A lot happening for the 20th Anniversary of the first release of WordPress. Happy Birthday WordPress! Sarah Gooding has a nice review of the history and milestones of the project.

JetEngine 3.2 beta is adding the ability to use ChatGPT to help in creating SQL queries.
To me it seems like an interesting idea but at this point somewhat experimental.

Matt Mullenweg was on the Design Better podcast. It is an interesting discussion for people who are following what he has been doing, but note that very little of the discussion relates to what is happening in WordPress now. One interesting point is that he mentioned he has seen what is coming in AI and that shortly it will be a level of magnitude better.

It is good to see that attention is being paid to improve performance. The tests were of even very basic installs / configurations. I’m guessing this means that 6.3 will come with another performance boost.

Jamie Marsland poses the question, has the plugin version of Gutenberg served its purpose and is it time now to close it out and move on?

Many of us are using MariaDB and a new health check plugin was created at CloudFest Germany. This plugin displays information about the health of your database and optimizations you can run.

This is a tutorial for developers on adding patterns for the Query Loop block.

This is an excellent and thorough overview of Accessibility and WordPress by Cory Miller. It is the best single article on the subject that I’ve seen. A good discussion of what to consider and what decisions need to be made.

Automattic has released a local development environment that runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows. It is called “wp-now” and it can launch a new development site in seconds. It uses NodeJS, WebAssembly, and SQLite to run WordPress in the browser.