Guidelines feature, AI streaming, command palette overhaul
v7.1
WordPress 7.1 is set to be released on August 19th, 2026. This release advances how people work together in WordPress, with collaboration as a throughline: new Notes features like suggestion mode and emoji reactions make asynchronous feedback richer, while real-time collaboration remains an exciting focus area, with strategic questions still to answer around exactly how it’ll show up in the WordPress experience. Closely tied to this is a new Guidelines feature, a persistent, structured way to encode editorial rules into WordPress so you can keep your voice and preferences when collaborating with AI. Longstanding styling gaps are being tackled too, with responsive styling and pseudo-state styling underway, expanding what you can do directly in the Site Editor without touching CSS. Several new options make it easier to find your way around: see when a block inherits its styling from a global setting, set key details about your site in a new Identity section in the Site Editor, jump to what you need faster with recently used commands and suggestions in the command palette, and enjoy the familiarity and functionality of the admin bar inside any of the editors. The experience of uploading and using media gets numerous updates, including a new free-form image cropper for getting your images just right and client-side media improvements that support more image formats and add resiliency throughout. Numerous APIs are slated for iteration, and expanded Unicode support is in the works so email addresses, usernames, and slugs can better reflect WordPress’ global audience. Throughout, smaller delights like a new “On This Day” dashboard widget, new blocks, and various writing flow improvements round out the release.
As always, what’s shared here is being actively pursued, but doesn’t necessarily mean each will make it into the final release of WordPress 7.1.
For those who want to be involved in the release in a different, more hands on way, there’s a new dedicated outreach effort for WordPress 7.1 to ensure collaborative editing gets the collaborative testing it needs. Learn more here.
AI
AI Client iteration
The AI Client is the foundational piece for running AI programmatically inside WordPress, and for 7.1 the focus stays on empowering plugin authors. Two notable capabilities are planned: generation streaming, introduced first in the PHP AI Client as an initial effort to unlock full usage in a future release, and embeddings, which represent content as vectors to enable meaning-based search across a site. These arrive alongside minor fixes that keep improving the reliability of the AI Client.
Connectors iteration
After landing a new framework for registering and managing connections to external services in 7.0, work is underway for connectors to gain more ways to authenticate beyond API keys: the plan is to start simple with adding username/application password support similar to the existing API key flow and then explore more general, declaratively-defined connection forms (URLs, a default-models dropdown, and more) in PHP, advancing the DataForm API in the process.
Follow this iteration issue and this Trac ticket for more details, along with the related DataForm issues #76544 and #74865.
Guidelines
After shipping early as an experiment in Gutenberg to gather feedback, a new Guidelines feature lets you define writing and content guidelines that tie into AI tooling, with the ability to import/export guidelines between sites. This brings a persistent, structured system for encoding editorial rules, brand voice, and content standards directly into WordPress. As more collaboration happens directly in WordPress, this brings consistency and personalization to that collaboration when AI is involved.
Follow this GitHub issue for more details.
Admin
A more organized command palette
The command palette, the Cmd/Ctrl+K overlay for jumping around the editor and running actions, is becoming smarter to navigate with. Results are now grouped into clear sections for recent, suggested, and matching commands, and a “Recently used” list keeps the commands you reach for most within easy reach, saved to your preferences so they persist across sessions. The palette also gets a roomier layout, making the whole list easier to scan.
Review this pull request for more details.
Admin color scheme reflected in the Site Editor
The Site Editor sidebar and overall shell now follow the set WordPress admin color scheme instead of always using a fixed dark background. This ensures broader consistency across all parts of the WordPress experience when choosing to personalize the admin.
Review this pull request for more details.
DataViews and DataForms iterations
Work is underway to migrate DataViews onto the new Design System primitives for a more consistent look and feel, and to consolidate Quick Edit with the editor inspector so editing a post’s details feels the same wherever you do it. The DataForm API itself is growing more capable, including support for disabling individual controls. The Site Editor’s Pages, Templates, and Patterns screens are also becoming more extensible, with a new server-side REST endpoint that lets plugin authors register their own view and form configuration.
Follow this iteration issue for more details.
Dedicated Identity section
A dedicated Design → Identity screen brings the essentials of your site’s identity into one place, with an inline media editor for your logo and favicon and live editing of your site title and tagline against the site’s root entity. The aim is to make these foundational settings quick to find and simple to update without digging into templates or needing to go searching in your wider site’s Settings.
Review this pull request for more details.
Design System
Work continues on the shared component library in wordpress/ui and the underlying theming system that powers it. A highlight of this cycle is graduating ThemeProvider from experimental to a stable, public API, alongside finalizing the public token names (background, foreground, and stroke renames) before they lock in, and adding new theme-customization tokens for corner radius and element sizing. In parallel, key parts of the editor UI begin adopting improved components, with flyout menus extending to transforms, style variations, and the block ellipsis and transform menus.
Follow this tracking issue for more details.
New “On This Day” widget
The dashboard is getting a new “On This Day” widget that resurfaces past content, a popular feature across many different platforms. Get motivated by looking back on what you’ve written and write more content today for future reminders.
Follow this pull request introducing the “On This Day” widget for more information.
Persistent admin bar across editors (aka omnibar)
The admin bar is getting some nice polish ahead of being easily accessible in the Site Editor and Block Editor. Having landed as an experiment in Gutenberg, the work brings the toolbar into the editing experience while polishing long-standing rough edges: removing the “Howdy” greeting, replacing the home icon with the set site icon, making the profile avatar a circle rather than a square, and replacing the legacy Dashicons icon font with wordpress/icons SVGs throughout the admin bar.
Follow this iteration issue for more details.
Revisions iterations
Revisions are becoming easier to read and navigate. Planned improvements include a spark line view in the scrubbing toolbar to visualize the shape of a document’s history, better representation of edits across authors, and the ability to jump to revisions from a specific author. This work dovetails nicely with real-time collaboration.
Follow this iteration issue for more details.
APIs
Abilities API iteration
The Abilities API gives developers and AI tooling a structured, queryable way to expose what a WordPress site can do. This cycle advances querying and filtering of abilities and implements a curated set of core abilities (including site settings, current-user info management, and general site awareness).
Review this trac query for more details.
Block Bindings iterations
Block Bindings gain more reach, with new support for binding list-item blocks and inner blocks, letting more of your content connect to dynamic data sources.
Follow this pull request adding list-item support for more information.
Enforced iframed editor
The post editor has been moving toward always running inside an iframe, which isolates the editing canvas from the admin’s styles and lets viewport-relative units and media queries work against the canvas instead of the browser window. Today the editor still drops back to a non-iframed mode whenever a block using Block API version 2 or lower is present. To make the rollout gradual, the current plan is to enforce iframing for block-based themes in this release, then extend it to all themes in a future release. In both cases, blocks need to be on Block API version 3 to work in the iframed editor, and a migration guide is available to help extenders get there.
Read the dev note on the 7.0 changes and the block migration guide for more details.
Extended Unicode support in email addresses, usernames, and slugs
This release is looking to broaden Unicode support so email addresses, usernames, and slugs better reflect WordPress’ global audience. This work centers around allowing storing Unicode email addresses (Core-31992) so functions like is_email(), sanitize_email() and antispambot() can be extended to support non-ASCII addresses.
Read this Make Core post and follow this Trac ticket for more details.
React 19 Upgrade
WordPress is upgrading from React 18 to React 19. This update will first be merged into the Gutenberg plugin ahead of an eventual pathway to Core. In this upgrade, there are several new APIs, major updates to TypeScript types, changed behaviors and more. Plugin and theme developers, please help test and review what’s coming as early and as much as possible. To help with testing, install and activate the latest version of Gutenberg, head to the experiments page, and turn on the “React 19” experiment.
Follow this tracking issue and read this Make Core post for more details.
Blocks
Icon API expansion
After WordPress 7.0 introduced the foundations of the SVG Icon API ( the icon registry, a REST endpoint, and the core Icon block), 7.1’s iteration centers on opening the API up to third parties: new public functions like register_icon() and unregister_icon(), core-icons theme support, SVG sanitization and namespace validation, and collection support (similar to the Font Library) so agencies and product makers can ship their own branded icon sets. The work also explores a reusable icon picker modal for any block, Icon block enhancements like flip and rotate, and making the hard-coded icons in blocks such as Navigation, Breadcrumbs, and Details selectable through the Icon API. Alongside the API work, the core icon set itself is getting a visual refresh, with prominent icons redrawn as stroke-based designs for a more consistent, modern look.
Follow this iteration issue for more details.
Lazy loading the Classic block
To improve performance, the Classic block is planned for deprecation in 7.1, with TinyMCE no longer loaded by default when it isn’t needed. This work improves migration and conversion paths and moves the freeform block into its own package, so sites that don’t rely on the classic experience get a lighter, faster editor. To help with testing, install and activate the latest version of Gutenberg, head to the experiments page, and turn on the “Classic block deprecation” experiment.
Follow this tracking issue for more details.
More Core blocks and block improvements
Every new block added to Core means new possibilities for all, without needing to rely on third party blocks. 7.1 has a few new Core blocks slated for inclusion:
- Playlist block, with additional waveform audio visualization.
- Table of Contents block, automatically generating navigable links to the headings in your content.
- Tabs block, organizes content into tabbed panels.
Alongside these new blocks are a set of upgrades to current block functionality to help you do more with what’s already there:
- Gallery block lightbox refinements, including swipe indication and opt-in captions on mobile.
- New block support for the HTML block, making it possible to have editable blocks inside of a custom HTML block. This is especially useful with AI generated sites, since LLMs often create custom HTML.
- “Mark as decorative” toggle for the Image block to hide decorative images from screen readers for an improved experience.
- An shortcode transform was added to the Embed block, so converting or pasting shortcodes now creates a proper Embed block instead of leaving raw shortcode text behind.
- Block specific transforms were added to the Shortcode block when text matches a registered shortcode. This makes it much easier to convert a shortcode into a comparable block.
- The Group block added support for background gradients through a new background.gradient block support, allowing gradients and background images to work together without conflicts.
This is a great area to contribute to the release. If interested, please help with the Dialog block for transcripts and conversations and the Marquee block for scrolling, animated content as these both are on the list of blocks to add but don’t have a champion.
Writing flow and drag-and-drop improvements
Writing and arranging content keeps getting smoother. The goal is to improve drag-and-drop enough to remove the toolbar drag handle entirely, make multi-selection work on touch devices, and refine inline insertion and inline images.
Follow this tracking issue for more details.
Collaboration
New Notes features
Notes have a range of planned improvements that include notes on specific content within a block and across multiple blocks, rich text in notes, notifications for replies and follows, emoji reactions, a minified notes experience, and an “apply suggestions” feature that works from note replies so assistants can act on them in a thread. All of these help provide a richer, more interactive experience of collaborating with others directly in the editor.
Follow this iteration issue for more details.
Real-time collaboration
Imagine a world with no post lock screen and with collaborators of all kinds (human and AI) working together to share content with the world through WordPress. After a monumental effort ahead of the last release, real-time collaboration marches ahead with that vision in mind and with big, open strategy questions around:
- What to land in this release (full feature vs the underlying architecture)? This came up in a Core Committer meeting at WCEU and is important to directly call out.
- What storage mechanism to use? There’s a clear winner that still needs to be decided upon.
These decisions, along with the readiness of the feature, are the key aspects to get right for all of WordPress and to align with project leadership on. They impact who gets access to the feature and what the experience will be like. To help aid the decision making and reliability of the feature, there’s a new dedicated outreach effort for WordPress 7.1 to ensure collaborative editing gets the collaborative testing it needs. Please consider getting involved and learn more here.
Follow this iteration issue for more details.
Customization
Display inherited styles
When you’re styling a block, it isn’t always clear which styles are coming from the theme, a parent, or global styles. This work explores surfacing inherited styles clearly in the sidebar so you can understand where a block’s styles are coming from and edit at the right layer of styling, whether that’s a global or local change.
Follow this tracking issue for more details.
Interactive states styling
A standardized way to style interactive states is taking shape. Support for pseudo-state styling such as hover, focus, and active has landed for both Global Styles and individual block instances, building on the broader “states” effort. Further work, including custom states like styling the current menu item, continues beyond 7.1. All of this work means you can begin to style how blocks respond to interaction, like buttons changing color on hover, all without writing a line of CSS.
Follow this tracking issue for more details.
Pattern editing iterations
With WordPress 7.0, the experience of using patterns shifted to be more like editing a single block with a focus on content changes than exposing every tool available for every block in a pattern. For this cycle, work will focus on UX improvements based on feedback around this change, bug fixes, and general maintenance.
Follow this iteration issue for more details.
Responsive styling
Responsive styling for blocks has been a long requested feature and 7.1 aims to be a big step towards more support. Building on the same style states mechanism that powers the interactive states styling for blocks, this work lets you define how a block looks at different screen sizes. This means you can apply responsive styles, like a font size at a certain viewport, directly in the editor without writing custom CSS. The feature will be available both for global styles that apply across every instance of a block, and for individual block instances. The aim is to make responsive design a built-in, first-class part of the editing experience.
Follow this iteration issue for more details.
Viewport breakpoint customization
After adding the ability to hide or show blocks based on viewport, theme-configurable breakpoints defined in theme.json are being added to provide more flexible, customizable responsive styling.
Follow this iteration issue for more details.
Media
Client-side media iterations
After being punted from 7.0, client-side media processing keeps getting more capable and resilient ahead of this release. The work spans HEIC image support, Ultra HDR support, GIF-to-video conversion, more resilient uploads that retry on failure and resume after a crash or going offline, video transcoding to web-safe formats, optimization of previously uploaded media, and local poster generation during video upload so pages can render before a video finishes loading.
Follow this iteration issue for more details.
Media editor modal
The Media editor modal replaces the existing inline cropping tool in the Block Editor. The modal pattern keeps the familiar Crop button entry point, and brings freeform and aspect-ratio cropping, flip, fine-grained and snap rotation, and metadata editing into one dedicated workflow.
Follow this tracking issue for more details.
Media gallery improvements
Galleries are becoming more dynamic and easier to build, with better handling of the legacy gallery shortcode on conversion, dynamic galleries that can sort or pull media attached to a post, and a quicker path in the inserter’s media tab to images attached to the current post with thumbnails shown directly.
Follow this tracking issue for more details.
Performance improvements
The core performance change planned for 7.1 is an update to speculative loading: when both object caching and page caching are detected, the default eagerness would move from conservative to moderate, prefetching and prerendering more readily on sites equipped to handle it so navigation feels faster.
Follow this Trac ticket for more details.
Two further efforts are being iterated on within feature plugins you can install and benefit from today. Work in the View Transitions plugin centers around bringing smooth, animated transitions between pages on the front end. Work in the Enhanced Responsive Images plugin computes more accurate sizes values in block themes so browsers download appropriately sized images. Both are in active development, and interested contributors are welcome to help move them forward.
Follow the View Transitions and Enhanced Responsive Images issues for more details.
Find something missing? Want to help?
If you have something you’re working on that you don’t see reflected in this post, please share a comment below so we can all be aware! If you’re reading this and want to help, start with the above items and/or ping me (@annezazu) in the 7.1 release leads channel. I have a list of projects that were punted from this release that I’m happy to talk to people about taking on.
Thank you to @ramonopoly @isabel_brison @ellatrix @gziolo @jason_the_adams @ntsekouras (and many others I might be forgetting) for reviews.
Fetched June 19, 2026
