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.

PHP 8.5 is a major update of the PHP language, with new features including the URI extension, Pipe operator, and support for modifying properties while cloning.

Here is the explanation from Cloudflare about the downtime yesterday. TL DR – it was a new bug in their Bot Management feature.

Adobe to acquire Semrush for $1.9 billion.

The changes described in this dev note sound like good ideas, but people should be sure to test mail sending and not assume it is going to work.