Oxygen 6 Beta 5 was just released. It includes a number of fixes but also adds new Grid alignment icons, inline editing for Text Link, and CSS variable support for Opacity.

I always liked the idea of Post Formats, but I’ve probably only used them a couple of times. One of the nicest implementations was Justin Tadlock’s Stargazer theme. Over the years the feature hasn’t been highlighted or promoted and with block themes even more so. Now Courtney Robertson released a Post Formats for Block Themes plugin. One enhancement is that the Chat format includes an integrated Chat Log block that nicely displays chat logs. She tells about the plugin in this post. There are links there to the github repo and the WordPress org page.

Elementor Editor v3.34 Beta has launched with some new features and improvements including: Nested Tabs built entirely with Atomic Elements, Entrance Interactions with Fade, Slide, and Scale, Atomic Flexbox wrapper for Atomic Elements, Display Conditions (Pro) added to Atomic Elements, Media queries now supported in desktop Custom CSS (Pro), Atomic Paragraph can now be switched to <span>, Multiple UI/UX improvements, other tweaks, consistency fixes, and more. This is another step forward to Editor v4’s launch, which is currently in Alpha.

The WP Awards 2025 winners have been announced. Congratulations to all of the winners. There were some that I would expect and there were some surprises. Advanced Themer was voted best Bricks Addon. The WPManage Ninja team came in first for the forms, membership, and marketing automation categories.

It might be a good idea to test that email sending from your sites is still working as expected.

The WordPress AI team is going to release an AI Experiments plugin to expose some new AI features being added as well as to enable several experiments: the generation of excerpts, images, and image alt text.

The European Commission plans to end the widespread annoyance of cookie pop-ups by letting users manage cookie preferences directly through their browsers. Websites would have to respect these settings for at least six months, and trivial uses of cookies, like counting visits, wouldn’t require banners. Initially, prompts will be simplified to a single yes/no click, with more advanced browser-level solutions coming later. The proposals aim to modernize EU digital rules, simplify online experiences, and give users real control over their data. The changes still need approval from the European Parliament and EU member states.

It looks like Oxygen 6 is in its final stretch before it comes out of beta. The team has just released beta 4 and plan to have the final version out by January 15th. By all accounts the “New Oxygen” is coming together very nicely and is very performant. This announcement covers the updates in this beta.

Nice, PHP 8.5 was released on November 20th and WordPress 6.9 RC2 already has support for it.