Welcome to DEV, your monthly WordPress deep dive.

Is it really almost August already? Or are Julying to me?! Well, let’s not waste any more time and get right into it.

Stick around to the end to see a toddler who’s well on her way to a comedy career.

In today’s edition:

• The Classic Block is back in, Unicode emails are out, and Beta 3 is ready for a test drive.
• The only thing hotter than the Arizona sun is the newly-live WCUS schedule. 🔥
• Plus, superb specs, a competition crusher, a Canva-inspired creation and more dev-flavored distractions.

 
Call me old-fashioned, but remember the days when “the team” was just a rubber duck on your desk? 🦆

The average rubber duck:

• Costs less than you spend on tokens.
• Is surprisingly helpful when it comes to solving dev problems.
• Doesn’t hallucinate and leave you vulnerable to slopsquatting.
• Doubles as a cute, nostalgic bath toy. 🛀

I mean… you could bring Claude into the bath with you I guess… but well, that’s when things start to get weird. 👀

Anyway, here’s what’s been happening in the world of WordPress this month!

WordPress 7.1 Beta 3 is now ready to be poked, prodded and played around with.

👉 Official blog post, with a link to download Beta 3

Go ahead, get in there! Test the core features you use the most, or try to push it to its breaking point and see what it can do. Helping out with testing means you’re contributing to making the next release as stable and powerful as possible.

Interesting things to note about 7.1 Beta 3:

• This release has ditched Unicode email support, which would have allowed users to register and log in with non-ASCII addresses. Apparently, it was shelved after flagging security concerns.
• The Classic Block is not going anywhere. It was almost hidden from the inserter by default, but it was brought back by popular demand.
• Beta 3 also contains fixes for more than 71 issues that have popped up since Beta 1. This includes several problems with media uploads, such as GIFs taking forever to upload and photos with EXIF rotation data showing up in the wrong orientation.

Note: Test all you like, but remember this is still a Beta. So, don’t install it on any site that, you know, actually matters. 😬

The schedule for WordCamp US 2026 has finally been announced, so it’s time to start planning which sessions you’re keen to attend, which parties you’ll definitely stay up late for, and where you’re most likely to “accidently” bump into your WordPress hero post-talk. (There they are! Omg. Play it cool! Play it cool!)

The event will take place at the Phoenix Convention Center from August 16th-19th, and sessions are spread across four tracks: AI, Honing Your Skills, Technical WordPress and the new WP101, designed to give noobs a friendly introduction to the basics. There’s more AI-focused sessions this year than ever before, including workshops on AI-assisted coding, AI-powered plugins, agentic development and the legal side of AI adoption.

Some talks that look intriguing include:

• WordPress for the Public Good: Modernizing Civic Websites for Accessibility, Services, and the Open Web by Manny Costa: Who doesn’t love a chance to be able to use their nerdy powers for the benefit of society?
• You’re the Only One at Your Company Who Understands WordPress. Now What? by Jeremy Jones: If you’re the sole WP-wrangler at your organization, you’ll feel seen here, and get some great ideas on how to explain the value of what you do to stakeholders who don’t get it.
• Everything is Fine and Nothing is Good: Design Systems in the Age of AI by Michelle Hunt: Besides having a title that sounds like a song by The Smiths, this talk promises thought-provoking insight into how we approach design in an AI world.

👉 Check out the rest of the schedule here

The event will conclude on August 19th with the release of WordPress 7.1, so get the champagne bottles ready. 🎉

For those of you bold enough to brave the convection oven that is Arizona in August, we salute you. “You’ll be fine! It’s a dry heat!” the locals say. Pack breathable fabrics, stay hydrated, and you’re sure to have a fabulous time. 🌵☀️

By “toys” we mean really clever, fun, and sometimes even useful tools that smart folks in the WordPress world have been building recently.

Here’s a roundup of some of the cool stuff we’ve spotted:

• A comprehensive website audit you can run (or ask your agent to run) against your site to see if it checks all the boxes.
• A tool that keeps an eye on your competition, and comes up with ways you can stay one step ahead.
• A drag-and-drop page builder that makes designing pages as easy as making a birthday invite in Canva.
• A very silly game that parodies the plugin building experience… and is pretty addictive.
• And speaking of silly games, there’s also Super Beaver World, built using Beaver Builder AI.

What nifty side projects have you been working on? We’d love to hear about them.

• WordPress Studio has been souped up with a shiny new Native PHP runtime that makes pages load 30-50% faster. Vroom vroooooommmmmm! (Source)
• When Patchstack says “update immediately,” they mean it. In the days after they disclosed a critical, unauthenticated pre-auth chain in WordPress core, they blocked more than 65,000 exploitation attempts from attackers who weren’t messing around. (Source)
• Pavel Ciorici has noticed a mysterious group of themes that somehow get 5k-20k “active installs” in days, while being downloaded around 20 times per day. Suspicious? He certainly thinks so. (Source)

Your plugin launched. Then it just… sat there. Here’s what to do to make sure it continues to get attention.

Lights, Camera, Admin: Find out how being a theatre kid helped Allie Nimmons become a better WordPress teacher.

“Anyone can generate (AI slop), in infinite quantities, which makes it worth exactly nothing.” – Joost on the future of websites.

The “You Shall Not Pass” period for Protect The Shire’s AI reviewer Gandalf was dropped from 24 hours, to just 6.

Making connections who understand your 3am debugging pain just got easier: The WP World now has a “Friends” feature.

What makes a block theme a block theme? The answer hinges on just one small detail.

Making a WordPress theme accessible is actually more… accessible than you might think. Jessica Lyschik explains.

From half-time browsing to sports betting site spikes: here’s how the World Cup impacted internet traffic.

Duck, Goose, Duck!

In our algorithmic, AI-crazed world, an analog-media-obsessed grassroots music scene feels more punk than ever.

Did this stick enthusiast find Gandalf’s staff while hiking in the French Alps?!

What is loop engineering? Kirupa explains with a helpful dirty dishes analogy.

It’s been 10 years since the infamous Pantheon branded elevator incident. Event sponsorship really has it’s… ups & downs. 😎

Amelia Wattenberger’s piece (with beautiful visuals) on why coding is a proxy for thinking, and what happens when we lose it.

And finally…

Some people are just born with a sense of humor, apparently.

Love this mix of nerdery and nonsense? Share it with your favorite WordPress weirdo. 💗