WordPress 6.9.2 was just released. It is a security update and it is recommended to update your sites immediately.

For the hard-core gear heads, you can search WordPress plugins, themes, and core source code with the Veloria search engine.

Lots of AI news. The WordPress team released an update to the AI Experiments plugin, adding built-in image generation and AI-assisted review tools directly inside the block editor and admin interface.

In this tutorial the ACF team tells how to manually setup ACF so that you are using custom tables instead of post_meta for storing field values. According to the article using custom tables is 100% safe and is supported by the standard ACF functions. I expect to see the team add this as an option for the Pro plugin in the future.

You may have noticed the Ollie Menu Designer and other newer plugins showing up first when you go to install a plugin. This is new and part of a move to help “hidden gems” get discovered.

Dries did an experiment where he added a markdown version of his articles, llms.text info files for AI, and then watched what happened. The result was not what people expect.

If you want to integrate AI directly into WordPress and don’t want to wait until April for 7.0, then it is possible to add Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, or OpenAI now using official WP plugins. This article provides an overview of the available features and links to get started.

This article is a thorough overview of the forthcoming PHP block features that are being added in WordPress 7.0. If you are interested in this feature then this is a must read as it includes a full discussion of features, use cases, limitations, and examples.

An interview with Rob Ruiz, who is the WP Rig developer. WP Rig is a flexible starter framework for WordPress theme development.