At first glance, the Arizona desert seems simple, barren. But look closer, and there is an elegance in that simplicity that is art in and of itself. 

Like good technology, everything has a purpose, nothing is wasted, and there is beauty in that. At WCUS this year that I saw art and technology converge.

A four-day family reunion 

WordCamp US 2026 ran August 16–19 at the Phoenix Convention Center. Over 1,100 people registered, with thousands more watching the livestreams. There were over fifty sessions across four tracks. Contributor Day drew 425 participants — 29 of them contributing for the first time — who organized into 26 teams around goals they could achieve in a day.

So why make the trip when the talks are livestreamed, recorded, and recapped?

On the walk to the event hall, I asked Anne McCarthy the same question (yes, we braved the heat!). She nailed it: it’s a family reunion. In the age of screens, AI, and video-meeting culture, people are not only craving human connection but also their chosen family. 

Others who believe in WordPress and what open source represents. Like-minded creators and builders making things that matter now, and hopefully for years to come.

WordPress 101 Workshop: Build a Website

I sat in on Jamie Marsland’s beginner session to build side by side with other WordPress users and see the customer experience with fresh eyes. 

We started from a blank page. And there’s something genuinely exciting about stripping everything away and going back to the basics.

After we’d built a few pages and posts, Jamie showed us the Cover block (his favorite). Watching him use it felt more like designing than building.

On the topic of teaching and learning, the WordPress 101 session felt complementary to the WordPress.com Student Plan we launched at WCUS. Students get to learn on a real WordPress site, not a temporary classroom project, and the work they create can stay with them after the course ends. Learn by making something real, then keep building on it.

Jamie’s enthusiasm for WordPress is contagious; in fact, halfway through his session, a pigeon flew into the room and settled in. It came for the air conditioning, stayed for the demo.

Sessions geared toward creativity, simplicity, and customer centricity

In line with the art and technology theme, WordPress 7.1 “Mary Lou” shipped during WordCamp – a release named after the pioneering jazz artist, packed with new styling tools, updated media flows, added notes functionality, and more. 

The opening keynote, Dreaming with AI: Innovation Lessons from the Front Lines of Disney & Meta, was delivered by Loyal Pyczynski. His perspective: AI can help teams build products that are more useful and more distinctly human, but only if you bring creators, developers, researchers, and communities in early, let real experimentation drive decisions instead of assumptions, and keep human judgment at the center.

And his test for whether you’ve done your job? User attention. If the thing you’ve made is good enough, people won’t get distracted — they’ll look up and realize time has gone by and they want to keep going.

Nearly half of the sessions were AI-focused or AI-adjacent, the biggest showing at a flagship WordCamp to date. The program covered agentic development, AI-powered plugin pipelines, vibe coding for non-technical users, block themes and AI in agency workflows, WordPress readiness for the agentic web, and more.  

The closing session with Matt Mullenweg and Robert Jacobi brought it back to simplicity. WordPress co-founder and CEO of Automattic, Matt Mullenweg, pulled out his camera and snapped pictures of the audience, saying he’s bringing back @photomatt – a playful nod to the handle he uses on Tumblr and X. During the fireside, he also spoke to the need for technology to get simpler. Over time we have a tendency to make things more complicated, but wisdom brings us back to simplicity. Matt’s stories and tech references are laced with poetic references that tie back to technology.

Which brought me back to the desert. Nothing wasted, everything with a purpose — perhaps the hardest thing to build and the last thing you arrive at.

WordPress Studio shines

At the WordPress.com booth, our agentic local development tool, WordPress Studio, drew people into longer-than-planned demos, with attendees gathering around the screens to watch sites being built and changed in real time.

Right alongside it, WordPress Agent showed another side of the same idea: AI that doesn’t just advise you, but can actually make changes to your site for you. We also demoed Guidelines, which gives the Agent a shared memory of your site’s voice, goals, and visual direction.

What interested me was how quickly the conversation moved past the demo itself. People were already imagining these tools inside the way they actually build, manage, and update WordPress sites.

WCUS played to our humanity

The tactical experiences, the emphasis on play, the prioritization of creators, and the endless photo opportunities are all part of what made this conference uniquely human.

It’s a tech conference, after all, but I was absolutely delighted by the way it transcended digital sameness and AI-driven standardization to stand out and speak to our humanity.

Here are examples in action:

• Code for the People private screening with stickers and swag
• Paint your own Wapuu – tactile, emotional, brilliant 
• Booth giveaways that were Arizona-centric: water bottles, fans, sunscreen, along with bags and bandanas designed by local artists 
• The WordPress Mercantile featured local businesses built on WordPress
• A focus on play, including a seating area with cornhole, an in-booth air hockey table, and multiple photo ops with delightfully creative backgrounds
• A creator studio staged with couches, plants, perfect lighting, and high end recording equipment designed specifically for generating great video. Free SD cards for those who utilized it 

Even the Wi-Fi password was a nod to the convergence of technology and art…IYKYK.

As I climbed into my Waymo and headed to the airport, I reflected on how art connects people. It inspires people. It can also polarize — and that’s not a bad thing. 

As businesses and as humans, we don’t have to be everything to everyone. We just have to find our people (like our WordPress community). Be uniquely you. 

Find your customers, focus on them, and use technology to help you fuel that connection.

With this new Studio desktop experience, you can describe what you want to the expert WordPress agent, watch it come together in a live preview, point at anything that’s off, and ship it to production when it’s ready, all in one window.

You’re left with a full WordPress build you own and can maintain, not throwaway code.

Today, it’s available in beta for everyone to try.

How to access the beta and what to expect

You can try this new desktop UI in just four steps:

1. Download the WordPress Studio desktop app on macOS, Windows, or Linux
2. Sign in with your WordPress.com account
3. Enable the New Studio Experience option under Studio → Beta Features
4. Add a payment method on file to verify you’re a real account (you won’t be charged)

And if you’re a brand-new Studio user — welcome! You’ll see the new agentic UI as default, so there’s no need to opt into the beta.

The Studio interface has been reimagined to focus on agentic development, with three panels next to each other in a single window:

• Your Sites on the left
• A chat with Studio Code in the middle
• A live preview of your site on the right

Switch on the new UI without losing a thing

If you’re an existing Studio user, you won’t lose your current sites when you switch the new experience on; every local site from the old experience carries over automatically. Nothing to migrate, re-import, or rebuild.

Pick a site to jump back into it, start or stop it, or open its settings.

Chat with Studio Code to make it happen

The agent in the middle panel is Studio Code, our coding agent built for WordPress that knows blocks, themes, and WP-CLI natively.

In fact, this is what WordPress developer Olivier Gobet said about his experience building with Studio Code:

I’ve been building WordPress sites for almost 20 years, and Studio Code has genuinely changed the way I work. For the first time in a long while, I feel like I’m no longer limited by the technical barriers of implementation. Instead of asking myself, Is this possible?, I can focus on, What do I want to build?

You describe what you want in plain language, and Studio Code builds it on a real local WordPress install where you can build, vibe, and experiment. Chat history is stored so you can easily stop and restart a work in progress, and you can always spin up a new chat for each site when you want to start fresh:

If you want to give Studio Code standing instructions it follows on every task, set them under Settings → AI.

That same screen is where you can also toggle agentic features off entirely if you’d rather build WordPress the classic way.

Watch it build in real time

Changes render live in the in-app preview as Studio Code works. You see the site take shape with every ask, so there’s no switching between browser and UI to check whether an edit landed.

It’s a working preview of your local site, too: click any link to move to other pages, just as a visitor would, and watch them update as Studio Code makes changes. You can even access the admin dashboard to manage posts, pages, products, and everything else you’re used to.

One of your favorite tools is still available, too, just in a different spot. Use the Annotate button to send specific, targeted requests to Studio Code.

Click the elements you want changed, stack up your notes, submit them with one click, and Studio Code makes every edit in one pass. It’s the client-feedback loop, built into the tool, and it’s a natural fit for your workflow of reviewing, marking up, and revising a site fast.

Build locally, ship when you’re ready

The core functionality of Studio remains too: you’re able to spin up a real, local WordPress site in seconds by clicking the + button in the toolbar.

Because everything you build happens locally, you can try things, break things, and start over with zero risk to a live site. Nothing goes live until you say so.

When it’s ready, you ship to fast, managed hosting on a paid WordPress.com or Pressable plan in a few clicks with Studio Sync.

What you build in Studio is real WordPress: portable, dependable and yours to maintain.

Meet the new WordPress Studio

Give the new Studio desktop beta a real workout. Point it at an actual project, a brief, some images, a vibe, and see how far it gets, where it shines, and where it falls short.

During this beta period, you’ll get a one-time credit gift from us to try it out. Once you hit your limit, top-ups are available for just $10.

And we want to know how it goes. Open a GitHub issue with your feedback, bug reports, and ideas. Your input shapes what comes next.

Set it up once, then talk to your site to publish posts, moderate comments, check traffic, update media, and handle the small jobs that start after the writing ends.

After you add the plugin, type @WordPress.com in any chat and hand off those chores to ChatGPT.

Publish your words without the busywork

You wrote the post, maybe in your notes app, maybe in a doc, maybe in a voice note. Getting it live on your blog can be time-consuming, but with the ChatGPT plugin, you just need to ask. 

Try running some of these prompts directly in ChatGPT:

• @WordPress.com here’s my draft. Can you clean up the formatting and make a draft for me on my site?
• @WordPress.com schedule my recent draft to go out on Monday.
• @WordPress.com can you add a featured image of a hand holding a pencil in the style of a black and white editorial vintage illustration with visible stipple and crosshatch texture.
• @WordPress.com review my draft and suggest links to related posts already on my blog. 

Your content stays yours, and ChatGPT helps with the formatting, scheduling, and the clicking around. 

Run your site by asking

Once connected, ChatGPT can read your stats, your comments, your media library, and your site’s activity log, so questions about your site get answered where you asked them.

Here are a few prompts you can use:

• @WordPress.com how did my traffic this month compare to last month?
• @WordPress.com show me the comments actually worth replying to, and clear out the spam
• @WordPress.com find images missing alt text and help me update them
• @WordPress.com what changed on my site in the last two weeks?
• @WordPress.com trash any post that’s been sitting in draft for over a year

Alt text deserves a special mention here. It’s the accessibility task everyone means to do and almost nobody does, because doing it means setting the alt text one image at a time.

Now you can set alt text through a conversation with ChatGPT, and your readers who use screen readers get a better experience for it.

Change your site, conversationally

The plugin can make changes across your site, from adding pages and updating site settings to working with your existing design.

Try prompts like:

• @WordPress.com add a page for my workshop schedule, I attached a draft here.
• @WordPress.com my site is still in coming soon mode. Can you make it public?

You stay in control

The WordPress.com ChatGPT plugin is optional and off by default. When it’s enabled, ChatGPT has to ask you before making changes to your site.

If it’s about to publish or edit content, launch your site, change settings, or delete something, you’ll see what it plans to do before anything changes.

New posts and pages start as drafts by default, and for anything that publishes, edits, launches, or trashes something, ChatGPT describes exactly what it’s about to do and waits for your confirmation. 

Connect your site to ChatGPT

Getting started only takes a few steps and after that, WordPress.com is available whenever you type @WordPress.com in ChatGPT.

First, you’ll need to enable MCP access on your WordPress.com account. This enables AI agents like ChatGPT to use the WordPress.com tools you choose to enable.

Then, open WordPress.com in ChatGPT, select “Install plugin,” sign in with your WordPress.com account, and approve the connection. Then type @WordPress.com and hand off the first chore.

The full setup guide is in our support docs, and if you’d rather connect Claude or another AI assistant, that works too.

MCP access is included with every paid WordPress.com plan, and Free sites also get this during the first 30 days after creation.

Your writing stays yours, and now you can work with your site without having to go to it. Writing was always the fun part anyway.

The Hosting Dashboard now has a persistent top bar and left sidebar that move with you between sites. Domain names, hosting, updates, and performance are now just one click away.

So whether you manage one WordPress.com site or 20, you’ll always know where things are.

Navigation that stays with you across sites

Instead of navigating through a separate set of controls for each site, you now work from the same persistent interface as you move between them.

If you’ve used WordPress Admin, the layout will feel familiar.

We intentionally aligned the sidebar with WP Admin patterns, so you spend less time figuring out where things are and more time getting work done.

What changes when you manage multiple sites

These changes become clearest when you’re switching between sites or repeating the same task across several of them.

Managing client sites: Routine tasks add up when you’re managing several sites, including the same plugins that need updating. Previously, that meant navigating out, switching sites, and starting over every time. Now your sites are always visible in the persistent nav. Move between them without losing your place.

Running multiple blogs or stores: Checking hosting status, renewing domain names, reviewing updates — tasks that used to require bouncing between dashboards are now accessible from one consistent view. Less hunting, more doing.

Coming from self-hosted WordPress: One reason people stay self-hosted is that WP Admin feels like home. The Hosting Dashboard follows the same sidebar logic, so moving between self-hosted WordPress and WordPress.com asks less of you.

One dashboard, whether you manage one site or 200

Whether you’re managing a handful of sites or a full client roster, the Hosting Dashboard works the same way. 

The interface doesn’t change as you grow, and neither does your workflow. The same navigation and workflow stay consistent as your site list grows.

This is only a navigation update — your sites, content, and settings stay exactly as they are.

Try your improved Hosting Dashboard

The updated navigation is now live in your Hosting Dashboard. Open it and try switching between a couple of sites, and you’ll see everything stays where you left it.

If you have any feedback or questions, our support team is here to help.

It resolves most questions on its own, but we built it to get you the right help, fast. And sometimes the right help is a person.

Talking to our Support Assistant should never feel like jumping through hoops to get the right help. So when we built it, we focused not just on what it can do, but on knowing when it should step aside. 

Here’s how it decides.

It knows what it’s talking about

When you contact WordPress.com support, you expect to reach someone with real expertise.

Our assistant is built to meet that same bar. It’s trained on our full library of support guides, the same documentation our Happiness Engineers lean on.

It can also see your site and account, so its answers fit your specific situation. When you ask it a question, you’re getting an informed, accurate answer from a service that knows both the topic and you.

A check before every answer

It offers human support before you have to ask

The assistant’s default is to solve your problem on its own.

But it’s built to recognize the moments when that won’t work. That includes issues that need a person to investigate, cases where it doesn’t have a reliable answer, or situations where you’ve tried its suggestion and things still aren’t working.

Roughly one in four conversations ends up with a person, and in about half of those, our assistant is the one who suggests it.

When you ask for a human

Our assistant isn’t perfect at reading the room, so sometimes you’ll want to ask for a person yourself. 

When you do, it won’t refuse or stall. It will ask for one or two details if it can fix the problem on the spot, and it will plainly tell you that a human is still an option afterward.

And the choice stays yours: you can always continue the conversation with the AI if you prefer.

We tested this “try once, then step aside” approach before rolling it out, and it did what we hoped. Many problems were solved in that one extra exchange, and the people who still wanted a human got one without asking.

You’ll never have to explain it twice

This is our favorite thing about the assistant: it can see your recent support history, including conversations you’ve had with our human support team.

If you ask for a human and it can see you already explained this exact problem recently (and it wasn’t resolved), it skips the questions entirely. It names your issue, acknowledges the time you’ve already spent, and offers the hand-off in one step.

And when the hand-off happens, the conversation goes with you. Our Happiness team receives the chat transcript and a summary of your issue, so you’re not starting from zero with the person either.

Good support knows when to hand off

All of this is about putting the right help in front of you as soon as possible and quickly determining whether that help is our assistant or a person.

Most of the time, it can solve your problem itself. When it can’t, it’ll get you to a human as fast as possible.

Human or Support Assistant, our goal today is the same as it’s always been — to simply help you succeed.

Need a hand with something right now? Contact WordPress.com support.

Every time you use AI to build or write on your site, you can end up repeating the same context: your voice, your goals, how your images should look, what colors you use — the little rules that make your site recognizably yours.

And after all that re-explaining, you often still end up with something generic.

Guidelines on WordPress.com change that. Specify your personal brand—how you write, what your images look like, and what your goals are—and it becomes a persistent memory the WordPress Agent works from.

It’s a memory that lives on your site, guiding everything you make with the WordPress Agent in the editor, via Telegram, or via email.

How Guidelines works

Guidelines lives in your site’s dashboard under Settings → Guidelines and it’s where you define your site in a few different sections.

You don’t have to start from scratch. Click Suggest guidelines, and the WordPress Agent will read your existing posts and pages and draft every section for you. You can then go through each suggestion and accept, edit, or dismiss it.

Already started a section and want to sharpen it? Improve with AI refines what you’ve written. 

Guidelines are the memory, and the WordPress Agent reads from it. Set your brand voice once, and the Agent draws on it automatically without needing to be re-prompted or constantly reminded of who you are and what your business does.

One memory for every kind of site

Guidelines work for every kind of site. The value just shifts depending on who’s setting it up.

If you run a small business or work solo, you already know your brand inside out – you don’t have time to re-explain your brand on every task. Set your tone once (“warm and plain-spoken, no corporate jargon”), name the things that matter (“always call them ‘sessions,’ never ‘appointments'”), and every collaboration session with your WordPress Agent starts on-brand.

If you’re a creator or publisher, you want help that sounds like you, not a content mill. Tell Guidelines to keep your first-person, conversational voice, and let the Agent handle the polish and reviews while your words and voice stay intact.

If you sell products, consistency is everything. Set your product photography style once (“white background, soft shadow, no props”) and your copy rules (“benefit first, spec second; never ‘cheap,’ always ‘affordable'”), and every generated image and refined description will match.

If you build sites for clients, repeating brand context for every project is a tax on your time. Give each client site its own memory, so you can hand off something that stays on-brand without having to stay in the loop.

If you’re a developer, you want AI that stays within known constraints instead of going rogue. Guidelines gives the WordPress Agent a durable, reviewable spec to work from.

Give your team a shared memory

Guidelines becomes more useful as more people work with your site.

For a team, it becomes a shared memory — a single source of truth that every contributor and the WordPress Agent works from. Your voice and visual direction stay consistent even when the person behind the keyboard changes. The rules live with the site, not in one person’s head.

Create your Guidelines

Guidelines takes a few minutes to set up, and you can start with what your site already knows.

First, enable the WordPress Agent on any paid plan. If you use Telegram and/or email, hook those up too.

Then go to Settings → Guidelines on your WordPress.com site and click “Suggest guidelines.” See what your site already knows about itself, accept what fits, and change what doesn’t.

Finally, talk with your WordPress Agent in the editor, via Telegram, or via email. Your site’s memory is pulled when it’s needed to help guide the result.

You know your brand. Now your WordPress Agent does, too.

We’ve been quietly piloting this for the past year, and it’s already reached more than 5,000 active students across 27 countries. Now we’re ready to open the doors.

At WordCamp US 2025, Matt Mullenweg closed his keynote with a question: 

How do we give the next generation the best tools, so they don’t have to write with a borrowed pen?

That line is the whole reason WordPress.com Education exists.

The Student Plan: Free professional WordPress.com tools

Any teacher can apply for their class at wp.com/edu and get, for every student:

• A real WordPress.com plan: The same platform millions of businesses run on. No watered-down “student tier,” no restricted plugin access.
• A free domain name: Students can register a .blog or .art domain at no cost (our two education-eligible TLDs for this initial phase). 
• Plugin support: Students can install plugins and extend their sites as part of their coursework.
• The first year, completely free: No credit card required.

This isn’t a stripped-down classroom version of WordPress.com. The Student Plan includes plugin support, 6 GB of storage, backups, staging sites, SFTP/SSH, phpMyAdmin, and Studio Sync. Students learn and build with many of the same tools they’ll encounter working with WordPress professionally.

After year one, renewal is just $2/month ($24/year) — a price that keeps the site online and accessible long after the course ends.

That last point matters more than it might sound. This isn’t a throwaway class project that disappears when the semester ends. It’s a real website, on a real domain, that a student owns and can carry into a portfolio, a job application, or their first freelance client — for less than the price of a coffee a month.

And even if a student decides not to renew after the first year, nothing gets deleted. The site simply drops to a free WordPress.com plan on a free subdomain, and every page, post, comment, and media file the student created stays exactly where it is, fully intact and online.

No countdown timer, no “pay or lose your work” ultimatum. The portfolio a student spent a semester building is theirs to keep, whether they renew or not.

Why we built the Student Plan for real classrooms

Teachers tell us the same challenges come up again and again:

Setup takes too long. Creating accounts, configuring sites, troubleshooting access issues — all before the actual coursework even starts. WordPress.com handles the infrastructure so you can focus on teaching.

Students lose their work when the semester ends. Most classroom tools delete everything once the course closes. Motivated students who want to keep building have nowhere to go. With WordPress.com Education, every student owns their site and can keep it live for $2/month — or take their content with them, anytime.

Not every student starts from the same place. Students in under-resourced schools or countries often face barriers that limit what they can build or access online.

This program gives every student the same professional-grade platform, the same custom domain, and the same opportunity to create a real web presence — no matter where they’re starting from.

Preparing students for the real web 

Education systems around the world are rethinking what digital literacy means in the age of AI. 

We think the answer starts with ownership — not another walled-garden tool that disappears the moment a subscription lapses, but the open web itself.

Students leave with a domain they control, content they own, and practical WordPress skills built on the fundamentals that power over 40% of the internet.

It’s already working: 5,000+ students, 27 countries

WordPress.com Education has been running successfully as a pilot program for the past year.

At IES Luís Seoane in Spain, marketing teacher Joaquín says giving students access to WordPress.com from day one lets them work in a real environment. More than 20 of the program’s 30 students went on to internships, and employers were “surprised by the level our students bring—not just in SEO and SEM strategy, but in working with WordPress.”

I love the ‘forever’ nature of this. My students can build a real portfolio that they can keep and use after the course ends.

— Javier, Media Studies Teacher, San Telmo Arts School, Spain

Survey results from pilot educators confirm this:

• 88.9% said WordPress knowledge, combined with the program, improves their students’ employability.
• 81.5% said it improves their students’ entrepreneurial capacity.

Real skills, on real infrastructure, translating into real outcomes — internships, jobs, and the confidence to launch something of their own.

Building the bridge to the community

WordPress.com Education is also a bridge into the wider WordPress community. Beyond our own classroom program, we’re supporting two WordPress.org initiatives with free WordPress.com hosting:

• WordPress Credits is a WordPress Foundation program that partners with educational institutions to engage students in open source contributions. We provide free hosting to participants, and 150+ students have benefited so far.
  
• WordPress Campus Connect is a WordPress.org initiative that brings local WordPress communities into higher education institutions through student-led events. WordPress.com has sponsored dozens of these events with free hosting for organizers and attendees.

It’s about moving students from “I have a website” to “I’m part of a global open source community” and doing our part to strengthen the programs the wider WordPress project has already built.

Bring WordPress.com to your classroom 

WordPress.com Education is more than free hosting. It’s a program that works alongside educators to prepare students for the future of the open web, helping them retain ownership of their content while strengthening their employability and entrepreneurial skills.

This includes initiatives such as AI-assisted website creation, microcredentials, and professional certifications designed to build practical skills, validate knowledge, and turn ideas into real-world opportunities.

Educators can apply to bring the Student Plan to their classes at wp.com/edu.

If you’re a teacher, department head, or program coordinator who wants your students building real, lasting websites they can own and grow — apply today.

Welcome back to the WordPress.com changelog. There are two bigger updates worth paying attention to this round, as well as a run of fixes:

AI

You know your brand, now your site does too

Getting AI to write or design in your brand’s voice usually means describing that voice from scratch every single time, or settling for generic output when you don’t.

Guidelines is a settings page where you write it down once: how you write, what your images should look like, and what you’re trying to accomplish. The WordPress Agent in the editor, via Telegram, or via email pulls from those guidelines so any and all outputs are grounded in what makes your site uniquely yours.

Plus, you don’t have to start from scratch. On a paid plan, the WordPress Agent can read what you’ve already published and draft your guidelines for you, every section at once or one section at a time. Each suggestion arrives as a change you can accept or dismiss, nothing is saved until you choose to, and your published posts and pages are never edited without your review.

Find Guidelines under Settings → Guidelines, and enable the WordPress Agent on your site.

Plans

Know where your plan stands before it lapses

The purchase page for your plan now tells you plainly what’s happening and what it means for your site. As your expiration date gets closer, the message escalates from a heads-up months out, to a warning at 60 days, to an urgent notice in the final week. Each one spells out what you’d actually lose if your plan expires, too: things like plugins, custom themes, and your storage.

Fixes and improvements

We shipped reliability and polish updates across WordPress.com too, including:

• Adding FLAC to the audio formats you can upload on a paid plan, alongside MP3, M4A, WAV, and OGG.
• Giving you more context if your card was declined and your payment fails so it’s easier for you to troubleshoot. (GitHub PR)
• Giving you a way out when a plugin install stalls (going to your plugin list or contacting support), instead of waiting for it to resolve itself. (GitHub PR)
• Stopping posts from showing up multiple times in the Reader. (GitHub PR)
• Sharpening featured images in the Reader’s compact mobile view. (GitHub PR)
• Improving the contrast and accessibility of the Views and Visitors chart in Stats. (GitHub PR)

If you’ve noticed these changes, we’d love to know what you think — leave a comment below!

This year, we’re offering a sponsor code WordPress.com-friend20 for 20% off general admission.

8 talks worth adding to your WordCamp US schedule 

WordCamp US 2026 has a strong AI thread this year, and Automattic speakers are right in the middle of it. 

We’re talking about vibe coding and agentic commerce to agency workflows, and the future of open source.

If you want to hear from the people building across WordPress.com, WooCommerce, and Automattic, start building your schedule here:

1. Matt Mullenweg, WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO joins Robert Jacobi in a fireside chat on the state of open source. AI, changing expectations, and the future of WordPress are all on the table, but the useful part is that it isn’t meant to be a prepared keynote: the final 30 minutes are audience Q&A. If you have a burning question about where WordPress goes next, this is your chance to ask it.

2. Jamie Marsland runs WordPress.com’s YouTube channel at Automattic, where his whole job is showing non-developers what they can build on WordPress without writing code. He’s doing triple duty at WCUS with “WP 101: Build a Real Website, Today,” “Office Hours: Take Your Site Live,” and “How to Vibe Code in WordPress for Non-Techies.” The last one is a must see if you’ve ever wanted to build a plugin, customize the editor, or connect WordPress to another tool, then talked yourself out of it because you don’t write code. He’ll show you what AI does instead, live.

3. Klaus Harris works on learning and credentialing at Automattic after more than 18 years as a software developer. In “The Making of a WordPress Credential,” he joins Dr. Leslie Thomas to unpack a problem the ecosystem has somehow lived with for years: employers need a better way to recognize real WordPress engineering skill. The session goes behind the year-long Automattic effort to build a professionally governed credential, not another badge you collect and forget about.
   
   
4. Brian Coords, Developer Advocate at WooCommerce and one of the block-theme community’s go-to teachers, is tackling the question every agency is quietly nervous about. His session, “The Site Is the Source of Truth: Block Themes, AI, and Agency Workflows,” makes the case that once AI starts editing production sites directly, the site itself, not the AI’s memory of what it did, has to stay the one source of truth.
   
   
5. Shani Banerjee, WooCommerce Developer Advocate, joins Danny Dudzic to take the agentic-web conversation in a very practical direction: the checkout. “From Crawlers to Customers: WordPress and the Rise of AI Buyers” looks at what changes when bots stop simply indexing your site and start comparing products, making decisions, and potentially buying. If AI agents become a new kind of customer, WordPress and WooCommerce have to be ready for more than traffic.

Beyond Automattic, these speakers are well worth catching: Miriam Schwab’s “The Agentic Web Is Coming. Is WordPress Ready?” tackles what the agentic web means for WordPress. Meanwhile, Nicola Catton’s “Own Your Audience” gets into The Ankler’s move off Substack and the realities of owning your publishing platform. Last but not least, Manny Costa’s “WordPress for the Public Good” looks at WordPress as civic infrastructure, with accessibility, public services, and long-term stewardship at the center.

See how WordPress.com is helping students build on the open web

WordPress.com Education gives students access to a professional WordPress.com environment where they can build real websites, learn practical web skills, and keep ownership of what they create.

As Javier, an IT teacher at San Telmo Arts School in Málaga, put it: “I love the ‘forever’ nature of this. My students can build a real portfolio that they can actually keep and use after the course ends.” 

More than 5,000 active students have already used the program. If you teach, study, or care about the future of the open web, visit our booth to see how WordPress.com is connecting classroom work to real-world skills and the wider WordPress community. 

At WordCamp US, we’ll have something exciting to announce about what’s coming next for students and educators.

Come say hello at the WordPress.com booth

At the WordPress.com booth, our message is WordPress for the future. Our demos of Studio and Agent show what that future looks like: new ways to build, manage, and work with WordPress.

WordPress Studio is our agentic development tool for WordPress developers and agencies. We’ll demo a brand-new UI, and you’ll see how our Studio Code agent can build, make changes, and ship to production, all from a conversation.

WordPress Agent is for people who spend more time running a site than coding one. The demos cover guidelines as memory, editorial review, image editing, and using the Agent through email and Telegram.

Watch the demos, ask questions, and tell us how these tools can improve. 

Help shape what we build next

The booth isn’t a finished-product victory lap. We’re using WCUS to learn what sparks your interest, what gives you pause, and how we can do better and build better to support you well into the future.

If you work at an agency, bring the client workflow that wastes your time so we can help solve it. If you publish or run a business, bring the task you wish your site could handle for you. Our booth staff will take that feedback back to the teams that build and market the products.

Have fun with something decidedly offline

After all the talk of AI, there’s something deliberately analog waiting in your attendee bag: The Little WordPress.com Zine.

Inside are stories from people building on WordPress.com, a few gloriously low-tech activities, and a look at WordPress Studio and WordPress Agent.

The stories inside are all wrapped around a bigger idea: the things you build on the web should belong to you.

It’s a limited edition made for WordCamp US 2026, included in your attendee bag.

Don’t miss out on WordCamp US 2026

WordCamp US 2026 runs on August 16–19 at the Phoenix Convention Center. 

General admission is $100, while student tickets are just $25. Use sponsor code WordPress.com-friend20 for 20% off general admission.

Your ticket covers:

• Two conference days with more than 50 talks and workshops
• Contributor Day
• Showcase Day
• Lunch and all-day coffee
• Sponsor Hall access
• Closing social

From the team at WordPress.com, we can’t wait to see you there in person, either at our booth or at the many social events!

Welcome back to the WordPress.com changelog!

Some helpful editor updates headline today’s changelog: two brand-new blocks, a gallery that fills itself, and a much better way to leave notes on a draft. You can also now change your plan yourself, without contacting support.

Editor

Two new blocks: Tabs and Playlist

The Tabs block organizes content, like FAQs and feature comparisons, into tabbed sections. Each panel accepts blocks, and the tab buttons have their own color, typography, border, and spacing controls so they match your theme.

The Playlist block showcases a list of audio tracks with artwork, track metadata, and a waveform. You can set the play order and toggle artwork, artist names, track numbers, and track length individually. If you publish podcast episodes or music, you can do it without pasting in an embed from somewhere else.

Type /tabs or /playlist in the editor to use these blocks on your posts or pages.

Galleries that build themselves

The new Dynamic Gallery option in the Gallery block automatically shows every image attached to your post instead of making you hand-pick each one to create a gallery from scratch.

Add a Gallery block in your post or page by typing /gallery, then click “Use attached images.”

Leave more granular feedback in notes

If anyone else touches your posts before they go out — a client, a business partner, a contractor, or the one friend who always catches your typos — you may be gathering feedback from a few different places.

Notes keep all of it on the draft inside WordPress. A note now attaches to a specific phrase rather than the whole block, and you can @mention someone to pull them directly into the conversation.

Nobody has to be in the editor at the same time. You leave a note, they answer when they get to it.

Manage your plan

Change your plan yourself, any time

Moving to a lower-tier plan used to mean contacting support. Now there’s a “View plans” button on any active plan’s settings page that will take you to the plans page where eligible lower tiers show a “Downgrade” option alongside the usual upgrades.

Once you’ve requested a downgrade, it’s scheduled for your next renewal date. This means that you keep everything you’ve already paid for until the term ends, and then you’re charged the lower price.

Fixes and improvements

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

• Buy a paid plugin from the marketplace, and you’ll land on your plugins page with it switched on instead of waiting on a progress bar that sometimes stalled.
• Your traffic numbers show up reliably on the hourly view instead of constantly loading.
• Video stats now show thumbnails so you can tell which video is which at a glance.
• Help is a click away while you’re picking a domain during signup. Click the “Need help?” button to search our docs or connect with one of our Happiness Engineers.
• We’re retiring Feature Clips, our experimental tool for turning a post into a short vertical video. If you were using it, our guide to working with video walks through the other ways to add video to a post.