Autor: Matt

We get a lot of flak at WordPress.org for supporting older PHP versions, but an area we’ve always pushed the frontier is in Web Standards, getting websites and browsers evolving together to make the web richer. Ever since I caught the religion from Zeldman, promoting more functionality in the browser has been a life mission. It’s a little nerdy, but we wanted to do client-side media processing (use all that amazing Apple and Google silicon instead of burdening the poor servers) so we used something amazing Google created called Document Isolation Policy. When WordPress 7.1 “Mary Lou” shipped these features…

On 19th and 20th September 2026, the WordPress community gathered at Civil Service College Uganda, a venue close to River Nile, for the fifth edition of WordCamp Jinja. The event brought together more than 300 diverse participants across 2 days and 3 parallel tracks of sessions full of learning, collaboration and connection. In a city known for its flowing waters, creativity and ideas flowed too, as participants shared their experiences, explored new possibilities with WordPress and built relationships that would carry beyond the weekend. Our theme, “Embrace Creative Currents on the Nile: Where Inclusivity Fuels Creativity,” reflected the mix of…

bbPress 2.6.20 is a security and maintenance release. Everyone running bbPress should update. This release strengthens topic and reply password validation and keeps bbPress post shortcodes literal in ordinary WordPress content loops. It also adds a site-wide Forum Status setting with Open, Closed, and Frozen modes. Existing sites remain Open unless that setting is changed. The maintenance work improves BuddyPress profile actions, group topic routes, activity visibility, and group-forum access. It also restores compatibility for subscription links in third-party theme packages, preserves moderation forms after validation errors, and includes fixes for notifications, converters, widgets, profiles, topic and reply administration, and…

Who maintains education AI, the backbone of software infrastructure, and a new open source document tool.

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 state of WordPress security in 2026, and the battle against AI threats. 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…

For the next 30 days, a few billion of you will get an extra header in honor of Eric Binnion. The code in Nginx to do this is poetic: add_header X-Remembering “Eric Binnion <https://friendsofericbinnion.wordpress.com/>” always; Our design team will make that less AI and more humane in the coming days. Automattic.com will have a mourning band for 30 days. Eric was the 21st recipient of the Distinguished Janitor Award, Automattic’s highest honor, and in our hangs the last few months we’ve been talking about how to redefine and evolve it, which will happen internally at Automattic. One of the ideas…

Almost a third of our source code was comments. I deleted all of them and asked an AI agent to build the same features on both versions of the codebase, three times each. The code it wrote was just as good with or without comments. If you use agents on a real codebase and wonder whether comments help them, slow them down, or don’t matter, here’s what I found. Why I tried this In this video (around 23:07), Lauren mentions that they don’t let their agents write comments in the code. Our codebase, is the opposite: it’s full of comments,…

Speaking of sci-fi authors, Automattic is hosting Neal Stephenson for a livestream about his new book soon, please tune in! Neal was a big influence on WordPress! I got hip to him from Tantek. In the source code of billions of pages you’ll see this: <link rel=”profile” href=”https://gmpg.org/xfn/11″> GMPG is the Global Media Protocols Group, “an experiment in Metamemetics.” Inspired, of course, by the Global Multimedia Protocol Group that owned the virtual real estate in Snow Crash’s metaverse. Eric, Tantek, and I were reacting to the idea that there should be a separate heavily-marked-up RDF or XML web, and that…

In today’s news, markdown streamlines AI input, AI-generated security reports increase workloads, and autonomous agent costs affect project efficiency

Next month in November, I’ll (Bob) be attending the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal. I have been to conferences in the past that have had attendance up to 15,000, but never one that has over 70,000 attendees. That’s a lot of people. A few months ago I applied for media creditation, unsure of their parameters […]