I've seen big publishers with "lite" or "text-only" versions of their WordPress sites. Amber Hinds is a WordPress accessibility expert. On the PublishPress podcast, I asked Amber if these versions are a good idea. Are "text-only" versions more accessible? Are they helpful for some users?

Why does it matter what the reading level of your content is? Amber Hinds is an accessibility expert and says we should aim to write below an 9th grade level. A 9th grade level? 🤯 Yes, there's several great reasons to write simply:

I've seen many publishers adding audio playback to their articles. You can get WordPress plugins to read posts for your visitors. Amber Hinds is an accessibility expert. I asked her if these audio versions are helpful for people for disabilities. Her answer surprised me ...

Chris Ward has enjoyed a career at the intersection of publishing and advertising. In this two minute clip, Chris describes the mind-blowing changes he's seen. In the early days, he was selling 728x90 banners on the homepage. Now we're in the era of cellphones listening to our conversations:

Revisions are becoming a first class feature in WordPress. Previously Revisions were hidden away behind a tiny link in the sidebar. Install the new version of the Gutenberg plugin and you'll now see a "Revisions" tab in the sidebar. This shows the most recent revisions:

Fast sites are profitable sites. Christopher Ward runs The Publisher Desk which helps publishers increase their advertising revenue. All Chris' work is on WordPress. It gives you complete control over the speed of your site. You can build sites with excellent Core Web Vitals results.

Big improvements to the Media Library are underway for WordPress 7.1. There was a flurry of activity around media issues on the Gutenberg Github repo over the last few days. Some short term goals: - HEIC image support - Ultra HDR support - More stable uploading for large files

Will we soon be using AI tools to manage our WooCommerce stores? Yes, says @briancoords.com, who is a Developer Advocate for WooCommerce. There are AI tools available that allow you to use a chatbot to create products, analyze data, and do much more with WooCommerce.

It looks like the next step for real-time collaboration in WordPress is underway. There's a new experimental feature plugin called "Presence API". You'll be able to see what other people are doing in your WordPress site: github.com/WordPress/pr...

Will we soon see AI agents making purchases on our WooCommerce stores? @briancoords.com says that Woo is actively working on that right now with Stripe and Google

- Lightbox - Modal - Overlay - Pop-up - Dialog It seems like there's multiple ways to say the same thing, but none of them really make sense for normal people. Our plugin is literally called "MetaSlider Lightbox" but my wife had to ask me what a lightbox is 🤔

AI is now a contributor to the WooCommerce core 🤯 What does it mean that Copilot and Claude are now contributing to the WooCommerce codebase? I asked @briancoords.com:

Malcolm Peralty from Pressable has been blogging for over 20 years, since before WordPress 1.0! He was perhaps the first WordPress news blogger. He's written books. But in 2026 Malcolm isn't writing 5,000 word blog posts by himself any more. He's now the conductor, and AI is the orchestra.

Who can edit posts on your WordPress site? 1. The person who wrote the post 2. Administrators or Editors That's it. Those are normally the only two options in WordPress. What happens if you want advanced options? For example ...

In the next release of MetaSlider, we're working on better options for vertical slideshows. We find that people really like vertical for mobile displays. It feels natural to flick through with these slides with your thumb. Make your WordPress site feel like IG or TikTok.

A couple of years ago, there was a whole new approach to translating WordPress plugins. Do I know anyone who has tried to implement the new .l10n.php translation files in plugin? This approach would replace the .mo and .po files with .l10n.php files. make.wordpress.org/core/2024/02...

We ran into a big Stripe issue today. Some Easy Digital Downloads accounts had missing data. This was on one of our smaller plugin sites so it was easier to miss. After digging in, we found that Stripe's events were often being blocked with a 403 error message.

Can you use AI to help write a book? Malcolm Peralty has been writing with WordPress for over 20 years. Malcolm's also an author and he tells us about his experience writing a book while relying heaving on AI tools. Would he do it again?

Most publishers have one-off posts, but also end up writing series of stories: - Investigations on a topic - Reviews of each episode of a TV show - Recipes from a particular cuisine - Game reports from a team's season Doing this in WordPress? You'll love PublishPress Series

Chris Reynolds has been in the WordPress community for close to 20 years. He has a new podcast called "Community + Code" that focuses on the people building our open source software. I got to be on the latest episode 😁 🎙️ communitycode.dev/episodes/epi...

"Google Tag Manager can be a nightmare to set up and a big pain in the butt." @derekashauer.bsky.social doesn't mess around in describing his experience setting up Tag Manager on WordPress sites. It probably got the same UI designers who worked on Google Analytics 4 😜

Unpopular opinion: there are areas where the WordPress community could immediately lean heavily into AI. For example, why not open the door to AI-generated translations? We could have every WordPress plugin and theme available in the world's 100 most popular languages.

This is a nice touch with the new real-time collaboration feature in WordPress 7.0. At the top of the screen is a list of all the users editing the post. If you click a name, you'll be take to exactly what the user is working on. This feature and the video are courtesy of Max Schmeling

How do people drive paid traffic to WordPress sites? @derekashauer.bsky.social helps people optimize their ads with conversion tracking and his answer is "Google and Meta". Any other sources of paid leads are far behind.

Looks like the delay in WordPress 7.0 is now confirmed and it's probably the right call. A lot of changes are still going on in to get 7.0 ready.

What are alternatives to Google Analytics for WordPress users? Google Analytics 4 is hard to use. It's not privacy-friendly. @derekashauer.bsky.social runs Conversion Bridge which can connect your WordPress site to over 20 different analytics platforms. Which ones does he recommend?

Do you have a list of words that you don't allow in WordPress posts? - Over-used words - Rude words - Common mis-spellings - Rival company or product names

IMHO, it seems pretty likely that the WordPress 7.0 release will get moved back from April 9. This release is really now big and feature-packed, so there's a lot of edges to smooth off. Done right is better than done fast ✅

Without looking, can you guess the most popular non-English language used for WordPress sites?

Are any of you distributing AI-generated translations for your free plugins? With Pro plugins you can distribute them from your site. But the WordPress Ployglots team won't accept AI translations yet. Has anyone found a workaround (short of adding the files to your plugin)?

If you're building with the WordPress block editor, you're faced with some key decisions around the user interface. Where do you put all your configuration options? Here are the 3 common choices:

If you want to control access to single WordPress posts or pages, we've got a big update for you. - Control who can edit each post - Control who can view each post - Control who can add terms to a post - Control who can view or edit posts with a specific Tag or Category

Do you need to lock down WordPress posts so only a few people can edit or view them? We're about to make that super-easy with the PublishPress Permissions plugin. With one click you can either enable or block access to any user or user role:

WordPress 7.0 will absolutely, 100% get the new Google Docs-style editing. Authors will be able to work together in real time on a post. The discussion now is around whether it's going to be enabled by default. It's not unusual for such a major new feature to be opt-in at first.

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.