WordPress Core Dev Notes

Core Committers met at WordCamp Europe 2026 to discuss reducing friction between code bases and improving communication. They also explored a canary-style approach to WordPress development and native beta testing within Core.

WordPress now supports Unicode email addresses for accounts, including non-ASCII local parts and decoded Punycode domain parts. This change updates is_email() and sanitize_email() and introduces a new WP_Email_Address class for structural analysis. Validation now matches the WHATWG email specification.

The WordPress Developers Chat will meet Wednesday, June 10, 2026, at 15:00 UTC in the core channel on Make WordPress Slack to discuss upcoming releases. Announcements include calls for WordPress 7.0.x release managers and testing of client-side media processing, plus an update that the Gutenberg React 19 upgrade has been temporarily reverted.

WordPress 7.0.0 was released May 20, 2026. While the work of a major release team includes people fil...

Gutenberg 23.3.2 reverts the React 19 upgrade announced days earlier after discovering that plugins built for React 18 crash due to runtime incompatibility in JSX element generation. WordPress plans a more incremental upgrade strategy with an experimental feature flag and compatibility layer for existing plugins, targeting WordPress 7.1.

Client-side media processing, which offloads image decoding, resizing, and encoding to the browser using WebAssembly, is graduating from a Gutenberg experiment to a WordPress 7.1 core feature and is now open for testing. The feature reduces CPU and memory load on servers during image uploads, supports modern formats including AVIF, WebP, HEIC, UltraHDR, and JPEG XL, and gracefully falls back to server-side processing in unsupported browsers.

WordPress is launching a dedicated outreach effort for collaborative editing in the 7.1 release cycle, inviting real-world early adopters to test the feature across diverse hosting environments and use cases. Participants can join the #collaborative-editing-outreach Slack channel to provide feedback, report bugs, and help shape the feature before its planned inclusion in WordPress 7.1.

The WordPress Core developers chat on June 3, 2026 will discuss the React 19 upgrade targeted for WordPress 7.1 and announce the 7.1 development squad following the closed volunteer call. The agenda includes general announcements and an open floor for ticket requests and discussion.

The modal-based media editor becomes the default cropping experience, replacing inline cropping with a dedicated workflow for freeform and aspect-ratio cropping, flip, rotation, and metadata editing. The editor upgrades to React 19, responsive styles extend to individual block instances, Notes blocks gain support for multiple discussion threads, and the experimental customizable WordPress dashboard adds five new widgets with significant layout polish.

The full chat log is available beginning here on Slack.

**WordPress Performa...

WordPress Docs team announced important changes to documentation articles. Details are available in the linked post on make.wordpress.org/docs.

Core Committers reviewed the WordPress 7.0 timeline and remaining open tickets, clarified the new Gutenberg code syncing process that will update SVN trunk to track the upstream Gutenberg trunk branch after release, and discussed potential high-priority features for 7.1 including client-side media retry, template organization, and enhanced responsive images. Performance Team noted declining contributor activity and committed to documenting plugin status to attract new contributors.

A hotfix is available for an issue affecting classic editor users who extended the post publishing panel with additional action buttons. Install Classic Editor version 1.7.0 or Hotfix version 1.4 to resolve the problem, with a permanent fix targeted for WordPress 7.0.1.

WordPress 7.0 "Armstrong" was released on May 20 with accessibility improvements and removals of title attributes in author links. WordPress 7.1 is under active development with an alpha phase underway and a call for volunteers published. The team is planning a 7.0.1 release targeting mid-to-end June to address outstanding issues.

WordPress is upgrading from React 18 to React 19, shipping first in Gutenberg 23.3 and targeting WordPress 7.1. Developers must migrate away from removed APIs (ReactDOM.render, hydrate, unmountComponentAtNode, findDOMNode, and defaultProps for function components), update the inert attribute from string to boolean, and adjust ref callbacks and forwardRef usage. React 19 introduces new hooks (use, useActionState, useOptimistic, useFormStatus) and TypeScript types have changed significantly, particularly for refs and ReactElement props.

The May 27 WordPress Developers Chat will discuss WordPress 7.0 "Armstrong" release updates, including accessibility improvements and removal of title attributes in author links, plus planning for WordPress 7.1 and a call for testing the Media Editor modal.

The media library now supports voice control technology, and alternative text embedded in photo metadata is automatically imported and set as image alt text when available. Color contrast across the dashboard and admin interfaces is improved to meet WCAG standards, including fixes to the comment notification badge and Twenty Twenty-Five theme. The editor includes new blocks (Icons, Gallery lightbox, Connectors) and accessibility improvements to DataViews, keyboard navigation, and component focus handling.

WordPress is requesting feedback on extending email sanitization functions (is_email(), sanitize_email(), antispambot()) to support valid UTF-8 characters, unlocking Unicode email addresses for user accounts on sites with utf8mb4 databases. The proposal includes a new WP_Email_Address class for parsing internationalized email addresses and introduces wp_is_unicode_email() and wp_sanitize_unicode_email() functions, while maintaining US-ASCII-only restrictions for the server's own sender address.

WordPress has retired the "beta" label for PHP 8 support retroactively across all versions. WordPress 6.9 and 7.0 now document full support for PHP 8.5, WordPress 6.8 and later for PHP 8.4, and WordPress 6.4 and later for PHP 8.3. The label was retired because PHP 8.x receives stable updates regularly, reducing plugin and theme compatibility work, and the "beta" designation was discouraging users and hosts from upgrading to newer PHP versions.

A Media Editor Modal experiment integrates freeform and aspect-ratio cropping, flip, rotation, and metadata editing into a dedicated workflow, replacing the existing inline cropping tool in the Block Editor. The modal uses WordPress-native components instead of third-party libraries and is available for testing via the Gutenberg trunk or WordPress Playground.