This beta release is intended for testing and development only. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, use a test environment or local site to explore the new features.

How to Test WordPress 7.1 Beta 3

You can test WordPress 7.1 Beta 3 in any of the following ways:

The scheduled final release date for WordPress 7.1 is August 19, 2026. The full release schedule can be found here. Your help testing Beta and RC versions is vital to making this release as stable and powerful as possible. Thank you to everyone who contributes by testing!

Find out what’s new in WordPress 7.1: Read the Beta 1 announcement for details and highlights.

How important is your testing?

Testing for issues is a critical part of developing any software, and it’s a meaningful way for anyone to contribute – whether or not you have experience. Details on what to test in WordPress 7.1 are available here.

If you encounter an issue, please share it in the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums. If you are comfortable submitting a reproducible bug report, you can do so via WordPress Trac. You can also check your issue against this list of known bugs.

Curious about testing releases in general and how to get started? Follow along with the testing initiatives in Make Core and join the #core-test channel on Making WordPress Slack.

What’s in WordPress 7.1 Beta 3?

For technical details on the more than 71 issues addressed since Beta 1, see the following links:

• Closed 7.1 WordPress Core Trac tickets since July 15, 2026
• 7.1 Gutenberg commits since July 15, 2026

Note: Beta 2 was released on July 17, 2026, as part of the WordPress 7.0.2 release and includes important security fixes.

Beta 3 introduces two improvements to styling.

Applying local style changes globally is no longer an all-or-nothing action. The Apply globally option in the block inspector now opens a quick review step, allowing you to choose which modified styles to apply globally while keeping the rest as local overrides.

Other notable fixes include improvements to media uploads: long animated GIF uploads no longer hang, images rotated using EXIF metadata are processed correctly, and uploading a single HEIC image in Safari no longer creates two entries.

The editor also includes additional fixes for Notes, responsive styling, and custom CSS. For developers, WordPress Coding Standards has been updated to version 3.4.0.

Unicode email address support will not be included in WordPress 7.1. The work will continue in a community plugin, allowing broader testing of compatibility, security, and data-handling considerations.

A Beta 3 haiku

Fresh bugs surface now,
click by click, we chase them down—
codebase grows steady.

Props to @krupajnanda, @annezazu,
@wildworks, @amykamala for proofreading and review.

The 7.0.2 security release addresses one critical and one high severity security issue.

Because this is a security release, it is recommended that you update your sites immediately. Due to the severity, the WordPress.org team have enabled forced updates via the auto-update system for sites running affected versions.

To manually update you can visit your WordPress Dashboard, click “Updates”, and then click “Update Now”, or you can download WordPress 7.0.2 from WordPress.org. On sites that support automatic background updates, the update process will begin automatically.

Security updates included in this release

The security team would like to thank the following people for responsibly reporting vulnerabilities and allowing them to be fixed in this release:

• A facilitated SQL injection issue reported as a team by TF1T, dtro, and haongo
• A REST API batch-route confusion and SQL injection issue leading to Remote Code Execution reported by Adam Kues at Assetnote / Searchlight Cyber

For more information on this release, please visit the HelpHub site.

Backports

• WordPress 6.9 is affected by both vulnerabilities. Version 6.9.5 has been released containing fixes for both.
• WordPress 6.8 is only affected by the first vulnerability. Version 6.8.6 has been released containing a fix.
• The beta release of WordPress 7.1 is affected by both vulnerabilities. Version 7.1 beta2 has been released containing fixes for both.
• Versions of WordPress prior to 6.8 are not affected.

CVE and GHSA references

• CVE-2026-60137 / GHSA-fpp7-x2x2-2mjf
• CVE-2026-63030 / GHSA-ff9f-jf42-662q

Thank you to these WordPress contributors

This release was led by John Blackbourn and Barry Abrahamson. In addition to the security researchers mentioned above, WordPress 7.0.2 would not have been possible without the significant contributions of the following people: Aaron Jorbin, Alex Concha, annezazu, Barry, David Baumwald, Dominik Schilling, Ehtisham Siddiqui, Joe Dolson, Joe Hoyle, John Blackbourn, Jonathan Desrosiers, Marius L. J., Matt Mullenweg, Mohammad Jangda, Peter Wilson, Sergey Biryukov, vortfu, Weston Ruter, plus representatives from Altis, Automattic, Bluehost, Cloudflare, GoDaddy, Hostinger, and WP Engine.

This beta release is intended for testing and development only. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, use a test environment or local site to explore the new features.

How to Test WordPress 7.1 Beta 1

You can test WordPress 7.1 Beta 1 in any of the following ways:

The scheduled final release date for WordPress 7.1 is August 19, 2026. The full release schedule can be found here. Your help testing Beta and RC versions is vital to making this release as stable and powerful as possible. Thank you to everyone who contributes by testing!

How important is your testing?

Testing for issues is a critical part of developing any software, and it’s a meaningful way for anyone to contribute – whether or not you have experience. Details on what to test in WordPress 7.1 are available here.

If you encounter an issue, please share it in the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums. If you are comfortable submitting a reproducible bug report, you can do so via WordPress Trac. You can also check your issue against this list of known bugs.

Curious about testing releases in general and how to get started? Follow along with the testing initiatives in Make Core and join the #core-test channel on Making WordPress Slack.

WordPress 7.1 will include new features that were previously only available in the Gutenberg plugin. Learn more about Gutenberg updates since WordPress 7.0 in the What’s New in Gutenberg posts for versions 22.7, 22.8, 22.9, 23.0, 23.1, 23.2, 23.3, 23.4, 23.5 and 23.6.

What’s new in WordPress 7.1?

WordPress 7.1 delivers a more complete set of styling controls, a smoother media experience, and a more personalized admin experience. Notes have evolved to add inline notes with @mentions and rich text formatting that make asynchronous feedback feel more powerful. New styling features unlock long requested features to style how blocks look across screen sizes and to style interactive states, all without writing custom CSS. Various client side media improvements means better format support, improved performance, and more resilient uploads when adding media to your site. A new inline cropping tool brings a fresh and more robust experience to editing images. Finally, the admin experience becomes easier to navigate with an ever present admin bar in the editors, improvements to the command palette, and various quality of life improvements. Underneath it all, developers get an expanding set of APIs to build on, and site owners get better support for a truly global audience.

New suite of Notes features

Notes continue to grow into a fuller collaboration experience, making asynchronous feedback between teams faster and more expressive.

Text Formatting: Notes now support inline formatting like bold, italic, code, links and adding emoji; each with a respective keyboard shortcut, so feedback reads clearly without breaking your flow.

@mentions: Type “@” in a Note to pull up a searchable list of collaborators and tag someone directly, so feedback points at the right person without leaving the sidebar.

Leave notes anywhere: Start more than one conversation on the same block instead of folding every comment into a single thread, making it easier to track distinct pieces of feedback.

Inline notes: Leave a note on a text selection instead of on an entire block.

Show more / show less: Long notes now collapse by default with a toggle to expand them, keeping the margin tidy while you write.

Style it your way, on any screen

WordPress 7.1 takes a major step toward built-in responsive design and interactive styling, letting you achieve looks that once required writing custom CSS.

Responsive styling: Define how a block looks at different screen sizes directly in the editor, for both Global Styles and individual blocks without the need of writing custom CSS.

Viewport breakpoint customization: Theme authors can now define their own responsive breakpoints in theme.json, giving more flexibility for how responsive controls behave on a given site.

Interactive state styling: Style how blocks respond to interaction, like a button changing color on hover or focus, using a standardized set of controls for both Global Styles and individual block instances.

A smoother media experience

Uploading, editing, and browsing media keeps getting more capable and more reliable.

• Client-side media processing: Image and media processing moves into the browser, now with broader format support that includes HEIC (the default format for iPhone photos), UltraHDR, AVIF and WebP support built in, plus GIF-to-video conversion for lighter, more efficient files. Uploads are also more resilient, with a progress indicator and automatic retries if your data connectivity drops off.
• New Media Editor Modal: A dedicated modal for editing images replaces the inline cropping tool, bringing cropping, rotation, and metadata editing together in one streamlined workflow.
• Smarter galleries: Gallery blocks can automatically pull in and sort media already attached to the current post, cutting down on manual set-up.
• View attached images: After you upload images to a post, the inserter will automatically surface them in a new Attached images section to make it easier to find relevant images.
• Infinite scrolling by default: The Media Library grid view now loads additional items automatically as you scroll, rather than requiring a click on “Load more” especially handy for sites that handle large media libraries. This can be disabled under your user profile.

A more personal, more navigable admin

These meaningful upgrades make the WordPress admin easier to move around in and more consistent with how you like to work.

• Persistent toolbar (Omnibar): The admin toolbar now travels with you into the Site Editor and Block Editor, with a series of polish improvements throughout.
• Command palette improvements: Moving through the dashboard and editor with the command palette (Ctrl/Cmd+K) is more refined to make finding what you need even faster! Now results are grouped into Recent, matching and Suggestions sections instead of one flat list.
• Admin color scheme in the Site Editor: The Site Editor now reflects your chosen admin color scheme instead of always using a fixed background.
• DataViews and DataForms iterations: Continued refinement of the components behind managing lists of posts, pages, patterns, and templates, alongside the forms used to edit them.
• Excerpts in the Posts list: The Posts list view now shows a short excerpt for each entry, making it easier to identify the post you’re looking for without opening it.
• Visual revisions: This release adds a picker activity layout for browsing history in more detail, clearly labeled autosaves in the timeline, and an autosave notice that opens straight into the visual revisions view. Global Styles revisions get a small polish too, swapping the active style’s text label for a badge.
• A dedicated Identity section: Site identity settings like your title, tagline, and icon are now live in their own clearly labeled section of the Site Editor, making them easier to find and update.
• On This Day Widget: A new widget resurfaces what you published on this date in past years, right on your dashboard. A small nudge to look back on what you’ve written, and a reason to write something new today.
• Allow Changing Comment Parent: Fixing a misthreaded comment used to mean editing the database directly. WordPress 7.1 adds an editable “In reply to” control to the Edit Comment screen, letting you pick a new parent from a dropdown of the post’s other comments. It’s scoped to the same post, so this is about untangling threads, not moving comments across posts.

New blocks and block-level enhancements

WordPress 7.1 release brings a handful of block refinements that give more control with fewer steps.

• Playlist Block: A new block for adding a collection of audio files to a post or page, with an optional waveform visualization that shows the audio’s shape as it plays; a more visual way to present podcasts, music, or audio content without using any third-party plugins.
• Tabs Block: A new block for organizing content into clickable tabbed panels instead of showing everything at once. It’s a cleaner way to present related content without overwhelming the page.
• Background gradients: Background gradients and background images no longer conflict. The gradient used to get silently overridden by the image, but now they combine and display together. This fix extends beyond the Group block to Verse, Accordion, Pullquote, Post Content, and Quote block.
• HTML block editable content: The HTML block now supports editable nested blocks. This is great to use for AI-generated content, which often arrives as raw HTML.
• “Mark as decorative” for images: A new toggle on the Image block lets you hide purely decorative images from screen readers for a better accessibility experience.
• Smarter shortcode handling: Pasting or converting a shortcode into the Embed block now creates a proper Embed block instead of leaving raw shortcode text behind, and the Shortcode block gains block-specific transforms of its own.

Built for a global audience

WordPress 7.1 continues work to make Core reflect the full diversity of its worldwide community, with progress toward supporting Unicode email addresses so usernames, slugs, and email addresses can better represent users everywhere.

Built for developers

WordPress 7.1 continues to expand the foundation developers build on.

• Abilities API expansion: Continued refinement of the Abilities API with improved querying, filtering, and input validation, giving developers and AI tooling a more reliable foundation to build on.
• Block Bindings for list items: Block Bindings now extend to List Item, making it possible to connect more block content to dynamic data sources without custom code.
• Custom icon registration: New functions let plugin and theme authors register their own icons for the Icons block for use throughout the block editor.
• Enforced iframed editor: The post editor now always runs inside an iframe, isolating the editing canvas from admin styles for more predictable rendering. Blocks using Block API v2 or lower should be updated to v3 for compatibility.
• wordpress/theme stabilization: Introduces design tokens and a stable React ThemeProvider to provide a more consistent, customizable foundation for WordPress admin interfaces.
• Connectors authentication improvements: The Connectors screen now also supports username and application-password login – a more familiar way to connect plugins and services. This release also closes a security gap where browsers could auto-suggest saved credentials into the API key field.

With so much in progress for WordPress 7.1 Beta 1, this is still only the beginning; expect continued refinement with each Beta and RC release ahead of the final release on August 19, 2026 at WordCamp US 2026.

Just for you: a Beta 1 haiku:

Seeds of Seven-One,
Notes, styles, media, and tools—
Test, and watch them bloom.

Props to @benjamin_zekavica, @amykamala, @wildworks, @adamsilverstein, @annezazu, @fushar, @jorgefilipecosta, @joedolson for proofreading and review.

WordCamp US 2026 returns for another year, this time in Phoenix, Arizona, for four days, August 16 to 19. It comes at a moment of real energy for WordPress, as artificial intelligence reshapes everyday workflows, the business of building and maintaining sites is shifting, and new people keep discovering the platform every day. Four tracks address this moment, covering AI, Honing Your Skills, Technical WordPress, and Beginner WordPress. Between them, there is something for everyone, whether you lead an agency, freelance for local clients, write code for a living, or are building your very first site. Whatever draws you in, you will leave Phoenix better equipped and better connected than ever.

Phoenix itself rewards anyone who adds a day or two to their trip. The capital of Arizona sits in the Sonoran Desert and pairs a lively downtown with a rich arts and food scene. The Roosevelt Row arts district is known for its galleries, murals, and independent restaurants. It is also home to one of the largest art walks in the region. Nearby, Chase Field and the Footprint Center host professional baseball and live shows, and the surrounding desert offers striking scenery at places like Papago Park and the Desert Botanical Garden.

Start with Contributor Day

The week begins with Contributor Day, a full day set aside for giving back to the project that makes everything else possible. Attendees will gather in teams to improve WordPress itself, from Core code and documentation to design, training, accessibility, and translation.

WordPress is so unique because we’re not just a product; we’re a movement.

Matt Mullenweg, WordPress Cofounder

Contributor Day is open to everyone, whatever your skills, and whether or not you have ever contributed before. Come and experience the open source collaboration that is at the heart of the project. Signing up in advance helps us prepare our veteran contributors and provide you with the best experience.

Explore Real-World Projects on Showcase Day

Day 2, Showcase Day, is dedicated to real-world WordPress projects and focuses on how teams develop features, manage publishing, and run demanding sites at scale. It brings to life the kind of work collected in the WordPress Showcase, the directory of standout sites built on the platform, from global brands like Disney to community publishers and institutions like NASA. Past WordCamp US Showcase days have brought teams from the likes of Wikimedia and CANCOM to explain how they manage large, high-traffic systems. Other sessions took a builder’s perspective on catching bugs faster with automated testing and even running the Block Editor inside a custom app.

Dive Into Two Conference Days

The two main conference days will bring a full slate of sessions across four tracks. First among them is the AI track, which treats the technology as a tool to handle with care rather than a headline to chase. Its sessions set guardrails for AI-assisted development, prepare for a web where AI agents become the visitors a site must serve, and weigh the legal and ethical questions of putting AI tools in the hands of clients. Speakers from companies like Elementor will be taking a look at where the web is heading, while keeping the focus on what teams can adopt today without giving up control of their work.

The Technical WordPress and Honing Your Skills tracks cover the craft and business of building with WordPress. On the technical side, sessions dig into modern development workflows, automated testing with tools like the browser-based WordPress Playground, and plugin pipelines. The Honing Your Skills track adds practical guidance on pricing, maintenance, and how the agency model is changing as clients ask for more. The Beginner WordPress track keeps the door open for newcomers, with approachable sessions that make your first WordCamp less daunting. Hands-on work runs through all of these tracks, so alongside the talks, attendees will find workshops and working sessions where they can build something real and leave ready to apply it to their own projects.

Not all of the value happens in the session rooms. On the show floor, the Happiness Bar is a free, drop-in help desk where you can sit down with a volunteer WordPress expert and work through whatever has you stuck. The Sponsor Hall next door is where many of the best unplanned conversations happen, and its Career Corner gives anyone weighing their next move a relaxed place to browse the job board, meet company reps, and see who is hiring across the ecosystem.

Plan Your Trip to Phoenix

Getting to Phoenix is straightforward. The Phoenix Convention Center sits in the heart of downtown, less than five miles from Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport (PHX) and about 15 minutes away on the Valley Metro light rail. WordCamp US has a room block at the Sheraton Phoenix Downtown, close to the convention center, so book your hotel before the block fills, and reserve your ticket if you have not already. The full event lineup and details live on the WordCamp US 2026 site, and the conference closes with an evening social before everyone heads home.

1. Reserve your ticket
2. Find accommodations
3. Plan your trip
4. Explore Phoenix

Help Us Spread the Word!

Whether attending in person or following along online, share your experience and help welcome others to the WordPress community. Use the #WCUS and #WordPress hashtags to tell your story on social.

This minor release includes fixes for 31 bugs throughout Core and the Block Editor, addressing issues affecting multiple areas of WordPress including the block editor, admin ui, and media. For a full list of bug fixes, please refer to the release candidate announcement.

WordPress 7.0.1 is a short-cycle maintenance release. The next major version of WordPress will be 7.1; it is scheduled for release on 19 August 2026 at WordCamp US.

If you have sites that support automatic background updates, the update process will begin automatically.

You can download WordPress 7.0.1 from WordPress.org, or visit your WordPress Dashboard, click “Updates”, and then click “Update Now”. For more information on this release, please visit the HelpHub site.

Thank you to these WordPress contributors

This release was led by Aaron Jorbin, Brian Haas, Carlos Bravo and Estela Rueda.

WordPress 7.0.1 would not have been possible without the contributions of the following people. Their asynchronous coordination to deliver maintenance fixes into a stable release is a testament to the power and capability of the WordPress community.

Aaron Jorbin, Abdur Rahman Emon, Abhishek Kumar, Adam Silverstein, Adam Zieliński, Aditya Singh, Aki Hamano, Andrea Fercia, Andrei Draganescu, Andrew Serong, annezazu, Ben Dwyer, Brian Coords, Brian Haas, Carlos Bravo, cogdesign, Dan Luu, Daniel Richards, Darshit Rajyaguru, David Baumwald, Dennis Snell, Dhruvang21, Ella Van Durpe, Erick Wambua, Esteban, Estela Rueda, George Mamadashvili, Greg Ziółkowski, Himanshu Pathak, Hit Bhalodia, Huzaifa Al Mesbah, iflairwebtechnologies, James, Jarda Snajdr, Jb Audras, Joe Dolson, Joen Asmussen, Jon Surrell, Jonathan Desrosiers, Karthikeya Bethu, Khokan Sardar, Lucian R., luismulinari, Mahammad Darvishov, Manhar Barot, Marco Ciampini, Marin Atanasov, Maryam Sultana, Masum, Miguel Fonseca, Miroku, Mohammed Noumaan Ahamed, Mukesh Panchal, Mustafa Bharmal, Nik Tsekouras, Noruzzaman, Ozgur Sar, Peter Wilson, Presskopp, Rahul Kumar, ramonopoly, Riad Benguella, Rishabh Gupta, Roshni Ahuja, Sainath Poojary, Saksham Sharma, SAndrew, Scott Reilly, Sergey Biryukov, siliconforks, Stephen Bernhardt, Swanand M, Takashi Kitajima, Terence Eden, threadi, Tushar Patel, Umesh Nevase, WebMan Design | Oliver Juhas, Weston Ruter, Yogesh Bhutkar, Yusuf Mudagal

How to contribute

To get involved in WordPress core development, head over to Trac, choose a ticket, and join the conversation in the #core channel. Need help? Check out the Core Contributor Handbook.

Props to @jorbin for proofreading.

Explore the project portfolios built by this year’s AI Leaders

AI Leaders · Class of 2026

When the pilot launched, the goal was to test whether open source learning could connect directly to job pathways rather than stopping at a certificate. What makes this program distinct is that it is built on open source from the ground up: students learn on WordPress, contribute to it, and use generative AI the way the WordPress ecosystem uses it every day, leaving with a credential that employers can verify and a community that continues long after the course ends.

The pilot reflects a shared belief that AI and open source skills should be within reach regardless of where someone lives or what they can afford.

WordPress was built to expand access to publishing and participation on the open web.

The program is a collaboration with distinct roles for each partner. It is funded through the UIC Tech Solutions Open Source Fund, with support from the University of Illinois Chicago and Automattic, while the WordPress project and the WordPress Foundation contribute to the development of the curriculum itself.

What Comes Next

The first cohort was just the beginning. The gathering in Chicago brought this group together with employers and agencies, and further job placements are already in motion.

WordPress offers a wide range of educational opportunities for people at every stage, from first steps to advanced contribution. Explore workshops, lesson plans, and community-created resources designed to help you build practical skills while connecting with others who are learning and contributing at WordPress.org/education/.

Throughout the design, the storefront leans into the history and culture of WordPress. Visual and copy choices nod to familiar elements of the project, from the metabox and the admin bar to Wapuu making the occasional appearance, with small open source and code references for those who look closely. The aim was a storefront that feels uniquely WordPress.

Under the hood, the storefront shows what a modern WordPress and WooCommerce site can do. It is built almost entirely with blocks, including a block-based cart, checkout, mini-cart, and order confirmation, supported by a set of custom theme blocks created for the store. The Interactivity API powers the catalog navigation and modal states, the store runs on WordPress 7.0, and accessibility is built in throughout, honoring reduced-motion preferences across animations and meeting color contrast standards. Product pages surface per-product attributes such as size, material, and care, so shoppers have the details they need before adding an item to the cart.

This latest redesign supported the Mercantile booth at WordCamp Europe. To make in-person sales work smoothly, the team enabled local pickup at checkout and added a set of event-only products refined to match the rest of the catalog. Fifty orders were completed at the event using in-person payments, a strong real-world test of the new checkout flow.

There is more on the way! A playful experiment in progress will let curious shoppers explore a text-based version of the store from the command line, a small tribute to the developers who make up much of the WordPress community. Subtle hints pointing the way will appear once it is ready.

The new Mercantile is the work of many contributors who designed, built, tested, and refined it together. Every purchase supports the WordPress Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, in its mission to democratize publishing and preserve open source software for generations to come. Take a look around and find something you love.

Applications are now open for the 2026 Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship, which supports one active WordPress contributor who identifies as a woman and has not previously attended WordCamp US. The scholarship helps make it possible for a community member with financial need to join WordCamp US 2026 in Phoenix, Arizona, and take part in one of the largest annual gatherings in the WordPress project.

The scholarship honors Kim Parsell, a longtime WordPress contributor whose work and presence left a meaningful mark on the project. Kim was known for her care, generosity, and commitment to helping others feel welcome in open source spaces. For readers who are less familiar with her story, the tributes shared by friends and colleagues offer a deeper look at her role in the WordPress community and the lasting impact she had on those who knew her. Through this scholarship, the WordPress Foundation continues to recognize contributors who reflect that same spirit of participation and community.

WordPress is built by people from many backgrounds, experiences, and areas of expertise. Events like WordCamp US create space for contributors to meet in person, learn from one another, and continue the work that supports the software and the community around it. For some contributors, the cost of travel, lodging, and registration can make attending difficult. The Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship helps reduce that barrier for one eligible contributor each year.

Scholarship Details

One scholarship will be awarded for WordCamp US 2026. Applicants must:

• Identify as a woman.
• Be actively involved as a contributor to WordPress.
• Have never attended WordCamp US before.
• Demonstrate financial need to attend the event.

The scholarship includes the cost of a WordCamp US 2026 ticket, round-trip flight, and lodging. Applications are open through July 10, 2026, and all applicants will be notified of the decision by July 24, 2026.

WordCamp US 2026 will take place August 16–19, 2026, at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona. Contributors, attendees, volunteers, organizers, and sponsors will come together to share ideas, learn from each other, and continue building the future of WordPress. For many contributors, attending in person creates new ways to collaborate, find support, and stay connected to the open source work that happens throughout the year.

To learn more about eligibility, visit the Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship page. Community members are encouraged to share this opportunity with contributors who may qualify. You can also learn more about attending WordCamp US 2026 on the WordCamp US tickets page, explore volunteer opportunities, or review sponsorship opportunities.

This post recaps how the WordPress project’s five Global Partners — Jetpack, WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Bluehost, and Hostinger — supported community events during the first half of 2026. Across more than a dozen regional the first WordPress Developers Day, and a growing network of WordPress Campus Connect events, Global Partners staffed booths, sponsored sessions, and connected with developers, freelancers, students, and agency owners around the world.

A global footprint

The year began in January with WordCamp Nepal, where Jetpack joined the community in Kathmandu. The momentum carried into India, where WordCamp Kolhapur and, a week later, WordCamp Pune brought Global Partners face-to-face with a student-heavy audience of roughly 200-250 attendees. In Pune, a session on connecting WordPress with AI workflows drew a large crowd, and attendees were curious about WordPress.com plans, new AI features, and Automattic for Agencies. 

In February, Jetpack traveled to WordCamp Port Harcourt in Nigeria, an inclusive and well-organized event with 256 attendees that featured talks on inclusion and accessibility. Locally produced swag was a standout success there, a reminder that the WordPress community’s reach extends well beyond Europe and North America.

Across Europe

Spring brought a wave of European events. At WordCamp Madrid, with 280 attendees, WordPress.com served as a Global Sponsor and ran a Wapuu treasure hunt that drew 97 participants. 

Down the coast in France, WordCamp Nice gave Jetpack a chance to connect with 247 freelancers and developers, an audience that appreciated concrete, easy-to-explain solutions and asked questions about newsletters, security, and Jetpack’s broader feature set.

WordCamp Vienna stood out for its developer-heavy crowd of 277. From a Jetpack-branded booth staffed on both days, the team engaged with agencies and merchants, fielded numerous questions about WooCommerce and security, and booked 8 agency meetings. Many builders were interested to learn that Automattic stands behind both WordPress.com and WooCommerce. In Italy and Germany, WordCamp Torino and WordCamp Leipzig both reflected growing curiosity about AI, a theme that resurfaced throughout the year. At Leipzig, with 109 agencies, hosting companies, and freelancers in attendance, WordPress.com staffed a booth where tote bags were in high demand, while conversations kept returning to AI and WordPress Studio.

WordCamp Slovenia and WordCamp Portugal closed the European stretch. WordPress.com brought a booth to Ljubljana, and in Porto, it appeared with both a booth and logo presence alongside WooCommerce, which suited an event filled with e-commerce builders and Woo payment providers. The first WordPress Developers Day in Novi Sad introduced a new format, with Jetpack as a global sponsor and nearly 30 in-depth conversations on Jetpack, WooCommerce, performance, and the realities of client work.

Community in Uganda

In May, WordCamp Kampala brought four Global Partners onto the sponsor roster: Jetpack, WooCommerce, Bluehost, and WordPress.com. The event, themed “Tech for Social Good,” welcomed more than 200 attendees and reflected the energy of a fast-growing local community.

Support from Global Sponsors

Behind every one of these events is a layer of support that does not always appear at a booth. In 2026, Bluehost and Hostinger both joined the WordPress community sponsorship program as top-tier Global Sponsors, alongside Jetpack and WordPress.com. Their contributions help underwrite the global WordCamp program and the community events that make a year like this possible. That program-level backing is what allows organizers in Kathmandu, Porto, and Kampala to bring their events to life, and the WordPress community is grateful to every partner that invests at that scale.

Campus Connect reaches 6,200 students

One of the most notable stories of 2026 is not a WordCamp at all. It is WordPress Campus Connect. As of early June, the program has passed 6,200 students, with 25 events completed in 2026, 45 events all-time, and 42 more in planning or already scheduled. WordPress.com has played a direct support role throughout, including providing hosting for WordPress Campus Connect events around the world.

The connective tissue between these events and the broader community is real. An organizer first met at WordCamp Mukono went on to help lead WordPress Campus Connect work in Uganda. A student who built her first WordPress site at a WordPress Campus Connect event later attended a WordCamp. These events serve as a pathway for the next generation of WordPress contributors, builders, and professionals.

Looking ahead

If 2026 has shown anything, it is that interest in WordPress, and in the tools and services that Global Partners provide, continues to grow around the world. The questions being asked at booths and in sessions are sharper, the audiences more diverse, and the community’s reach more genuinely global. Thank you to Jetpack, WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Bluehost, and Hostinger for being part of that story this year, and to every organizer, volunteer, speaker, and attendee who made these events possible.

To find an upcoming event near you, visit WordCamp Central. To learn how organizations can support the WordPress project, see the community sponsorship program.

WordCamp Europe, the biggest WordPress conference in Europe, spent the first week of June in Kraków. The 2026 edition of this event filled the ICE Kraków Congress Centre from June 4 to 6, drawing 2,458 ticket holders from 81 countries to the south of Poland. Close to a quarter of them were attending their first WordCamp Europe.

The city made it easy to settle in. Every attendee’s badge carried a transport hologram good for unlimited trams and buses. The Main Market Square, the largest in Europe, sat a short ride away, and the local food ran the gamut from pierogi to żurek soup to obwarzanek pretzels sold off the street.

Kraków is beautiful, with history everywhere.
– Sebastian Miśniakiewicz, local team lead

The program kept pace with the setting. Across multiple tracks, the schedule held 49 talks and eight hands-on workshops, grouped into themes that ran from core development and AI to business and the open web. Around them sat a full Contributor Day, a sponsor area, side events, on-site childcare, and an after-party the local team stretched to eight hours.

Contributor Day Opens the Week

As it does every year, the event began the day before the talks. Contributors filled the venue for Contributor Day, a working session where people work together to improve WordPress itself rather than watch a presentation about it. The morning started with registration and a welcome, the room split into teams, and a group photo broke up the work around midday. The afternoon ran a second working block before each team gathered to share what it had done.

The range of tables is the clearest picture of how wide the project has become. Newcomers could sit down with Polyglots to translate WordPress into their own language, with Documentation to fix the pages people reach when they get stuck, or with Support to answer questions in the forums. More technical tables covered Core, Performance, Testing, Themes, and the Plugins team, whose reviewers screen every plugin submitted to the directory.

First-timers were not left to find their own way. The day was built around onboarding tables, named table leads, and mentors, with an open invitation for experienced contributors to adopt a newcomer and walk them through their first patch, string, or ticket.

People who could not travel to Kraków were welcomed to join remotely through the #contributor-day channel in the Make WordPress Slack, so distance was not a reason to sit the day out.

The Birthplace of the Web

It was fitting that the opening keynote came from CERN. The European Laboratory for Particle Physics, on the French-Swiss border outside Geneva, is where the World Wide Web was invented more than 30 years ago, and Joachim Valdemar Yde, who has managed CERN’s web team since 2021, came to explain why the laboratory had chosen WordPress to carry its web presence forward.

Yde and Francisco Borges Aurindo Barros, who leads CERN’s WordPress infrastructure, framed the move as a chance to give a web presence built up over three decades a shared, modern foundation. After evaluating several leading content management systems against CERN’s needs, WordPress came out on top.

Barros walked through what they had built. The guiding idea is that people at CERN focus on their content while the web team looks after the platform underneath. A self-service portal lets anyone request a site in a few clicks. Behind it, a shared distribution supplies a common theme and a set of approved, security-hardened plugins, and an in-house tool provisions each new site on Kubernetes in about a minute. In its first year, the platform has already set up hundreds of sites.

Moving years of existing content onto the new platform is the other half of the work, and the team automated it: a single command lifts each site’s pages, headings, and images and rebuilds them as Gutenberg blocks, with no downtime. They plan to open source the tool.

Then Yde delivered the line that the room had been waiting for.

As of today, our main flagship website, home.cern, is now served on WordPress. It’s been automatically migrated, and it’s live.

– Joachim Valdemar Yde, Web Manager, CERN

The rollout is on track to wrap up over the coming months, and early impressions, Yde said, have been overwhelmingly positive, with easy wins in responsiveness and accessibility. For those at the event, the keynote pointed the room toward a later talk by CERN’s Akanksha Chatterjee on building and maintaining the laboratory’s engineering websites on the same service.

There is a neat symmetry to it. The institution that published the world’s first website now runs on the software that powers more than 40% of today’s web, licensed under the GPL and maintained by the people in the room.

WordPress 7.0 and AI

WordPress 7.0 was a throughline of the conference. Several sessions placed the release at the center, framing it less as a routine update than as a change in what the software is, and in what it makes possible for the people who build with it.

The anchor for that conversation was a panel called “Inside WordPress 7.0.” It gathered contributors who worked on the release, among them Juan Manuel Garrido, Adam Silverstein, Benjamin Zekavica, Sarah Norris, and Milana Cap. It was framed around more than a feature list, setting out to cover how a release of this size actually comes together: the contribution workflows, the coordination, and the human aspects of shipping software in the open.

What gives this release its weight is the work moving into WordPress’s core: a native AI client, a new Abilities API that lets plugins declare what they can do in a way other tools can discover, and a Connectors screen for wiring up providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google Gemini. The argument running through the AI sessions was that this belongs to everyone who builds on WordPress, not only to developers shipping their own integrations. Speakers got specific about how to put that to work.

• Anukasha Singh focused on how the Abilities API can make plugin permissions cleaner and safer than the capability checks developers have leaned on for years.
• In a workshop, Vito Peleg set out to take builders from one-off prompts toward a tool-using workflow that audits a live site and files structured tickets.
• Alain Schlesser, a WP-CLI maintainer who has worked on structured data and the AI-native web, turned to a fast-growing opportunity. AI assistants and search now send real traffic to the open web, with more than a billion referral visits logged by the middle of 2025. His session framed WordPress as well-placed to earn that attention, with a practical checklist for getting a site ready to be found, read, and cited.

People stayed at the center of the conversation, too. Tammie Lister, in a talk called “Human in the loop means something,” framed the phrase as a real commitment rather than a checkbox. Humans and AI are each good at different things, and the products worth building let each do what it does best.

Development and Craft

The development sessions were where the craft lived. Dennis Snell, who co-wrote the HTML API and designed the block parser, devoted a deep-dive workshop to that API. Peter Wilson, a long-time Core committer on the Performance team, focused on how the WP_Query class has been made faster through better caching, and how site builders can take advantage of that at scale.

Scaling got a hands-on session of its own. One talk set out to see how far a WordPress site can run on a twelve-dollar virtual server, profiling it under load in Grafana and tuning away the bottlenecks, with a GitHub repository so attendees could follow along at home. Fellyph Cintra focused on the latest in WordPress Playground, the browser-based tooling and architectural changes that the project credits with a real speed-up.

Jessica Lyschik, a Core contributor and former default-theme co-lead, set out to make the case that accessibility-ready requirements are far easier to meet than most theme developers assume, drawing on real reviews of both block and classic themes.

Two members of the Plugins team, David Perez and Fran Torres, framed their session as a practical clinic. Between them, they have reviewed more than 25,000 plugins, and they set out to name the common, avoidable issues that keep good plugins stuck in the review queue. For a first-time author, that is the difference between an afternoon and a month of waiting.

The Business of WordPress and the Open Web

The business and community sessions pulled the lens back to people, with a refreshingly unsentimental view of running a WordPress business. Debbie Levitt built her talk around a model for finding product-market fit at three levels at once, on the premise that teams celebrate one good metric and then wonder months later where their users went. Vassilena Valchanova took on a quieter problem: being good at the work is not the same as anyone knowing you are.

There was a local thread here as well. Irfani Silviana, a full-stack developer at a Kraków-based agency, framed the Business Model Canvas as a translation layer that moves developers from shipping features to engineering business value, a fitting talk to give in her own city.

The web’s standards, the argument goes, remain as open as the day Tim Berners-Lee created them at CERN.

That idea carried through the rest of the community sessions.

• David Snead, an attorney who works with internet infrastructure providers, set out to explain how hosts, registrars, and registries coordinate against abuse through shared, real-time intelligence, on the logic that a threat to one WordPress host is a threat to all of them.
• Marcel Bootsman shared a practical playbook for how companies and individuals can support open source sustainably and look after the people who keep it going.
• Karin Christen set out to describe how her Swiss agency turned Five for the Future from a good intention into a standing team habit through internal contributor days.

Running alongside the talks, the hands-on workshops were a chance to build something on the spot. In one, Ryan Welcher set out to build a touch-enabled gallery slider with the Interactivity API, while another centered on Full Site Editing, with a working portfolio theme attendees could reuse on their next client project. These were laptop-open, leave-with-working-code sessions.

Closing Fireside Chat

The closing session opened with a warm gesture from Kraków University of Technology. Representatives took the stage to thank the organizers and the community and to present Mary Hubbard, the Executive Director of WordPress, with a gift from their faculty of informatics and mathematics. They described what the university and the WordCamp community share: a love of learning and sharing knowledge, and an openness to new ideas, skills, and connections.

Hubbard used the moment to share some news. Starting in October, the university will open a WordPress-specific course, which she called a trail-blazing event for Poland and for WordPress. Earlier that day, the program’s first cohort, around 20 students, had shown what they built, part of the WordPress Campus Connect and WordPress Credits education work.

Hubbard then turned the stage into a conversation, inviting Matías Ventura, the lead of the Gutenberg project, and Rich Tabor, a WordPress designer and developer, to talk through where WordPress is heading and how AI fits in. WordPress 7.0 had just launched with Ventura as its release lead, and he asked everyone who had contributed to it to stand for a round of applause.

Much of the chat explored the balance between building WordPress with AI, and building with AI on WordPress, without losing the human part. Ventura noted that WordPress’s long investment in its design system is paying off now that you can ask an AI to extend a menu or a control, and it reaches for the right components. He pointed to older primitives gaining new value, like WP-CLI, which AI models use fluently, and to Studio Code, an open source, agent-based coding tool the team has been building for WordPress. Tabor showed how he now ships many small editor improvements by talking to an agent instead of typing code, and Ventura demoed desktop mode and open-canvas experiments that reimagine the admin.

On open source and AI, Hubbard argued that open source is why WordPress has thrived, that the same values should shape AI, and that the community should be far more vocal about it. As she put it, “We should be talking about it, and we should be much louder about it.”

Audience questions pushed on multilingual support, unsticking long-stalled tickets, and reaching a younger, more diverse community. On that last point, Hubbard came back to education, pointing to a US pilot of an AI literacy micro-credential that uses WordPress as the playground, and made the case for it:

I think that focusing in on younger generations, and bringing them into the project in a healthy way, with the dynamic of education as well as mentorship, and how we can understand and learn from them, as well as mentor them and adopt them as contributors, is very important.

– Mary Hubbard, WordPress Executive Director

Beyond the Talks

WordCamp is also about the corridor outside the talks, and Kraków gave people reason to roam. Between sessions, attendees moved through the sponsor area for product demos and conversations that often carried on over lunch.

The after-party was the not-so-subtle flourish of a local team that doubled the usual length to eight hours, with Polish food and dragon-and-floral swag that nodded to the Wawel Dragon of Kraków legend. The nearby artistic Kazimierz district kept the evening going, and the trams, as one organizer had promised, were still running reliably afterward.

What Comes Next

WordCamps run on people, and 2026 was no different. The organizing teams, the speakers, the sponsors who funded the venue and the meals, the local crew who sorted trams and pierogi, and the contributors who arrived a day early to work on the project all built this WCEU together. The people watching the livestream from outside Kraków were part of it as well.

For anyone whose appetite was only sharpened by three days in Poland, the calendar already has the next stop. WordCamp US 2026 (Phoenix, USA) runs August 16 to 19, with its own Contributor Day opening the week.

WordCamp Europe will return next year (May 27-29, 2027) in Málaga, Spain.

Photography by the WCEU 2026 photography team. See the full galleries on Flickr.