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Sonny Rollins, the Saxophone Colossus, has passed. He is probably my favorite saxophonist, and while the aforementioned album is one of the five I would take to a deserted island, he has so many other good ones like The Cutting Edge which also has bagpipes, or Sonny Side Up with Sonny Stitt and Dizzy Gillespie. WordPress 6.7 in November 2024 was named in honor of Rollins. We rarely choose a living musician for a release so the team actually prepared a gift we sent to him with the names of all the contributors. Mr. Rollins,Your immense contributions to music are a source of deep inspiration to the thousands of open source contributors to WordPress. We like to say ‘Code is poetry’, and we’re honored to pay tribute to you and your legacy of creativity and innovation by naming the 6.7 release of WordPress to you. It was sent to his publicist, so not sure if he got a chance to see it, but I hope it at least gave him a chuckle to have a random Open Source project celebrating him. He was the last surviving jazzer in the Great Day in Harlem photo.

June 4-6, 2026 | ICE Kraków Congress Centre, Kraków, Poland WordCamp Europe 2026 will bring the WordPress community together in Kraków, Poland, from June 4–6 for Contributor Day, two conference days, and a program shaped by the ideas, tools, and people moving WordPress forward. This year’s schedule includes two official keynotes, hands-on workshops, panels, and sessions across development, accessibility, artificial intelligence, content, search, business, education, security, and community. The program offers a broad view of how WordPress is used today: as publishing software, a framework for building at scale, a tool for business growth, and a global open source project shaped by contributors around the world. Whether you build with WordPress, write for the web, support clients, teach new learners, or contribute to the project, WordCamp Europe offers a chance to learn from practical examples and connect them to the platform’s future. Get Your Tickets WCEU Schedule About WCEU 2026 Keynotes at WordCamp Europe 2026 The keynote sessions at WordCamp Europe 2026 will give attendees two ways to look at WordPress today: through a large-scale institutional adoption story and through a broader closing reflection on where the project is headed. These sessions anchor the program while connecting many of the themes that appear throughout the conference, from infrastructure and governance to contribution, innovation, and the future of the web. Joachim Valdemar Yde and Francisco Borges Aurindo Barros will share how CERN is adopting WordPress as its future content management system. Their keynote will explore the governance, infrastructure, and migration work behind moving more than 800 websites onto a customized WordPress Service, offering a look at WordPress on an institutional scale. Ma.tt Mullenweg will close WordCamp Europe 2026 with a broader look at WordPress, the open web, and the ideas shaping what comes next. As the event’s final keynote, this session will bring together many of the conversations happening across Contributor Day, sessions, workshops, and community gatherings throughout the week. Program Themes to Watch at WCEU 2026 The rest of the WCEU themes are organized around topics that reflect the breadth of the WordPress ecosystem. These themes give attendees a way to follow the sessions most relevant to their work, from building better sites and improving content discovery to growing sustainable businesses, strengthening security, expanding access, and supporting the people and communities behind the project. Search, Visibility, and Discovery Search continues to change, but helping people find the right information remains central to the web. WCEU’s search and SEO sessions look at how AI-generated answers, generative engine optimization, shifting user habits, and new discovery platforms are changing visibility for publishers, businesses, and builders. Sessions include Panel: The Future of SEO, with Kacper Bartoszak, Pam Aungst Cronin, Alex Moss, David Cuesta, and Jovana Smoljanovic Tucakov, as well as Emma Young’s AI Search: Why Your Whole Company Should Care, which looks at why AI-native discovery now affects content, development, partnerships, and business strategy. AI and the Future of Building Artificial intelligence has a dedicated presence at WordCamp Europe 2026, with sessions that move beyond general discussion and into practical use cases for marketing, product work, development, and site management. Vito Peleg’s Agentic AI & WordPress: From Prompts to Tools & Systems will explore how teams can move from simple prompts to AI workflows that execute tasks, while Monika Dimitrova’s AI Won’t Save Your Marketing (but it might save your time and money) focuses on how small businesses can use AI without losing the strategy and identity that make their work effective. Development and Technical Practice Development sessions at WCEU will focus on how WordPress sites, tools, and workflows are built for long-term use. The program includes a Panel: Inside WordPress 7.0, with contributors discussing the release, its features, and the process behind it, along with sessions such as Anukasha Singh’s Smarter Plugin Permissions with the Abilities API, Ariel Ramos’s Headless WordPress API Security in 10 Minutes, and Dejan Rudić Vranić’s hands-on workshop Build Your Developer Portfolio: A Hands-on Guide to FSE. Accessibility and Inclusive Design Accessibility is part of building a better web for everyone, and WCEU’s accessibility sessions give attendees practical ways to make digital experiences more usable, inclusive, and sustainable. This theme connects directly to WordPress’s project values, from how content is structured to how themes, plugins, and interfaces are designed. For designers, developers, content creators, and project leads, these sessions offer a chance to make accessibility part of everyday decisions rather than a final step at the end of a project. Content, Writing, and Communication Content and writing sessions at WCEU will focus on how clearer communication helps users find what they need, teams share what they know, and communities make information easier to understand. Pooja Sanwal’s Why Writing Still Matters in a Video-First Internet looks at the role of written content as video continues to dominate online traffic, Fernando Tellado’s Do You Really Need an SEO/GEO Pugin for WordPress? explores what WordPress can already do for visibility, and Birgit Olzem’s Documentation as a Love Language for the Future You looks at how simple documentation practices can help teams and communities preserve knowledge. Security and Trust Security remains central to maintaining websites people can rely on. WCEU’s security-focused sessions look beyond basic reminders and into the risks, systems, and decisions that shape safer WordPress experiences. The broader program includes talks on AI-assisted spam and bot detection, plugin permissions, and secure headless WordPress architectures, giving attendees practical ways to think about resilience, trust, and responsible site management. Business and Sustainable Growth The business sessions at WCEU will explore how WordPress professionals turn ideas, services, and products into sustainable work. Debbie Levitt’s Three Levels of Atomic Product-Market Fit looks at how teams can understand product-market fit beyond a single metric, Irfani Silviana’s WordPress ROI Map: Engineering Business Value with BMC connects technical decisions to business outcomes, and Liza Bogatyrev’s Stop Positioning Into Obscurity to Unlock Growth focuses on how clearer positioning can support revenue and adoption. Education, Contribution, and Community WordPress grows when people can learn, participate, and find a place

Ever logged into WordPress to publish a post, only to end up spending hours on admin tasks? It happens more often than we probably want to admit. You meant to write, but then you noticed yesterday’s orders needed checking. A landing page needed updating before tomorrow’s promo. And your form needs to be integrated with your email list. An hour disappears before you’ve written a single sentence. What if you could have an AI agent built right into WordPress… one that can handle all of that admin work for you? Imagine opening your dashboard and just asking: “How many orders came in yesterday?” Answered. “Update my About page to mention our new location.” Done. “When someone fills out my contact form, send me a Slack message and add them to my newsletter.” Set up… all it takes is a single line request in plain English. That kind of help has never existed inside WordPress… Until now! Today, I’m excited to introduce Uncanny Agent, the first true AI assistant built natively for WordPress. As you may know, Uncanny Automator is a no-code automation plugin, used by over 50,000 websites, that connects your WordPress plugins, sites and apps. With Uncanny Agent, the AI assistant built within the plugin, you can ask any questions about your site or tell it what you need done…and it takes care of it for you.  Why Uncanny Agent? Over the last two years, the #1 question I’ve received from WPBeginner readers is: “How can I use AI to save time on my WordPress site?” Most of the answers floating around are weak. You can type in a prompt in ChatGPT and follow its instructions manually. Or you can spend hours building an automation setup, only to replace manual work with automation management. The problem is that most AI chatbots can only talk about WordPress in general terms. They recommend generic tutorials and broad advice because they don’t actually have access to your WordPress site or your plugins. That means you can’t ask questions like:  Which products sold best last week? Can you edit a blog post and make certain changes? Which WooCommerce orders are still pending? Why isn’t the WooCommerce checkout redirect firing? That’s a real problem for small business owners. You don’t typically have a developer to call or an operation team to work for you. When you need an answer about your site, you need it instantly, not after an hour of clicking through dashboards. So, I asked myself: what if every WordPress user could have an AI assistant right inside WordPress? That means you can get instant answers for all the questions you have about your site. Or give it instructions in plain English, and it acts on your site directly.  In other words, having an AI assistant inside WordPress is like having a senior WordPress operator on call 24/7 for your site.  That’s exactly what Uncanny Agent delivers. What is Uncanny Agent? Uncanny Agent is an AI assistant for WordPress built into the Uncanny Automator plugin. It helps you get real work done on your WordPress site just by describing what you want in plain English. There are three core things Agent does: Answers questions about your site: “How many users completed Course B this month?” or “What’s my best-selling product this quarter?” Completes tasks for you: Drafting posts with featured images, updating settings, generating reports, formatting content Builds automations from a conversation: describe a workflow in one sentence, and Agent builds it for you Ask Your Site Anything, Get a Real Answer If you’ve purchased an AI + Automation plan, Uncanny Agent lives inside your WordPress dashboard. You don’t need to install a separate plugin or sign up for another account.  Click the Uncanny Agent widget to open it, type your question, and get instant answers. No more digging through three different plugin dashboards or exporting CSVs into a spreadsheet. Since Agent has direct access to your WordPress data, answers are accurate to the second… no real-time snapshots needed from an external analytics tool. Draft Content and Handle Admin Work in Seconds Uncanny Agent can complete tasks on your behalf, all through natural conversation. What used to take 10+ clicks to complete a task will now get done in just one request in plain English.  The best part is that you can have back and forth conversation with Agent to get the best results.  For example, you can simply ask “Review our current blog posts and propose 3 complementary article topics”. Once you get a response, you can ask to “Draft a post that covers the second topic”. The same goes for updating product descriptions, formatting content, or even writing a code snippet that you can add to your theme file to enhance a WordPress feature.  The result: routine WordPress busywork disappears from your calendar. Build Automations Without Touching a Recipe Builder Most automation tools require you to map every step manually. Triggers, actions, fields, conditions… it adds up. With Uncanny Agent, you describe what you want in one sentence: “When someone submits my contact form, send me a Slack notification and add their info to Google Sheets.” Agent builds the automation for you. You review it, save it, and move on. Built on a Mature Automation Engine Uncanny Automator has been the standard for WordPress automation since 2020, with 50,000+ active sites. It already does the heavy lifting of connecting WooCommerce, Slack, Zoom, Mailchimp, Google Sheets, OpenAI, and the rest of your stack. Uncanny Agent, the new feature, is the AI layer sitting on top of that proven engine that runs billions of recipe combinations to connect your WordPress plugins, sites, and apps together. It is by far the most capable AI assistant available for WordPress. AI-Powered Automation: How Much Does It Cost? Here’s what it costs to get AI-powered automation on your WordPress site without Uncanny Agent. You will need an automation tool like Zapier or Make along with a general AI assistant like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. Both

WordPress 7.0 “Armstrong” introduces significant updates including visual revisions, responsive block visibility, and enhanced workflow features, promoting collaboration among users and developers while emphasizing safe updating practices.

A standard contact form tells you almost nothing about the person who just filled it out. You get a name and an email address, but no idea whether that person is ready to buy, still exploring options, or not a real fit at all. At WPBeginner, we run a hosting quiz that works differently. Before we ask anyone for their email, the quiz asks a few short questions about their goals and current situation. Those answers sort each visitor into a group, so our follow-up emails match where they are in their decision. This guide shows you how to build the same kind of qualification filter using WPForms. This post focuses on the qualification logic: how to define your lead criteria, score answers, and route each lead automatically. TL;DR: I’ll show you how to build a quiz that automatically filters your leads into hot, warm, and cold groups using WPForms and the Quiz Addon. You’ll define your qualification criteria, write readiness-focused questions, score the answers on a 0–100 scale, and connect the results to your email marketing tool so each lead gets the right follow-up automatically. Before diving in, there are a few quick things to note. First, this guide assumes you already have an email marketing tool. If you don’t, check out our roundup of the best email marketing services to get started. Second, you’ll be building your lead filter using WPForms. Because WPForms is built by Awesome Motive, the same company behind WPBeginner, we trust the plugin and use it on our own site every day. Finally, this post focuses specifically on the logic of scoring and routing your leads. If you need a more general walkthrough of the form builder itself, see our guide on how to create a quiz in WordPress. Here are the topics I’ll cover in this guide: Why a Quiz Beats a Contact Form for Finding Real Buyers Define What Hot, Warm, and Cold Leads Look Like for Your Business What You Need Before Starting Step 1: Install WPForms and Activate the Quiz Addon Step 2: Build Your Qualification Filter Step 3: Analyze Your Results and Tune the Filter Frequently Asked Questions Additional Resources for WordPress Lead Generation Why a Quiz Beats a Contact Form for Finding Real Buyers Most people think lead generation is a numbers game: the more sign-ups, the better. But a smaller list of people who are genuinely interested in what you offer will almost always outperform a huge list of strangers who barely remember signing up. Consider two scenarios. You could collect 1,000 email addresses with a free wallpaper download, or 200 emails from people who completed a quiz called ‘Is your website ready to grow?’ The wallpaper group signed up for a freebie and told you nothing. The quiz group revealed their goals, readiness, and mindset just by showing up and answering. That’s the difference between a wide net and a filter. A net catches everything, including people who will never buy from you. A filter catches fewer people, but the ones it catches are far more likely to become real customers. Here’s how this plays out across different business types: Business Type Quiz Example What You Learn Web hosting / SaaS ‘Which plan is right for you?’ Match visitors to the right tier Coaching / consulting ‘What is your biggest challenge?’ Identify client fit before a sales call Blogger building a course ‘What is your experience level?’ Route learners to the right content Local service business ‘What do you need help with?’ Qualify inquiries before a callback eCommerce store ‘Find your perfect product’ Recommend items based on preferences A quiz does more than collect emails. It gives visitors a personalized result that feels immediately useful, which builds trust before you ever send a single follow-up message. Define What Hot, Warm, and Cold Leads Look Like for Your Business Before you open the form builder, you need to decide what a ‘hot’ lead actually means for your specific business. This is the step most people skip, and it’s why their quiz ends up sorting leads in ways that don’t match reality. Which Signals Actually Matter Not all signals are equally useful. Four types of information tend to reveal the most about lead quality: timeline urgency, budget range, problem complexity, and decision-making authority. Of these, readiness signals matter most. Someone who says ‘I need this launched in two weeks’ is a completely different lead than someone who says ‘I’m just exploring options.’ Timeline and urgency tell you whether a person is ready to act, not just interested in the topic. Budget matters, but weight it lower. A lead with a clear, urgent problem and no stated budget is often closer to a sale than a lead with a large budget and no urgency at all. Before building anything, complete this template for your own business: A hot lead for my business is someone who ___. A warm lead is someone who ___. A cold lead is someone who ___. Write your criteria down before you design a single question. Your answers will directly shape which quiz responses get the highest point values. How the WPBeginner Hosting Quiz Defines Leads Here’s how we apply this at WPBeginner. Our hosting quiz asks visitors about their experience level, monthly traffic, and hosting priorities. Those three signals tell us whether someone is ready to switch hosts or is still figuring out the basics. A hot lead for our quiz is someone with an existing WordPress site, over 10,000 monthly visitors, and ‘performance and uptime’ as their top hosting priority. That person is shopping seriously. A warm lead is someone building their first site who wants affordable, reliable hosting. A cold lead is someone who is not yet sure they need WordPress at all. Notice that budget doesn’t appear in that definition. We found that readiness signals like existing site and current traffic predict sales-ready conversations far better than budget answers alone. Three Reader Scenarios Your criteria will look different depending on what you’re

Content management systems are constantly evolving to meet the growing needs of organizations with vast amounts of information to share. One topic that’s often overlooked until it becomes a problem is how structured data impacts editorial efficiency and long-term website success. When a site has hundreds, or even thousands of individual pages, keeping everything organized […]

Hi there, It’s good to be home again. It was an unusually long break, but I appreciate the series of official bank holidays that morph into long weekends away from the computer. And of course, the catch-up is overwhelming. The creativity inside the WordPress community around content creation, development and design is highly energizing. And it’s WordPress 7.0 release week! It’s finally here! So don’t let me keep you any longer. Enjoy! If you want to stop long enough to send me a note, I’d be delighted to hear from you. Yours, Birgit WordCamp Europe is coming up fast. It’ll take place Jun 4 to 6, 2026. The schedule just was posted. If you still are on the fence about getting your ticket. Here are another 49 reasons to head to Krakow. The schedule lists 34 Talks, 3 Panels, 10 Workshops and 2 Keynotes. For armchair WordCampers, like myself, there will be a livestream. After the WordCamp recordings will be uploaded to YouTube and WordPressTV. A first selection of what I might watch: Keynote: Two worlds collide: WordPress at CERN HTML API practicum: a deep dive with Dennis Snell Human in the loop means something with Tammie Lister Beyond hamburgers: latest Navigation block changes with Sarah Norris WordPress for scientists: building engineering websites at CERN (regular talk) with Akanksha Chatterjee Build your developer portfolio: a hands-on guide to FSE with Dejan Rudic Vranic Closing Keynote with Matt Mullenweg on Saturday June 6, 2026. if you rather stay in North America, WordCamp US just opened up the online ticket booth. It’ll take place from August 16 to August 19, 2026, in Phoenix, AZ. The calls for sponsors and speakers are also available now. The deadline for speaker submissions is next week Friday May 29, 2026. Developing Gutenberg and WordPress WordPress 7.0 “Armstrong” After the decision to remove Real-time Collaboration from the release because it needs more time in the oven, so to speak, the release squad was really busy to produced RC 3 – 5 before the final release on Wednesday May 20, 2026. Read more via the WordPress 7.0 “Armstrong” release post. The release squad also published the Field Guide with all the developer notes and salient details. Here on Gutenberg Times you can browse through WordPress 7.0 Source of Truth. For German-speaking WordPress users, I discussed the release with Simon Kraft on the Presswerk episode. Abha Thakor and I talked through a few features for the OpenChannels.fm episode to come out on Tuesday, May 26, 2026. Justin Nealey product manager at GoDaddy breaks down why WordPress 7.0’s three new APIs matter far more than the headline features for plugin developers. The Connectors API means site owners manage their own AI provider keys centrally; WP AI Client gives you a single provider-agnostic call to invoke any model; and the Abilities API turns your plugin into something the site’s AI agent can reach for autonomously. Together, Nealey argues, your plugin stops being a destination users visit and becomes a verb the agent performs. Ronak Vanpariya, web developer on Gujarat, India digs into why Real-Time Collaboration was pulled from WordPress 7.0 with a five-point technical post-mortem. You’ll learn how RTC had to work across every corner of the Site Editor, how simultaneous edits triggered race conditions corrupting block data, and how the feature’s reliance on persistent server connections would have overwhelmed shared hosting environments. Memory bloat on older devices and recurring block-tree breakage uncovered by fuzz testing sealed the decision. The feature lives on in the Gutenberg plugin. Mike McAlister, creator of Ollie, released a video walkthrough of WordPress 7.0 covering the features he sees as most impactful for site builders. He walks through the new AI infrastructure — WP AI Client and the Connectors API — content-only pattern editing, customizable mobile menu overlays, block visibility controls for responsive design, per-block custom CSS, visual revisions, the new Icon and Breadcrumbs blocks, an upgraded Font Library screen, and a command palette shortcut. In other WordPress Core news: Immediately after the release of WordPress 7.0, Jeff Paul published the WordPress 7.1 Call for Volunteers. Work has already started since the firsty 7.0 Beta in February. The first beta for WordPress 7.1 is roughly eight weeks out and scheduled for July 15, 2026, and the final release for August 19, 2026 aimed at the last day of WordCamp US. In addition to the punted Real-time collaboration feature, I discovered a few tracking issue for WordPress 7.1 already: #76525: Block Supports and Design Tools in WordPress 7.1 Opened by Aaron Robertshaw, this tracks new and enhanced block supports for 7.1, carrying over items descoped from 7.0. A living issue is updated as supports are added or dropped from the release scope. #75707: Block Visibility: Configurable Breakpoints and theme.json Integration The follow-up to 7.0’s block visibility work. The goal is to let themes define custom breakpoints via theme.json and make visibility extensible for future responsive features — laying a solid foundation before more viewport-aware tools arrive. #76045: DataViews, DataForm, et al. in WordPress 7.1 Tracks continued iteration on DataViews, DataViewsPicker, DataForm, and the Field API. Key work includes migrating @wordpress/dataviews to the new Design System primitives and extending DataForm to PHP-only blocks. #77199: Block Bindings in WordPress 7.1 Narrowed in scope to match contributor availability. The headline goal is integrating the Block Bindings UI into Block Fields and removing the previous Block Bindings UI, plus adding Block Bindings support for the Cover block. First-time release lead Paulo Trentin brought us the latest version for the Gutenberg plugin, 23.2. In his release post What’s new in Gutenberg 23.2? (21 May he highlighted: You can now style blocks differently for tablets and phones right from Global Styles, so your designs adapt to each screen. Pop-up dialogs slide up from the bottom on mobile, making them easier to tap one-handed, and animations across the editor now share a consistent feel. You’ll also see smoother Content Types management, friendlier Shortcode handling, clearer Revisions diff markers for better accessibility, and steadier