In this tutorial the ACF team tells how to manually setup ACF so that you are using custom tables instead of post_meta for storing field values. According to the article using custom tables is 100% safe and is supported by the standard ACF functions. I expect to see the team add this as an option for the Pro plugin in the future.

If you want to integrate AI directly into WordPress and don’t want to wait until April for 7.0, then it is possible to add Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, or OpenAI now using official WP plugins. This article provides an overview of the available features and links to get started.

This article is a thorough overview of the forthcoming PHP block features that are being added in WordPress 7.0. If you are interested in this feature then this is a must read as it includes a full discussion of features, use cases, limitations, and examples.

In case you missed the announcement, beginning with version 7 BlockStudio is free. BlockStudio allows you to create blocks using PHP, Twig, Blade, and JSON.

WordPress 7.0 will include the ability to create PHP-only blocks. It looks very straightforward and will empower PHP developers.

Things just got real … The Dynamic.ooo team just released Novamira. It is an MCP server that gives AI agents full access to WordPress, the Database, filesystem, PHP execution, etc. It works with existing plugins and enables the use of AI with WordPress. It is meant for use on development sites, not production sites.

This article by Sergio Gomes argues that JavaScript-heavy approaches like React are difficult to optimize for performance and perhaps are not a good fit for many types of sites. This is a sentiment that I’ve heard a number of times, even here in this group. What is remarkable about this article is that Sergio works for Automattic and it was published on Automattic’s blog …

Here is an interesting discussion about how URLs and permalinks work in WordPress.

Todd Wardzinski of the Red Hat team makes the case for first writing specs before beginning to vibe code.