In just over a month and a half, WordPress 7.1 will launch, and its release has already been scheduled, starting with beta on July 15.

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Hello, I’m Alicia Ireland, and you’re listening to WPpodcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.

In this episode, you’ll find the information from June 29 to July 5, 2026.

WordPress 7.0.1 is in Release Candidate 1, with 18 Core tickets fixed and 15 Gutenberg pull requests included. Among the most relevant bugs it resolves are the cramped publish buttons issue in the classic editor, a flaw that corrupted CSS declarations with background-image, accessibility issues in Visual Revisions, and several visual bugs in the admin redesign. The final release is scheduled for July 9.

As for WordPress 7.1, we now have the release party schedule published. Beta 1 ships July 15, RC1 on August 5, and the final release on August 19, coinciding with WordCamp US in Phoenix.

The Testing team has published a call for testing one of the most anticipated features of WordPress 7.1: responsive styling per block. The feature lets you change font size, spacing, colors, or any other style of a block independently for tablet and mobile, without writing CSS, directly from the editor inspector.

Gutenberg 23.5 has arrived with two main updates taking center stage.

The first is the improvement of the media editor modal, which now extends to the Cover block: magnified crop editing, handle adjustment to the original pixel, and correction of keyboard resizing in proportion-locked crops are the concrete changes.

The second is unified device preview with a resizable canvas: you no longer have to choose between the three fixed presets of desktop, tablet, and mobile, but can drag the canvas to any width in between. Blocks with per-device visibility react in real time while dragging, and the device selector becomes the entry point for activating responsive editing, which was elsewhere before.

Beyond those two main updates, there are notable things: Global Styles add text shadow support, the Icons block gains flip and rotation controls and inserts a default icon instead of an empty placeholder, the Search block adds opt-in support for the correct semantic HTML element, and real-time collaboration can be disabled per post type.

The Core team has published official guidelines on how Gutenberg code will be synced into wordpress-develop going forward — something that changed during the WordPress 7.0 cycle and hasn’t been well documented until now.

The main change was abandoning published npm packages to switch to downloading a zip of compiled assets from GitHub, which gives more control over what exactly enters each WordPress version.

During the 7.1 cycle, sync will occur one week after each general Gutenberg release, with the goal of eventually reaching weekly or even daily synchronization.

There’s also a merge proposal for WordPress 7.1 that expands the Abilities API with three new read-only capabilities: core/read-settings, core/read-content, and core/read-users. This proposal takes the next logical step: letting an AI agent or automated workflow read the fundamental data any WordPress installation already manages — its configuration, its content, and its users — in a standardized way with the same permission controls as always.

The proposal also deliberately distinguishes between what makes sense to expose via REST and what makes sense to expose to an agent: certain queries REST avoids for latency reasons, like complex metadata filtering, can make more sense in the context of an agent working in the background where the cost of bringing everything and filtering on the client is higher.

The Community team is weighing a proposal to reorganize their handbooks, which have been growing organically for years into a flat list of nine documents where it’s hard to navigate, especially for newcomers.

The proposal starts by grouping them into three blocks with clear logic: one for people managing the Community team itself, with the general handbook, the incident response handbook, and the education program handbook; one for organizers of any type of event, with handbooks for Meetup, WordCamp, Campus Connect, online events, and KidsCamp; and a third for reference materials, where handbooks specific to sponsors, speakers, and volunteers would go — three documents that don’t currently exist as such but are buried within the WordCamp handbook.

The proposal also includes an internal reorganization of the team handbook, and a small idea that could have major impact: adding on the first page of each handbook an invitation to take the corresponding course on Learn WordPress, so newcomers know where to start learning.

WordPress Credits, the program bringing university students into WordPress contribution as part of their academic training, has published its first-half 2026 balance and there are concrete results.

The most striking figure is that the annual goal of closing twenty agreements with universities and schools worldwide is already met at midyear, leading the team to recalibrate strategy for the second half. One of the semester’s pilots, a condensed fifty-hour module, has worked well and will be repeated in July and August.

The other, testing a deferred mentorship model where students did the onboarding process alone before being assigned a mentor, hasn’t worked and has confirmed what was already suspected: mentorship is one of the essential ingredients of the program. In response, a new structure is being launched with regional leads coordinating mentors within their geographic area.

For the second half, focus shifts from growth to consolidation. The goal for new partnerships intentionally drops to thirty-five total by year-end, prioritizing countries and cities where the program still lacks presence.

And finally, this podcast is distributed under a Creative Commons license as a derivative version of the podcast in Spanish; you can find all the links for more information, and the podcast in other languages, at WPpodcast .org.

Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!