Next time you log in to WordPress, check the "Plugins" tab. You'll see 8 cool new plugins. I constantly hear that it's really difficult to grow new plugins on the WordPress plugin directory now. The old plugins get all the attention. This is an effort to change that.

Most WordPress sites have a boxed layout for posts. There's a narrow central area, then room for sidebars and padding. A lot of MetaSlider users want something different. They're looking showcase their images and videos using the whole browser window.

An ex-Automattic CEO is now CEO of this place: @toni.bsky.team toni.org/2026/03/09/c...

Have you noticed that 95% of products don't have demo sites? It's much easier to provide free trials of your SaaS or free versions of your plugin. Building a demo site is really, really hard 🤯 There's at least two big problems:

This is a potentially very interesting WP feature, but I've not seen it implemented. You can extend the "Preview" feature to create your own custom previews. For example, a social plugin can show what your post will look like when shared.

WordPress is moving at AI-speed right now. About a week after it was first discussed, the beta versions of WordPress 7.0 now have a "Connector" screen for OpenAI, Claude, and Gemini. Choose any service and it will install a plugin then ask for your AI key.

I'm not sure if StellarWP (from LiquidWeb) is now providing Namecheap's hosting service? I hope they are because Namecheap's service caused our plugin developers a lot of grief over the years.

Easy Digital Downloads ... which button should I press? 🤔

Well, I screwed that up 🤦‍♂️ We acquired a WordPress plugin in January and re-launched it last week after about 1 month of intense development. Immediately we got a lot of confused questions. Our positioning was all wrong and the development direction needs tweaking.

You really should check out the new way that WordPress 7.0 handles revisions. I've attached before and after screenshots of the same revision. Everything is better in the new update.

There are some nice, colorful design touches in the new Google Docs-style feature in WordPress. There's a list of collaborators at the top of the screen. You can see the avatar of everyone editing the post, and each user has their own color.

It's a little last minute, but WordPress 7.0 will likely ship with a new "Connectors" screen so admins can easily link their sites to AI services. The inspiration is going to be Claude's "Connectors" page.

As anyone checked out the new "Fonts" screen in WordPress 7.0? 1. Download a font from Google Fonts or another source 2. Upload the file 3. You can start using that font in your theme I presume we'll soon see plugins to skip 1 and 2 and install fonts directly from the WP admin.

One more step forward for Google Docs-style editing in WordPress. It's going out enabled by default in beta versions of WordPress 7 🌟 The WP team are going to use the beta phase to decide if this will make the final WordPress 7.0 release.

I've been following Google Docs-style editing for well over 5 years. For the first time, I'm 100% convinced this feature is going to land in core. Subscribe to this issue to follow along: github.com/WordPress/gu...

Have you tried the beta versions of WordPress 7.0? The latest update really gave my eyes a bit of a shock 👀 Everything in the admin area has a higher contrast. The input boxes are larger and sharper. I suspect this makes WordPress more accessible.

We're really close to a big new release of the MetaSlider plugin. This update will have dozens of slideshows that you can import with just a click. Maybe this kind of labor will be replaced with AI in a couple of years. But right now, we're doing things the old fashioned way:

If you work in WordPress, you probably spend a lot of your day working in WordPress admin areas and jumping from site to site. I brightened up my Friday afternoon by redesigning all our sites' admin areas to match their brand. Purple for PublishPress, orange for MetaSlider etc

Are you using the Command Palette in WordPress? Not many people are yet. But for the 1st time, I've seen a plugin really promote it. Check out what the Astra theme is doing. They add a big link to the toolbar: "Search everything: from site settings to pages and design tools"

We're about to release a new feature called "Admin Styles". It allows you to bring all your "Graphic design is my passion" skills to WordPress 👩‍🎨🖼️🎨

We're getting very close to releasing our newest plugin: PublishPress Shortlinks. The basic idea is a version of the old Public Post Preview plugin that's ready for 2026: - Preview links for posts in any status - Set passwords or expiry dates for links - Full analytics for links

Hot take: AI came at a very good time for WordPress. After a year with no releases, it's really put a rocket under everything again 🚀 I can't remember WordPress moving with this sense of urgency on anything before. AI is coming to core with WordPress 7.0 make.wordpress.org/core/2026/02...

We got a interesting email from @wordfenceofficial.bsky.social today. There was a security report for one of our plugins. Their team investigated and decided it was invalid. We don't get the see the report, which would be nice. But kudos to Wordfence for taking the time to evaluate these reports.

Gutenberg Phase 3 has been a really strange phase for WordPress. But we're starting to see lots of movement on new features. Check out this latest idea for Revisions. The first image shows the current state (code display). The second image shows the new proposal (visual display).

There's a simple but helpful new feature in the latest version of the Gutenberg plugin. You can now add CSS styles directly to any block. I've attached a screenshot showing how to do that using the "Advanced" panel.

One of the many questions around the current mess at the Washington Post is about their CMS. Arc XP is their CMS platform that they've been selling to other newsrooms. The Post claims $40-50 million in annual revenue and about 100 clients.

Do you have WordPress content that absolutely, no doubt, 1000% must stay published? That's possible with the new version of the PublishPress Statuses plugin. You can lock all your posts to "Published". Or to "Private". Or to other membership statuses.

There's an interesting new approach to WordPress images in the Gutenberg plugin. You can now control image blocks using a dropdown in the sidebar. This is an additional option. The current image settings are still there in the toolbar over the image.

Dollar for dollar, the best money I've ever spent on customer service is a way for users to easily download previous versions of our plugins. If you're a WordPress developer and don't do this yet, I'd highly recommend it.

WP Engine has a new "Newsroom" product. It's good to see validation of the publishing space as being really important for WordPress. If you want basically the same feature set without the "Get in Touch for Pricing" cost 💰, there's PublishPress 😃 wpengine.com/newsroom-pla...

Google Docs-style editing is now the default behavior if you install the Gutenberg plugin 👀 They really are pushing hard on this with the aim of getting it into WordPress 7.0.

If you run a lot of WordPress sites, it's confusing to jump between them. Every admin area looks the same. I often do the wrong thing accidentally because I think I'm in another site. With the new PublishPress Capabilities, you can set a 100% unique color scheme for each site:

Guys, it's basically February now

I think there's room for improvement on how we handle reviews on the WordPress repo. We've had a spate of recent reviews that simply say "it's too expensive" or "I want this feature for free". Good news. We've seen this problem before and it's solvable.

We lost a community of devs who share software to help other publishers. @newspack.com researched how we got here and how we can fix it. "At its peak, The New York Times released dozens of public repositories on GitHub each year. In 2024, it posted zero." source.opennews.org/articles/jou...

One of my goals this year was to ditch MailChimp in favor of open source platforms. We made the first move this week, using MailerPress for one of our smaller newsletters. It worked great. The only real difference was speed. We use Sendgrid which limits how fast emails can go.

We plan to add several new plugins to PublishPress this year. There will be small, medium and big plugins. In fact, there will be so many changes that we're introducing a new tool to help manage them: PublishPress Hub.

This has been a while in coming, but the latest version of the Gutenberg plugin has a new experimental feature that lets you hide or show blocks based on screen size. If you choose to hide a block on Desktop, Tablet, or Moble, it will be visually hidden, but included in the frontend markup.

Question for you WordPress users, please ... is it worth moving away from metaboxes in favor of buttons in the top toolbar?

How do you create a custom #WordPress publishing workflow? @steveburge.com has the answers! It's all in the latest episode of @thewpminute.com. thewpminute.com/creating-bet...

The newest PublishPress plugin is getting really close now. You'll be able to create links for WordPress posts. These can be customizable, branded, private ... whatever you need. You can even share previews of content that hasn't been published yet.

One of the hardest things do with WordPress plugins is the settings. I've spent 2 hours trying to work out how to explain a potentially complex new MetaSlider feature using only a 4 word label and a 20 word tooltip 🤔

Someone has done a good job of taking over the WordPress theme results for "Elementor". The official Elementor theme is down on about row 20

If you're selling WordPress plugins using Easy Digital Downloads, I'd recommend trying this new tool called "Stripe Subscription Sync". On one of our sites, it led to about 70 "new" subscriptions being recorded. Other sites produced fewer results, but still it's worth testing:

Have you seen the new Media Library that's being built in the Gutenberg plugin? It's pretty cool and I suspect it will come to the WordPress core this year:

I've been testing collaborative editing experiments in WordPress for years. Those earlier versions never worked smoothly. Now, with the Gutenberg plugin, for the first time it works great, right out of the box. Google-Docs style editing in WordPress is here. Give it a try 😃

I'd love our team to try and tackle the linking feature in Gutenberg. By default, there's a lot of noise including attachments, terms, images etc before we get to the posts and pages. - Does anyone have feedback on this feature currently? - Ideas on how it could be better?

You've probably seen the Tailwind CSS story today (the founder had to lay off most of the dev team). One thing that jumped out to me as lifetime hater of lifetime sales: the business runs 100% on lifetime plans. Got to get some annual subscriptions going: tailwindcss.com/plus#pricing

The Big Bite agency is now part of WP Engine. This could be a very interesting move for publishers using WordPress. If you're curious what Big Bite does, I wrote about them last year. For example, they helped "The Times" to standardize on WordPress: publishpress.com/publishing-n...

I see lots of WordPress support replies saying "Try changing the theme". That's a major headache for users as it often messes with the settings. A plugin like this from @perishablepress.com is much better. You can visually test a new theme without making it live: wordpress.org/plugins/them...