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.

Elementor has cut 100 jobs, described as a reset due to the AI era.

This is an analysis of the complete theme directory – all themes from the beginning. Some things we’ve known, for example, that block theme adoption is low, but there are some other insights as well, such as where theme authors are putting their attention now.

There does seem to be the assumption that lots of active installs per theme is the sign of success. However, in a free directory lots of choice also counts.

The results largely align with the TAB survey: Most are 1 person or small teams, decide on the CMS and hosting for their clients, provide additional services for more revenue and find that updates and performance are the biggest time sync.

Jean Galea published a very insightful and balanced article about the current state of WordPress. It takes enterprise, agencies / freelancers, plugin developers, new users, and other groups into account. It will resonate with a number of conclusions we have drawn, but also brings in some new perspectives.

In their Facebook group David Babinec announced that the Core Framework and its builder extensions will be free and hosted on GitHub. Template packs will still be a premium option from the website. They are making this change because sales are down 80% this year, partly due to AI and it being a niche product.

Novamira Pro 1.5.0 is out and this update seems to focus on supporting the various form plugins. This includes Gravity Forms, WPForms, Fluent Forms, Ninja Forms, Formidable Forms, and Contact Form 7.nov

This is based on the April 2026 dataset from the HTTP Archive. It is reporting the builder used on the home page. There are plenty of interesting tidbits, such as year-on-year stats.

Paul Charlton created a walk-through to show how the new advanced variations feature in the free version of FluentCart works.