There are a number of new features and improvements, including: a Popup Module, built-in maintenance mode, settings snapshots, more responsive controls, and accessibility improvements.

Atlant Security is a new, free, and comprehensive security plugin for WordPress. I was impressed by the extensive feature set and made a video. I do a walk-though so you can see what it offers.

Rather than adding an AI assistant itself, Meta Box abilities are a collection of of tools that AI agents can use via the WordPress Abilities API.

If you purchased Elevated Extensions when it was first released then you will be happy to see this addition. It looks to be flexible in what you can include in search. It is in use on the Breakdance, Oxygen, WP All Import, and WP Debug Toolkit docs sites, so it has some real-world examples.

Ronald Huereca has had to make the difficult decision to close down his plugin business. The plugins will be shared license free on GitHub. I’m sorry to hear the news, but thank you for handling it responsibly.

Ovidiu Maghetiu created a cool “Astro Playground” where you can try Astro live. It is a good way to see how it works.

Kevin Powell shows how to use the Popover HTML attribute. Baseline support has been around for a while. CanIUse reports 87.54% support.

Paul Charlton takes a first look at this new visual builder from the Core Framework team.

Bill Erickson ran GPT 5.5 and a number of open source AI models against some WordPress task lists to compare cost and how well they performed. His results pretty much mirrored my experience with Kimi.