WordPress

WordPress 7.1 “Mary Lou” shipped August 19, 2026, with design-token theming, a new accessibility tooltips API, and a unified public exposure flag for abilities. Two security releases (7.0.3, 7.0.4) patched pre-auth XSS and an Author+ RCE via malicious image uploads.

Design-system theming landed in core. A new wp-theme stylesheet exposes semantic design tokens as CSS custom properties for admin UI color, roundness, and cursor pointers; form controls default to 40px, and jQuery UI updated to 1.14.2 (dropping IE/Edge Legacy).

Accessibility work touched the editor and admin. Ships new Tab and Playlist blocks plus 45 core accessibility fixes. Post list tables moved the row header th to the title column, improving screen-reader row naming — breaking for extenders targeting th.check-column.

Gutenberg 23.8 shipped with shareable URLs and an in-editor code diff view for visual revisions, email notifications for users mentioned in notes, and major List View performance gains on large posts. 23.7.1 was a security release addressing GHSA advisories.

A Secrets API is proposed for 7.2. The proposal would give plugins a first-class way to store credentials instead of plaintext options-table entries, with WP-CLI support; the UI would wait for 7.3. 7.2 development is underway with a target release of December 9, 2026.

WordPress Contributor Toolkit hit 1.0. The desktop app guides first-time contributors from a fresh machine to a running wordpress-develop environment and through linking a Trac ticket and contributing — for Windows, macOS, and Linux, with no manual Git/Node/Docker install.