The maintenance release WordPress 6.2.1 is scheduled for May 16th. It includes a number of fixes to core and Gutenberg. The release candidate is available for testing.

Jamie Marsland has a video comparing 4 AI writers. He looks at how well they integrate with Gutenberg and how flexible and fast they are. It is a nice comparison because the differences are very apparent and it is easy to see what would make each one more useful.

What happens behind the scenes when a WordPress page is loaded? This tutorial on the Learn WordPress site provides an overview of the page request lifecycle, from the query string to which template is used. The tutorial is high level enough for a power user to read, but has information useful for developers.

The WPTavern reports on the discussion about AI and core WordPress. There is a feeling that WordPress doesn’t want to miss the boat and be less competitive if it ignores AI and should at least make sure there are no blockers to adding AI innovation. Some participants noted that projects like the upcoming phase 3 of Gutenberg will help WordPress to be competitive and that the use of AI is still new and evolving.

Block themes lack responsive controls by device size in the Site Editor. In this article Mike McAlister, the developer of the new Ollie block theme, discusses the current intrinsic design / fluid scaling approach and suggests a way that responsive overrides might be implemented.

A proposal on the Make blog to modernize WordCamps. Some ideas include trying out new formats, topics, and focusing events for a subset of the community, such as for designers or contributors. People are invited to share their feedback and ideas.

The WordPress marketing team has organized a campaign called from Blogs to Blocks to celebrate the upcoming 20th anniversary of WordPress. It will run from today until May 27th. They will provide prompts each day and invite people in the community to participate. Information is here if you want to join in.

Robby McCullough of the Beaver Builder team published on their blog a post about why limited site licenses don’t make sense for GPL products. (note that he republished this article from 5 years ago as it is still relevant).

Scott Kingsley Clark on the Pods blog announces that the first beta of Pods 3.0 is available. A main feature of this release is conditional logic based on field values where you can show or hide a field based on the value of another field.