WordPress

WordPress 7.1 heads toward its August 19 release with Beta 1 due July 15, while Gutenberg 23.5 adds cropping controls to the Media editor, responsive style states for aspect-ratio and flex-alignment, and real-time collaboration improvements. WordPress 7.0.1 shipped July 9 fixing 31 bugs across Core and the Block Editor.

The admin navigation model is being overhauled in 7.1. A persistent toolbar now appears inside the editor, replacing the "W" logo (which previously acted as a hidden back button) with a dedicated chevron back button. The site icon, when set, appears in the toolbar — each icon means one thing everywhere.

A design system theming foundation landed in Gutenberg. The ThemeProvider React component and a set of CSS custom property design tokens now ship, supporting consistent accessible UI components across the admin experience.

The Classic block stays in the inserter. The earlier plan to hide it by default in 7.1 was reverted — no migration needed, and the associated wp_classic_block_supports_inserter filter has been removed.

Three new read-only Core Abilities were proposed for 7.1 (core/read-settings, core/read-content, core/read-users), building on the Abilities API from WordPress 6.9.

CI infrastructure moved from branch protection rules to repository rulesets in the Gutenberg repo, fixing a broken plugin release step where the GitHub app couldn't push version bump commits to trunk.

Gutenberg 23.5 (and patch releases 23.5.1, 23.5.2) shipped with corner radius presets in ThemeProvider, a combobox component, Tooltip migration, and a fix for collaboration sync — only reporting changed properties from the default sync configuration.