlight brings you a monthly roundup of the most important WordPress news, updates, and community happenings. 📅✨ Got something to share? Whether it’s a new product launch, a significant update, or an exciting event, reach out to us through our contact form, and your news could be featured in the next edition! WPForms Launches Built-In Analytics to Track Form Performance If visitors abandon your WordPress forms before submitting them, you’re usually left guessing what went wrong. Until now, there was no easy way to identify where people dropped off or why. WPForms 2.0 changes that with WPForms Analytics, a built-in form tracking suite that lets you see where users abandon your forms right from your WordPress dashboard. The most powerful feature is the field-level analytics. A field-by-field table shows interactions, time spent, errors, and abandonment for every part of your form. That tells you the exact point where people give up. That might be a phone number field people do not want to fill, or an address field that throws errors. Once you know which one it is, the fix is usually simple: remove the field, reword it, or make it optional. Your All Forms page now shows views, entries, and conversion rate for every form. Each form also gets its own dashboard, with filters for the last 7, 30, or 90 days. There is a built-in AI chat as well. You can ask it what is hurting your conversions, and it reads your form data and tells you what to fix first. WPVibe Passes 6,000 Installs and Adds Page Builder Integrations, AI Code Snippets, and Memory WPVibe, the WordPress MCP server built by SeedProd, has crossed 6,000+ active installs on WordPress.org. WPVibe lets you manage your WordPress site by simply chatting with your favorite AI assistant. Instead of clicking through admin screens, you describe what you want, and the AI does it for you. It works with Claude, ChatGPT, Codex, Cursor, and more. Here is what arrived in the last few weeks: Page builder integrations: Your AI assistant can now automate tasks in Elementor, Divi, SeedProd, and Beaver Builder. AI code snippets: Ask AI to write custom code for your site. That removes one of the most intimidating parts of WordPress for non-developers. Memory: WPVibe remembers how you like to run your site, so you don’t have to repeat yourself. AI recipes in your dashboard: WPVibe suggests ready-made automation ideas picked for your site. Related: How to connect AI agents to your WordPress site We believe that WPVibe is one of the more practical answers to the question of what AI can actually do for WordPress users. It handles the repetitive admin work, and you stay in control. WordPress Ships Major Security Fixes WordPress 7.0.2 came out on July 17 as a security release that fixed one critical and one high severity issue. Because of the severity, the WordPress.org team turned on forced updates for affected sites, so many sites are already patched. The two security issues allow code to run on a default install without anyone logging in. Both are now in CISA’s catalog of known exploited vulnerabilities, so it is worth confirming your version rather than assuming. Head over to Dashboard » Updates and check the version you are on. If it reads 7.0.2, 6.9.5, or 6.8.6, then your website is fine. Otherwise, we recommend updating your website now. 7.0.2 also includes the earlier 7.0.1 maintenance release and its 31 bug fixes across Core and the Block Editor, so a single update gets you both. HelpJet: The AI Chatbot That Answers Your Customers’ Questions in Seconds HelpJet is a new AI support chatbot built by the team at HeroThemes, a WPBeginner Growth Fund company. It learns your help documentation and answers customer questions from it, 24/7, without needing anyone on your team to be online. Setup is simple. You add your help articles, URLs, and even private standard operating procedures, and the chatbot is ready in about five minutes. From there, it takes the repetitive questions off your team’s queue. Anything it cannot answer is passed to a human. HelpJet then learns from that reply, so it can handle the same question next time. On a WooCommerce store, it can also read your product data, including variations, stock levels, and shipping and tax rules. So a shopper asking about a specific product gets a real answer, not a link to your policy page. You can customize the chatbot and display it with no code required. It also runs on Shopify and Squarespace. For more details, see our HelpJet announcement post. AIOSEO Introduces SEO Alerts: An Early Warning System for Site Issues Serious SEO problems rarely announce themselves. For example, a plugin update can quietly set your homepage to noindex, which tells search engines not to list it. Or your robots.txt file may stop responding after a server migration, and Google pauses crawling until it can read the file again. To solve this, All in One SEO, one of the most popular WordPress SEO plugins, has introduced SEO Alerts, which checks three things every hour: whether your homepage is set to noindex, whether your robots.txt file is reachable, and whether your XML sitemap is loading. You can receive alerts by email or Slack. You configure it once, and AIOSEO monitors your site from there, so you hear about a problem within the hour instead of weeks later. SEO Alerts is free on every plan, including the free AIOSEO Lite version. AIOSEO has also introduced

Matt: Possible Futures of Happiness

At Automattic, we don’t have customer service or support, we have Happiness Engineers. There’s also a #ceo Slack channel where anyone can drop in and request a meeting, which my esteemed colleague Damianne President did, and this morning we had an interesting chat that set my mind racing about how we might engineer happiness in the future. One overriding assumption: Personal agents will trounce company agents in most cases. Your personal agent can — or soon will — know all your history, your calendar, your email, your preferences, and your photos, and it speaks your language. So much time is wasted in traditional support trying to see through the customer’s eyes, or authenticate them. That goes away, but watch your thinking! It’s so easy to fall into the mental model trap of legacy chatbots and data models. As a company, your website, your WordPress, documentation, tutorials, menus, manuals need to be amazing and up to date. That’s the source of truth, and an agent will read all of it! The interface and APIs remain because that’s useful to both human visitors and the agents. Whenever possible, make support public. More blogs and bbPress. I actually weep a little when I think of how many beautiful words are written by our Happiness Engineers that are only ever seen once in a chat box or email thread. My goal with our products is that support is radically available, and you almost never have to use it. If you’re in a support role, I think you can pick a lane based on where you get energy. If you love looking at screens, I think there’s a future where customer service wizards are watching over an Iron Man-like interface, armies of chat bots talking to people, where they can see how they’re going and intervene or nudge them as needed. There’s a ton of work in tuning agents and interactions. If people recharge you, I actually think this will be the greatest era. All of the basic, mechanical stuff will be automated, but I think human connection will be what economists call a Veblen good, more in demand even as it is more expensive. I think Happiness Engineering in the future will look a lot more like community building. A bot can’t host a meetup or a WordCamp. I was the biggest Waymo fanboy, but this year with lots of trips to and from hospitals with Om I found myself craving human connection and used Uber more than ever. (It also gave me a chance to practice the one repeatable way that money can buy happiness, which is keeping a couple Benjamins in your back pocket and surprising people with them.)

Gutenberg Times: WordPress 7.1 Source of Truth

Welcome to the Source of Truth for WordPress 7.1! Before you dive headfirst into all the big and small changes and pick your favorites, make sure to read these preliminary thoughts about this post and how to use it. If you have any questions, leave a comment or email me at pauli@gutenbergtimes.com. A huge “Thank you” to Anne McCarthy, Justin Tadlock, Isabel Brison, Adam Silverstein, Ramon Dodd, Andrew Serong, Hans-Gerd Gerhards, Marin Atanasov, Krupa Nanda, Aaron Robershaw, Ben Dwyer, Brent MacKinnon, Ashar Fuadi, and a lot more. It still takes a village. Also huge respect to the whole release squad on getting WordPress 7.1 over the finish line. Estimated reading time 34–51 minutes at 7,991 words Table of Contents Changelog Important note/guidelines Overview Resources Assets  Tags Priority Items for WordPress 7.1 Responsive styles for blocks [theme builders] [site admin][end user] Viewport breakpoint customization Interactive states styling (hover, focus) Media editor modal and free-form image cropper [end user][site admin] Client-side media processing improvements [developer][site admin][enterprise] Icons now inherit color, and the Icons API takes shape [theme builder][plugin author][developer][enterprise] For developers: Registering more collections Admin Bar everywhere  [all] New Blocks [all] Playlist block Tabs block Improved Blocks and Block handling Block transforms: preview first, convert faster [end user][site admin] Combine gradient and image backgrounds [end user] [theme builder][site admin] Cover Block: control video embed providers [theme builder][plugin author][enterprise][developer] Gallery and the attached images workflow in the Media Library [end user][site admin] Image Block: Mark as decorative toggle [end user][site admin] Login/out Block Improvements [theme builder][site admin][developer] Navigation Block and Link Creation [theme builder] [site admin][end user] Search block Styling[theme builder] [site admin][end user] Query block [theme builder] [site admin][end user] General quality of life improvements.  Pattern editing experience improvements [theme builder] [site admin] [developer]  Block Width and Layout Controls [theme builder] [site admin] [developer] Link Control and Preview Enhancements [theme builder] [site admin] [developer] Additional CSS Validation [theme builder] [site admin] [developer][end user] Block Editor Attribute Handling [theme builder][developer] Image handling improved [end user][site admin] Post Template Layout Improvements [theme builder][site admin] Post Title Block Enhancements[site admin][end user] Block Inserter Enhancements [site admin][end user] Editor enhancements Notes move toward a full commenting workflow [end user][site admin][developer][enterprise] Dedicated Identity section [site admin][theme builder][end user] Visual revisions improvements [site admin][end user][theme builder] Apply Globally now with review panel Admin / Workflow updates Organized command palette [all] Change a comment’s parent from the Edit Comment screen [end user][site admin][enterprise] See an excerpt of posts without titles [end user][site admin] On This Day dashboard widget[end user][site admin] Media Library: infinite scrolling is back on by default, with a per-user opt-out [end user][site admin] Developer Goodies [developer][theme builder][plugin author][enterprise] Post editor iframe now always on Global Styles and theme.json  Text Shadow support for theme.json Text-Align Block Support Migration Block Visibility Block Supports: CSS variables by feature selector A minimum-width option for block dimensions Design System Theme Provider  Admin color schemes in Site Editor Mix static HTML with editable blocks Block Bindings for list-items and inner blocks Connectors authentication improvements Blocks package stabilizes two experimental functions Accessible tooltips and toggle tips API Filtering Site Editor screens Changelog Any changes are cataloged here as the release goes on. July 30, 2026 – First edition. July 31, 2026 Added Apply Globally now with review panel Added Filtering Site Editor screens Important note/guidelines Try not to just copy and paste what’s in this post since it’s going to be shared with plenty of folks. Use this as inspiration for your own stuff and to get the best info about this release. If you do copy and paste, just remember that others might do the same, and it could lead to some awkward moments with duplicate content floating around online. Each item has been tagged using best guesses with different high-level labels so that you can more readily see at a glance who is likely to be most impacted.Each item has a high-level description, visuals (if relevant), and key resources if you would like to learn more. Overview WordPress 7.1 rounds out the block editor’s styling controls and makes working with media noticeably smoother. Long-requested features let you style how blocks look across three screen sizes and in interactive states like hover and focus — all without writing custom CSS. The admin experience becomes more personal, too, following you with your own color scheme and toolbar across every screen. Handling images gets a considerable upgrade, too. The new media editor modal brings free-form cropping, rotation, and metadata editing into one workflow, and client-side media processing makes uploads faster and more resilient, with broader format support and better-optimized files. The new Playlist and Tabs blocks enrich the layout options available out of the box and make for more creative information presentation. In the same realm fall the expanded Icon API with custom icon collections, dynamic galleries, and background gradients for more blocks. The unification of WP Admin and the block editors progresses as well: the editors now respect your admin color scheme, and the admin bar stays with you on every screen — including the editors and the front end. A new “On This Day” Widget connects you to your site’s history. While real-time collaboration has been punted to a future WordPress version, the asynchronous collaboration in Notes took real steps forward with inline notes on partial text selections, @mentions, rich text formatting, and multiple notes per block. Beyond the headliners, core blocks receive many quality-of-life improvements and bug fixes to make editing content in WordPress streamlined, consistent, and fast — and developers get an expanding set of APIs to build on. Resources Help Test WordPress 7.1 \ FieldGuide + Dev Notes are scheduled to be published August 5. Roadmap to 7.1 This release consists of features from the Gutenberg plugin version 22.7 – 23.6. Here are the release posts of those plugin releases: 22.7 | 22.8 | 22.9 | 23.0 | 23.1 | 23.2 | 23.3 | 23.4 | 23.5 | 23.6 Later Gutenberg releases contain bug fixes, backported to WordPress 7.1.