WordCamp Europe 2026 drew 2,458 attendees from 81 countries to the ICE Kraków Congress Centre — a stunning modern venue sitting at the edge of one of Europe’s most historically rich cities. Nearly a quarter of us were first-timers. I was in good company.

The city told the story 

What struck me immediately about Kraków: it’s the kind of place where history is visible, tangible, and layered. Contrast that with the ICE Congress Centre — glass, light, sharp angles, forward momentum — and something clicks.

This is WordPress.

A platform that started as a blogging tool in 2003 and now powers 43% of the internet. Ancient roots in the online publishing era, yet somehow relentlessly modern. Still building. That metaphor was immediately obvious.

Before the sessions: The people, the pins, the Wapuus

I arrived on Contributor Day, the pre-conference session where the WordPress community gathers to contribute — code, documentation, community planning. Meanwhile, members of the WordPress.com team were in a nearby hotel room unpacking boxes of custom pins, matching t-shirts, and carefully curated swag to hand out at our booth. That’s the texture of this community: people who show up early, do the behind-the-scenes work, and genuinely want to be here, together.

Across the floor, our team was deep in demo prep — walking through the latest features, pressure-testing the flow, making sure every talking point was sharp before the doors opened. The pride our team takes in their work, and in the people using our products, spoke for itself.

I started with toast

My first session was called How to Make Toast, led by Stacy L. Carlson.

I sat next to Uffe Christiansen, a partner in the Automattic for Agencies program, and we worked through the exercise together. The premise: map out how to make toast. Every step. Don’t skip anything.

Sounds simple. It isn’t. Groups within the session came up with wildly different process maps — anywhere from 3 steps to 20. Use pre-sliced bread or cut from a whole loaf? Plug in the toaster first or load the bread? How dark is dark enough — and who decides?

That’s the exercise. Not toast. Assumptions. The steps we skip because we think they’re obvious. The judgment calls we make automatically that someone else makes completely differently.

If you can’t map your own process, you can’t hand it off — to a team member, to a tool, to an AI. Toast first. Everything else second.

The search conversation continues IRL

I lead a content team that has spent the last year working to meet customers where they are as their search behavior shifts — from SEO to AIO and beyond. So I was grateful to see this topic represented across nearly every session block. Here’s what I heard, across multiple sessions, from multiple speakers:

The old rules still hold — they just have higher stakes. Great content, real perspective, genuine expertise. These have always mattered. Now they’re table stakes for being cited at all. The tools change; the fundamentals don’t.

Brand is the new backlink. The brands winning in AI-driven search have something in common: consistent opinions, real customer data, a distinct voice, presence across multiple platforms, and the discipline to show up the same way everywhere. Simple in theory. Hard in practice. When you get it right, it starts to reinforce itself.

We’re not chasing clicks anymore. We’re chasing citations. Multiple 2026 studies on AI citation patterns found that 85% of brand mentions in AI responses come from third-party pages — not your own domain. Content strategies built entirely around Google rank are already working from an incomplete map.

AI traffic converts at a higher rate — because AI pre-qualified your brand. If an LLM cites you, the person clicking already trusts you. That changes the math on what “less traffic” actually means.

It’s not “is this good.” It’s “is this different.” Commodity content — content that sounds like everyone else’s content — doesn’t get cited. Original research, real data, genuine point of view: those are citation magnets.

AI won’t save your marketing. That was the title of one session. The tools change. The fundamentals don’t. Know your customers, read your report tickets and your reviews. Solve those problems, and write about it.

And underneath all of it, a direction that felt significant: SEO is no longer an isolated discipline. It’s merging with AIO, brand strategy, PR, and content — a more holistic practice where all the signals work together more than ever before.

Accessibility isn’t a feature. It’s core to the conference.

One thing I didn’t expect: how intentional this community is about inclusion — not as a talking point, but as an operational standard.

Free childcare was available onsite. Sessions addressed neurodivergence. One talk made the case that optimizing for accessibility isn’t just the right thing to do — it’s better for the business. Industry research backs it up — 75% of organizations report accessibility directly contributes to improved revenue, and 62% of business leaders say customers have abandoned transactions because of inaccessible experiences. The open web is most valuable when it’s accessible to everyone. Customers benefit. Businesses benefit. It’s not charity; it’s smart design.

Some things don’t change

I didn’t expect a conference about the future of the web to keep coming back to the same old truth. But it did. No shortcuts. Hard work, authenticity, consistency — they cut through the noise now the same way they always have.

The technology changes. AIO, SEO, vibe coding, AI agents — the landscape looks nothing like it did five years ago and will look nothing like this in five more. But the core principles haven’t moved. Know your customer. Serve their needs in a way only you can. Be consistent. Be real. Do the work.

That’s not just advice for your content strategy. It’s how this community operates. It’s why people fly to Kraków from 81 countries to sit in workshops about toast, debate the future of search, and unpack boxes of pins in hotel rooms before the doors open.

If you’ve never been to a WordCamp, go. If not just for the sessions, then for the reminder that the fundamentals still hold, that the people building the open web are worth knowing, and that there is no algorithm, no AI, no shortcut that replaces doing something genuinely worth your audience’s time.

WordPress.com has been part of this community since the beginning. If you’re ready to build something on the open web, we’d love to have you.

First WordCamp in the books. Find one near you — or mark your calendar for a flagship:

• WordCamp US — Phoenix, Arizona, August 16–19, 2026
• WordCamp Asia 2027 — Penang, Malaysia, April 9–11, 2027
• WordCamp Europe 2027 — Málaga, Spain, May 27–29, 2027
• WordCamp India — TBD, 2027

And please, keep the Wapuus coming.

Studio Code is an agentic WordPress expert that lives in your terminal, helping you build sites, plugins, and themes locally on your computer. It’s part of the WordPress Studio suite of tools. Just describe what you want in plain language, and it gets to work. Think of it as a senior WordPress developer helping you build, with deep knowledge of WordPress baked in.

One of my favorite features built into Studio Code is a powerful little slash command called /annotate. 

I told so many people about this feature at the booth, over Slack, and in hallway conversations with colleagues because it helps me solve a problem that I always have with similar coding agents: the classic screenshot-arrow-request feedback loop.

Without /annotate:

1. My coding agent creates something.
2. I don’t like a few elements, so I take screenshots of the things I don’t like and manually annotate it with arrows. 
3. I upload the screenshots back to the agent, explaining the changes I want.
4. Repeat forever until the coding agent gets it right.

But with /annotate:

1. Studio Code creates something. 
2. I want to make some changes, so I type /annotate.
3. It launches a browser window where I can click on specific elements to give feedback, lump the feedback together, and send it all back to Studio Code at the same time.
4. Studio Code makes the specific changes I requested all in one go.

Remember Marco, the agency partner I mentioned at the beginning? As I was demonstrating this feature in Studio Code for Marco, a colleague (Davi!) mentioned that this would be a time-saver and an excellent user experience to run /annotate while on a call with clients. 

Picture this: you’re on a call with a client, sharing your screen, walking through the site you built them. They point out changes as you talk. You drop annotations, as many as you want, as specific as you want, and Studio Code makes every edit when you’re done.

No more endless feedback loops. One /annotate session, and all of their changes are live on your local site. Then you can push the updated version to your client’s live WordPress.com-hosted site in just a few clicks.

Studio Code is currently in beta, and you can try it by downloading Studio CLI (either from the desktop app or directly from your terminal) and running studio code. Then simply select or create a local site and run /annotate to try this feature out for yourself.

As a reminder, tokens are unlimited while Studio Code is in beta — build, iterate, and give us feedback on GitHub.

Welcome back to the WordPress.com changelog!

We have lots to update you on, including information about a new core version running on every WordPress.com site, how you can repurpose your written blog content in audio and visual forms, and so much more.

Core

WordPress 7.0 is here

WordPress 7.0 (“Armstrong”) shipped on May 20, and your WordPress.com site has been automatically updated.

The pieces you’ll experience right away:

• See what changed before you hit publish: Your post revisions now have visual markers to help you understand changes in a more intuitive way.
• Design your mobile menu like you design the rest of your site: Navigation overlays give the mobile experience its own dedicated editing canvas.
• Show different things on phone, tablet, and desktop: Responsive block visibility lets you pick which blocks appear on which device without writing CSS.
• More design pieces out of the box: New Breadcrumbs and Icon blocks, plus finer block-level controls for when you want a specific change.
• One place to manage your fonts: To use across every theme on your site.

On WordPress.com, this release ships with our AI features already in place to assist you in the editor, with your favorite AI agent, and beyond, plus real-time collaboration on select plans, so multiple people can write in the same post at once.

Reader

One place to read Bluesky, Mastodon, and blogs

Keeping up with your audience shouldn’t mean tab-hopping between different apps. Connect your Bluesky, Mastodon, or Fediverse accounts to the WordPress.com Reader and you can read those timelines next to the WordPress.com blogs you already follow — and like, repost, quote, and reply — in the Social Feeds section.

You can write to those followers from the same place. Start with a short social post, and if you need more room, expand it into a full blog post without starting over.

One spot to read what matters, react to it, and publish your own thoughts.

Writing

When you’re in the flow, the editor gets out of your way

Sometimes you just want to write. Not pick a block, not configure a layout, not browse a sidebar — just write. Write is exactly that: one page, a blinking cursor, simple formatting, and nothing else.

It’s in beta on every WordPress.com plan, including Free. Open Write, pick your site, and start typing. What you write is a real WordPress post — it lives alongside everything else, works with your theme, and you can open it in the full block editor whenever you need the rest of the toolkit.

Reach the people who’d rather listen than read

Whether your audience is commuting, multitasking, or simply prefers to learn through audio, your content can meet them there.

Posts to Podcast turns a post you’ve already written into a two-host conversation episode, saves it to your Media Library, and queues a draft post with the audio and transcript so you can publish in a couple of clicks. One post, two ways for people to find you.

Find it in your dashboard under Media → Create AI Podcast. Available on every WordPress.com site.

P.S. If you want to host the podcast on WordPress.com instead, you can also set up podcasting with Jetpack Podcast and publish episodes from your site.

Spin a post into a short social-ready video (experimental preview)

Short-form video (like on Instagram and TikTok) is popular and engaging, but turning a blog post into one has meant needing a second tool, a video editor, or someone you pay.

Feature Clips generates a short, vertical video based on your post content directly from the editor sidebar. Pick a suggestion drawn from your post, or write your own prompt to steer the look.

Your clip lands in your Media Library, ready to share to Instagram via Jetpack Social or download as an MP4 for TikTok and YouTube Shorts. It generates short instrumental clips meant to tease your content.

Available now on WordPress.com plans that support video uploads — Premium and up. You get ten generations per site per day, with a thumbs up / thumbs down feedback tool on each clip so you can easily send your thoughts back to our team.

Settings and plans

Shape your URLs (and four more settings) on every paid plan

The structure of your URLs matters — for SEO, for sharing, for how users understand your site at a glance. That setting (called Permalinks) used to be locked behind higher plans. Now, every paid plugin-enabled WordPress.com plan (Personal, Premium, Business, and Commerce) can change permalink structure directly.

Fixes and improvements

We also shipped some reliability and polish updates across the WordPress.com experience:

• The Reader sidebar now shows your site’s custom domain instead of its free subdomain.
• Receipt amount, type, and date now show inline on your Billing History page at narrower widths.

WordPress 7.0 includes both immediate editor improvements and deeper foundational changes. Some improvements are visible right away, like visual revisions, responsive controls, and a cleaner dashboard. Others work behind the scenes are more foundational, giving plugins, tools, and AI services a more consistent way to work with WordPress over time.

The result: A release that makes everyday site work smoother and opens the door to optional AI tools that actually feel a part of WordPress.

For a deeper technical look, check out the WordPress 7.0 Source of Truth. 

What’s new in WordPress 7.0

WordPress 7.0 brings updates across AI, editing, design, performance, accessibility, and developer tooling. These changes affect how you build, update, and manage your sites.

WordPress 7.0 updates include:

• AI foundations: The AI Client, Connectors API, and Connectors screen give WordPress a more consistent way to connect with AI providers and external services.
• Editing and admin improvements: Visual revisions, a refreshed dashboard, smoother transitions, Command Palette access, and broader font management make everyday site work clearer.
• Flexible design controls: Custom navigation overlays, responsive block visibility, and pattern editing make it easier to shape pages without adding workarounds.
• New and improved blocks: Breadcrumbs, Icons, gallery lightbox improvements, Heading block updates, and block-level styling controls bring more practical tools into the editor.
• Performance, accessibility, and developer updates: Under-the-hood improvements support faster loading, better editor stability, stronger accessibility, and more consistent foundations for plugins and custom builds.

Building a foundation for AI workflows

WordPress 7.0 introduces a new shared AI layer designed to make AI tools feel more native across WordPress.

Instead of every plugin building its own separate AI setup, WordPress now includes a common system for connecting tools and services. Plugins can communicate with AI models such as Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini through the new AI Client. The Connectors screen provides site owners with a single place to manage those integrations.

Note: These AI features are optional and need to be enabled by the site owner. Nothing is automatically shared with AI services when WordPress 7.0 is installed.

The optional AI plugin already brings features like title and excerpt generation, image generation and editing, and suggested alt text directly into the editor. As more plugins build on the same system, AI tools across WordPress become easier to use, manage, and extend.

On WordPress.com, this builds on AI tools already available across the platform, including the AI Assistant, Claude connections, and WordPress Studio workflows.

Want to understand how this all fits together? Take a closer look at how WordPress 7.0 is building the foundation for AI-powered sites.

Creative freedom inside the editor

Visual revisions make it easier to understand changes in a post or page. Instead of scanning a dense comparison view, you can review revision history with visual markers, navigate versions, and restore the one you want with greater confidence.

The dashboard also feels more modern and cohesive. WordPress 7.0 introduces a new default admin color scheme, smoother screen transitions, and a Command Palette shortcut in the top admin bar for faster access to tools.

Font management is also easier. The Font Library now works across block, hybrid, and classic themes, giving more sites one place to browse, install, upload, and manage fonts.

A new canvas for every screen

Designing for mobile used to mean making compromises. WordPress 7.0 changes that with a dedicated canvas for navigation overlays, responsive block visibility, and simpler pattern editing.

Navigation overlays now have their own editing canvas, allowing mobile menus to go beyond a simple list of links. You can start with a template or build your own overlay with blocks, columns, typography, and custom close buttons.

Responsive block visibility lets you choose which blocks appear on desktop, tablet, or mobile. That makes it easier to create cleaner layouts for different devices while keeping alternate versions available as you iterate.

Patterns are also simpler to update. A pattern can behave like a single block, so you can swap text and images or adjust styles without digging through every nested block. Advanced controls are still available when you need them.

Flexible design tools for richer layouts

WordPress 7.0 brings more practical control into the editor, making it easier to shape pages without relying on extra tools for every small design need.

The new Breadcrumbs block helps visitors understand where they are on a site, while the Icon block adds simple visual cues from a built-in library. Gallery lightbox improvements make image browsing smoother, and Heading block updates make it easier to work with page structure.

The same idea carries through to layout and styling. Responsive block visibility lets you choose which content appears on different screen sizes, while block-level CSS gives more control over individual blocks when a page needs a custom touch.

Taken together, these updates make WordPress feel more flexible in the places site owners work most: building pages, refining layouts, and helping visitors move through a site more easily.

A stronger platform for WordPress development

WordPress 7.0 provides developers with a more consistent foundation for building plugins, blocks, patterns, and site-editing experiences.

The release includes expanded APIs, PHP-only block registration, a more extensible Site Editor, and routing improvements that make it easier for plugins to build custom Site Editor pages.

These updates will not be visible to every site owner on day one, but they matter because they shape what WordPress developers can build next. Better foundations mean better tools, workflows, and site experiences over time.

Built by the WordPress community

WordPress 7.0 is a reminder of how open source software keeps evolving through shared contribution. The release reflects work from more than 875 contributors around the world. That community work is part of what makes WordPress different.

WordPress 7.0: Fully Managed on WordPress.com

WordPress.com is here to bring the best of every new WordPress release to you fast and without the setup. 

WordPress 7.0 is no different. The new AI foundations build on tools already live across the platform, including the AI Assistant, Claude connections, and Studio workflows. 

And on select plans, real-time collaboration is already available, letting teams work on the same site simultaneously, before it’s widely available elsewhere.

All of it backed by the security, performance, and support that comes with a fully managed platform.

You bring the vision. We handle everything else.

This month, we added a new Social Feeds section to the Reader. Now you can bring in the people you follow on Bluesky, on Mastodon, and across the Fediverse. Then read, react, and post, all without leaving the Reader.

One place to read, with more people to follow

The Reader has always been one place to catch up on writing across the open web: WordPress.com blogs, Jetpack blogs, any blog with an RSS feed. That part hasn’t changed. What’s new is the company you can keep there.

In the left navigation, you’ll find a new Social Feeds section, with entries for your connected accounts. Connected social accounts include:

• Bluesky: and the wider ATmosphere, including Blacksky and other Bluesky‑compatible platforms.
• Mastodon: bring in your timeline from any instance, big or small.
• The Fediverse: via your own blog. If you have a WordPress.com site, you can join the Fediverse without creating a new account; your blog is your identity. Don’t have one yet? Start a blog, and you can join too. Our Social Web page is a good starting point if that’s new to you.

Pick a network, sign in once, and your timeline shows up in the Reader.

Already connected? You’re in

If you’ve ever used Jetpack Social to share your posts to Mastodon or Bluesky, those connections are already there. Open the Social Feeds section, and your accounts are waiting.

Read, react, and reply

Inside a Bluesky or Mastodon timeline, the actions are the ones you’d expect: like a post, repost it, quote it, reply to it. Same keyboard, same window, no second app.

Compose and post

The Reader is a place to write now, too. Click Compose, type a short post, attach an image, and send it to your followers on Bluesky, Mastodon, or the Fediverse.

When a thought outgrows a social post

WordPress.com is a tool for creators, and we didn’t want to box you into the character limits of any one network. So when a draft starts running long for a social post, the Reader offers to hand it off to your blog. You keep writing in a fresh post draft, with all the room you need, and once you hit Publish, it reaches your followers on Bluesky, Mastodon, and the Fediverse all the same.

Try Social in the Reader

Head over to WordPress.com/reader, expand the Social Feeds group in the sidebar, and connect an account. It’s free, and the support doc walks through the details if you’d like a closer look.

If you’d like more on how WordPress.com fits into the wider Social Web, our previous posts on the Social Web Foundation and our recent ActivityPub feature update are both good follow‑on reads.

Happy reading, and happy blogging!

One page. A blinking cursor. The formatting you need and nothing you don’t. That’s Write: a new, focused writing surface built into WordPress.com. In last year’s Creators survey, “simplify the editor” was the single most-requested improvement from the people already publishing on WordPress.com. So we built it.

Write started as a plugin by Jamie Marsland, who asked a deceptively simple question: what would WordPress look like if it were designed purely for writers? We loved the answer enough that we brought the plugin into WordPress.com and built on it.

The interface is intentionally minimal: a clean page, a persistent top toolbar with the essentials, and formatting that appears when you need it and gets out of the way when you don’t.

Your Write posts are real WordPress posts. They live alongside your other posts, work with your theme, and you can open them in the block editor.

Write is in beta and ready to try (see our support article for setup details). The core writing experience is solid, but we’re still building, and we’d love your input on what to add next.

Ready to write? Head to wordpress.com/write-editor, pick a site, and start. Tell us what you think in the comments.

Co-authored by Kim Brown.

WordCamp Agent is a free Telegram assistant for WCEU attendees. It plans your trip, browses the schedule, remembers which sessions you care about, and pings you before they start. 

All you need is a WordPress.com free account to get started. And once you’re in, you’ll also get a preview of something more interesting: a working preview of WordPress Guidelines, the agent-context system shipping in Gutenberg and on its way to WordPress Core. It’s also the easiest way to see Guidelines working end-to-end in a real production environment.

Message WordCamp Agent on Telegram

How WordCamp Agent is built

The agent lives on Telegram and is bound to a regular WordPress site at wcagent.wordpress.com. When you message it for the first time, you’re added as a contributor on that site — your conversation, preferences, and notes become real WordPress content, stored against your user, private to your account, and deletable at any time

In one chat, you can:

• Ask for travel tips for Kraków and get accurate answers.
• Browse the live conference schedule.
• Tell it which sessions interest you, who you want to meet, or what accessibility needs you have. It remembers, across sessions and devices.
• Save notes during talks that you can turn into a post or a recap.

None of that required custom application code. Every behavior — the personality, the schedule lookup, the memory of your preferences — is a published Guideline on the WordPress site behind the bot. If you can publish a post, you can extend the agent.

WordPress Guidelines: The system under the hood

WordPress Guidelines stores four kinds of agent-facing knowledge as standard WordPress content:

1. Instructions: Site-wide guidance that shapes how an agent behaves. WordCamp Agent uses these for its personality and core event knowledge.
2. Skills: Reusable capabilities. The live schedule and venue lookups are skills. Swap the skill, change the agent’s behavior — no code change.
3. Memory: Facts the agent accumulates while working with you. Your session interests, dietary preferences, networking goals.
4. Artifacts: Work-in-progress. Notes, drafts, fragments you’ll come back to.

All four are represented as a single wp_guideline custom post type, classified by a wp_guideline_type taxonomy. They use WordPress’s existing roles and capabilities, and they’re accessible via standard REST endpoints.

What this looks like for developers

Guidelines reuse primitives and conventions you already know:

• A single wp_guideline custom post type
• wp_guideline_type taxonomy for distinguishing between instructions, skills, artifacts and memories
• Native post revisions for versioning
• Capability-based access control: administrators see everything; contributors, authors, and editors get read/edit on their own private guidelines; subscribers are blocked at the post-type level

For a deeper technical walkthrough of Guidelines, take a look at Grzegorz’s post.

Coming to WordPress Core: Guidelines

Guidelines shipped in Gutenberg 23.2.2 and is already powering WordPress Agent, WordPress Workspace, Desktop Mode, Lately, PushMD, and WordCamp Agent itself. 

The next step is WordPress Core.

We’re proposing it as a Core API because the alternative — every plugin shipping its own memory store, its own permissions model, its own REST surface — is exactly the kind of fragmentation WordPress has historically avoided. 

Putting Guidelines in Core means every WordPress site, hosted anywhere, becomes agent-ready by default.

Try WordCamp Agent 

The single best way to understand Guidelines is to use a site that’s already built on it. Ask it to plan your Kraków trip. Tell it what sessions you care about. Come back tomorrow and watch it remember.

Message WordCamp Agent on Telegram

Posts to Podcast gives your audience another way to keep up with what you publish.

Starting today, WordPress.com bloggers can turn recent posts into AI-generated podcast episodes directly from their dashboard. Choose the posts you want to include, generate a two-host audio conversation, review the draft, and publish it when you’re ready.

Find it in your dashboard

You’ll find Posts to Podcast under Media -> Create AI Podcast in your WordPress.com dashboard. Choose a time range, such as the last week or month, or select specific posts yourself.

The episode below was generated from recent WordPress.com blog posts using the same feature we’re announcing today:

How it works

Posts to Podcast turns the posts you select into a two-host audio conversation. The finished episode is saved to your Media Library, and WordPress.com prepares a draft post with the audio and transcript already included.

From there, you stay in control: review the draft, make any edits you want, and publish it like any other post. Since the audio is saved to your Media Library, you can also reuse it elsewhere, upload it to another platform, or keep it as part of your site’s media archive.

More ways to share your posts

Use Posts to Podcast to create weekly recaps, monthly digests, audio companions to newsletters, or listening-friendly versions of recent posts.

• Summarize your latest posts for subscribers who prefer listening.
• Turn a month of updates into a conversational recap.
• Share an audio companion to a newsletter, publication, or personal blog.
• Make your archive easier to revisit in a new format.

Available to all WordPress.com sites

Posts to Podcast is available to all WordPress.com sites. Whether you publish daily updates, weekly essays, tutorials, newsletters, or personal reflections, you can turn recent posts into a listenable episode directly from your dashboard.

A new format for your writing

Your words do the work. Posts to Podcast gives them a microphone.

Open your dashboard, go to Media -> Create AI Podcast, and turn your recent writing into something your audience can listen to.

If things have felt a little busier around WordPress.com these past two weeks, there’s a good reason: we shipped a lot, including a new home for your podcast, a weekly letter for close friends, and a new Mac app that uses your site context, so you can get more done without leaving your flow.

Here’s what’s new on WordPress.com to help you create, publish, and grow:

Podcasting

Jetpack Podcast is now live on WordPress.com

Launch a podcast that lives alongside your blog and newsletter — no separate hosting platform or tool needed. Find it in your site sidebar at Jetpack → Podcast.

• If you have a Free site, you can publish episodes by linking to audio hosted elsewhere, with Distribution and Settings tabs to manage your show.
• If you have a Premium plan or above, you can host your audio on WordPress.com, see stats, manage episodes, and embed your show with the new Episode Player Block.

Learn more about running your podcast on WordPress.com in our blog post.

Newsletters

Lately — weekly letters to your closest readers (beta)

For the corner of your life where you’d rather email a few close friends than post to the world. 

Lately is a weekly letter for the people closest to you, compiled automatically from notes you send during the week, and delivered every Friday to the friends you choose. 

It runs through Telegram: message the WordPress Agent as things happen, and it handles sending your curated newsletter each week. Available now as a beta for new sites.

AI

WordPress Workspace — one app for all your WordPress.com work (beta)

If you blog, publish, or run a business on WordPress, your site has been accumulating useful context since day one: your voice, audience, archive, offers, media, guidelines, and the shape of your work.

Workspace is a new Mac app that puts all of that to work. At its center, the WordPress Agent helps you write, research, and ship without you having to start from scratch every time you want to get something done.

Use it to draft a post from your notes, update a page, generate an image, or get a quick answer about your site — all from a keyboard shortcut and without leaving what you’re working on.

Available now as a beta on every WordPress.com plan — learn more and try it today.

Heading to WordCamp Europe? There’s an assistant for that

If you’re heading to WordCamp Europe in Kraków in just a few weeks, open Telegram and message @wordcamp_agent_bot.

It’s a free travel and conference assistant for attendees. It can help plan your trip, browse the schedule, remember which sessions you care about, and ping you before they start.

It’s your WordCamp assistant in your pocket — chat with it today.

WordPress Studio

A library of ready-made WordPress setups, now built into WordPress Studio

Calling all developers, designers, and vibe coders: starting a new WordPress project locally just got a lot faster.

The new Blueprints Gallery in WordPress Studio (desktop version 1.9.0 and later) gives you a curated library of pre-configured WordPress setups — for blogging, ecommerce, plugin testing, design exploration, and more — that you can launch as a local site in a couple of clicks.

Use the Live Preview button to try a Blueprint before you commit to it, and then sync with a WordPress.com hosting plan when you’re ready to go live.

If you’ve been hand-configuring the same kind of WordPress site over and over, this is your shortcut. 

Just for fun

Achievements, badges, and activity streaks for everyone

Rewards for showing up, making progress, and getting things done.

WordPress.com users now have an Achievements page. Track your daily activity streak, earn badges for milestones, and check out other people’s achievements when they make their profiles public.

Do you know the Konami code?

Try it on a logged-in WordPress.com page. Try it in WordPress Studio. Two different surprises, both worth finding.

Type ↑↑↓↓←→←→BA on your keyboard to unlock these easter eggs.

Fixes and improvements

We’ve also shipped reliability and polish updates across WordPress.com, like:

• Adding a “Performed by” filter to the Activity Log so you can drill into actions by specific people, apps, or system events.
• Adding a QR-code sign-in page for the WooCommerce mobile app, so you can sign in by scanning instead of typing.
• Updating the block editor with the latest improvements and bug fixes.

For custom or community Blueprints, using them in Studio often meant bringing in a configuration from outside the app, whether through a URL, ZIP file, JSON configuration, or GitHub example. Now, with Blueprints Gallery, you can browse, preview, and launch ready-to-use WordPress setups directly inside Studio.

Studio is WordPress.com’s fast, free, open source desktop app for building, testing, and managing WordPress sites locally. 

What are Blueprints? 

Paired with Studio’s no-server-setup local environment, Blueprints make repeat projects faster to start and easier to keep consistent.

Blueprints are reusable JSON configurations that automatically set up a WordPress environment with specific themes, plugins, content, and settings. Think of them as advanced site recipes: instead of manually setting up your ideal configuration from scratch, you can launch a fully configured site in just a few clicks.

Whether you are building a portfolio, testing a plugin, experimenting with WooCommerce, or spinning up a local development environment, Blueprints help you get started faster and with less repetitive setup work.

What is the Blueprints Gallery?

The Blueprints Gallery is a curated collection of ready-made WordPress site setups now available directly in Studio. It gives you quick access to Blueprints designed for different workflows, use cases, and experiments.

Instead of leaving Studio to find or import Blueprint configurations, you can browse a growing library of pre-configured environments tailored for things like blogging, ecommerce, development, design exploration, or plugin testing.

Each Blueprint is designed to help you skip repetitive setup steps so you can spend less time on setup and more time working in WordPress.

For developers, the Blueprints library is also available through Studio’s CLI. With the blueprint command, you can list available Blueprints and launch a fully configured local WordPress site directly from your terminal in just a few steps.

How to access the Blueprints Gallery

The Blueprints Gallery is available in Studio desktop version 1.9.0 and later. First, make sure to update Studio. Then, click on the “Add site” button in the sidebar:

Next, choose “Build a new site” and scroll down to the “Explore more Blueprints” section.

That’s it! Choose a Blueprint that fits your workflow and spin up a local WordPress site in seconds.

You can also use the Live Preview button to explore Blueprints before creating your site. Previews are powered by WordPress Playground, making it easy to quickly test layouts, themes, plugins, and overall site experience.

Looking for something specific? Use the search box to quickly find Blueprints that match your needs. 

Want to build your own Blueprints? This guide will teach you the basics of creating a custom Blueprint.

Blueprints Gallery: Now available in WordPress Studio

The Blueprints Gallery is now available in Studio 1.9.0 and later.

It’s now easier to discover, preview, and launch reusable WordPress setups directly inside Studio. As the gallery continues to grow, you will see more Blueprints added for different workflows, learning experiences, and creative use cases.

Explore the Blueprints Gallery, and find your next starting point for building locally with Studio.