The Meta Box team shared a 2023 retrospective and plans for 2024. This year they intend to focus on improving MB Blocks, MB Relationships, and MB Custom Table.

The latest version of the Gutenberg plugin, 17.8, includes basic grid support. This version of Gutenberg (and this feature) won’t be in 6.5.

Beginning in May 2020, Automattic sponsored Anne McCarthy to run the FSE Outreach program. The idea was to encourage WordPress users to try new features and also to be a conduit to get non-core user feedback to the core team. The program has been a success, both in terms of providing better communication, but also as a tool for bettering community relations.

Now Anne is moving on to other tasks and the outreach program, which was originally seen as temporary, is being given a more permanent status as part of the testing team. Birgit Pauli-Haack will be the new lead.

Looks like Automattic is going to sell user blog, website and Tumblr content to OpenAI.

Performant Translations – Yet another set of features slated to be included in WordPress 6.5 are a number of big performance improvements with internationalization. Up to now these improvements have been being tested via a feature plugin.

Also included in this article on the Make blog is information on a new translation file format which you may begin seeing.

The 8G Firewall has been beta tested for more than a year and now is ready for use on production sites. 8G is a lightweight (only 17KB) strong firewall that provides site security and peace of mind. Plus, 8G is open source and 100% free for everyone.

Pods 3.1 was released with a focus on hardening security. The release notes include documentation on access rights and Pods settings.

Native support for AVIF is coming in WordPress 6.5. AVIF images can be up to 50% smaller than a JPG image with the same or better image quality. Can I use says there is about 89% browser support.