Top July Updates for WordPress Developers — and Beginners

Here’s a quick list of some of the most interesting new developments in the WordPress ecosystem this summer. There’s a lot of exciting stuff for front and back-end developers, no/low-coders, and learners new to WordPress. Let me know if anything stands out you’d like to spend time on in a meetup.

AI and WordPress

James LePage announced AI Building Blocks for WordPress as a part of the third phase of the Gutenberg project:

1. PHP AI Client SDKAbilities API (former Feature API)
2. MCP Adapter
3. AI Experiments Plugin

James joined a great discussion with Jake Goldman and Jakob Trost about AI and WordPress. Over at WP Engine, they’ve got some AI tools cooking as well. And Elementor too, where “Angie” is a plugin-based agent to help you build sites.

Campus Connect and WordPress Credits

WordPress Credits is a new “contribution-focused internship program” for university students. It’s part of the WordPress Campus Connect project. Students in this program can earn course credits for contributing to WordPress core. A pilot program is running now in the Philippines, in Cagayan de Oro City.

Learn how you can get involved as an Educator or Company.

Voices of Experience

It’s always a good thing when veteran contributors to WordPress core reflect on their work. Here are two recent examples of community knowledge transfer:

• 12 Years Contributing to WordPress, by Jonathan Desrosiers, whom we’re happy to welcome as a speaker at WordCamp Canada this year.
• 10 Lessons from 10 Years of Contributing to WordPress Core, by Felix Arntz

CSS so intelligent you need an AI to use it?

Here’s a great deep dive into modern CSS — its opportunities and challenges — by Gabriel Shoyombo at Smashing Magazine: CSS Intelligence: Speculating On The Future Of A Smarter Language. CSS is getting so “intelligent”/complex, we may need to rely on LLM tools to work with it in the future. Like that wouldn’t happen anyway…

On the upside, you can use CSS to do things that once required JavaScript. For example. Scroll-driven Animations with just CSS. CSS-only carousels have also gotten a lot of attention lately. (Elementor released a bloc with one.)

On the downside, the boundary between the two is getting blurred, making it a harder decision when to use one or the other.

WooCommerce 10.0 Highlights

WooCommerce 10.0 has been released with major frontend accessibility improvements. In fact, it fully conforms with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 level AA and is substantially conformant with level AAA.

Shani Banerjee explains the details in A Year of Accessibility Improvements in WooCommerce Core. Amber and Chris Hinds over at Equalize Digital contributed a lot to this huge effort as well.

Other new features and enhancements include shareable checkout URLs, coupon enhancements, a better product importer, and over 400 commits from 67 contributors. Read the release notes for more details.

WooCommerce introduced a modernized version of their email templates in 9.7 that is a really nice refresh. Another less visible enhancements is that the Woo developer docs much more AI-friendly now with Cursor Rules, LLMS.txt, and copy-to-Markdown.

New Accessibiity Tools

Speaking of accessibility, check out Mark Root-Wiley‘s Post Cleanup Utilities plugin and Troy Chaplin‘s Block Accessibility Checks for some nice tools to help you keep WordPress content nice and accessible.

Remote Data Blocks

Remote Data Blocks is a really interesting plugin and concept from Automattic’s WordPress VIP team. With it, you can pull remote data from an API or Google Sheets into customizable blocks in WordPress. Think of it as a way to gain the main benefits of a “headless” WordPress site without actually making WordPress headless. Stephen Edde has more details in a blog post, Bring Your Content to Life With Remote Data Blocks.

Check out the documentation and test Remote Data Blocks on the WordPress Playground.

Time for an Admin Interface Makeover?

Fabian Kagy shared a plugin-based experiment that revamps the WordPress back-end administrator interface. You can quickly test it in the WordPress Playground.

Here’s another mock of a refreshed admin experience built with v0, Vercel’s LLM tool for generating UI components.

More Cool Tools and Shiny New Things

Alley has created WordPress REPL (https://repl.alley.dev) using WordPress Playground — I’d describe it as a superfast live PHP coding environment for cowboy coding without the risk of hurting any real cows. Alley is one of those enterprise WordPress agencies with a GitHub repo full of treasures if you want to go digging.

Watch Wes Theron‘s Designing with the Columns block tutorial to learn how to use the columns block to build site layouts in WordPress.

Finally, Studio keeps on improving as a strong and speedy way to run WordPress locally.