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All the good WordPress stuff, once a month

DEV: Commit to the Bit

Welcome to DEV, your monthly WordPress deep dive.

Before you clock off and lie in a rectangle of sunlight, let’s see what’s been happening in WordPress.

Stick around to the end to see the hamster who’ll absolutely annihilate your fitness goals.

In today’s edition:

  • How 1,100+ WordPressers got into the zone in Arizona.
  • Responsive styling! Better collaboration! Less media-processing misery! WordPress 7.1 has arrived.
  • WordPress starts asking the important questions: “Should we actually let AI do that?”

Hot Off The Presses: What’s New?

Meme depicting a dog napping in a patch of sunlight

Sometimes the only valid debugging technique is stretching out on the floor in a patch of sunlight, am I right?

This pup knows what’s up. I’m jealous.

While this very good doggo works on its background-color, here’s what’s been happening in WordPress this month.

WordCamp US was Arizona-nother Level

More than 1,100 sunscreen-ed and well-hydrated folks braved the 111ºF (44ºC) Arizona heat and gathered in Phoenix to talk all things WordPress, and from all accounts the four-day event was a great success.

To honor the occasion, August 19th has been officially proclaimed “Phoenix WordPress Day”, according to the city’s Chief Innovation Officer, Michael Hammett.

So, what did you miss if you didn’t make it to Arizona?

  • Contributor Day, with 425 participants and more shipping than a Tumblr fanfic.
  • A fireside chat (with no actual fire, thankfully. I’m sweating just thinking about it) where the Big M and Robert Jacobi discuss how the web is changing, where open source stands today and how WordPress is evolving alongside AI.
  • The chance to get your hands messy at Paint-a-Wapuu classes with local Phoenix artist Dina Murphy.
  • Official screenings of Code for the People, a short documentary by Bao Nguyen, which you can watch here.

Oh, not to mention the childlike joy of collectively building a massive WordPress logo out of Lego bricks. (If that isn’t a metaphor for Open Source, I don’t know what is!)

Were you there? What was it like? We’d love to hear about your favorite part. 

WordPress 7.1: Mary Lou

WordPress 7.1 “Mary Lou” has landed, named after jazz pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams.

And unlike my attempts at learning piano, there’s quite a lot here worth paying attention to:

  • Responsive styling is now baked further into the Site Editor, so you can change how blocks look across different screen sizes without reaching straight for custom CSS.
  • Block themes can also define their own mobile and tablet breakpoints in theme.json.
  • Notes got a collaboration upgrade too. You can format them, @mention people, attach a note to a specific bit of text, and keep multiple conversations going on the same block. Basically, fewer “which paragraph did you mean?” messages in Slack.
  • Media is getting lighter on your server. Image compression, resizing, and thumbnail generation can now happen in the browser, helping dodge the PHP memory limits and timeouts that tend to appear precisely when you’re uploading something enormous five minutes before launch.
  • There are also two new blocks, Tabs and Playlist, plus interactive Button styles for hover, focus, and active states, custom icon registration, and an admin bar that now follows you across every editor.