We have the power to bend WordPress to our will. A little (or a lot) of custom code can make the content management system (CMS) do more. The sky’s the limit when it comes to functionality.
That’s quite a magic wand in our pockets. However, it does bring up a few key questions.
Do we go big when building plugins and themes for WordPress? Do we add all the bells and whistles and account for every potential use case? Or do we aim for the bare minimum – just enough to serve our needs?
I prefer the latter approach – start small and adapt as needed. That minimizes bloat and saves on future maintenance. It’s a hard-learned lesson.
The elephant in the room is that our needs tend to change. The plugin that once did the job may no longer do enough, while the theme that helped us achieve one look may not be flexible enough to adapt to a new one.
This is where a modular approach to development is valuable. It’s all about building to suit your current needs while planning for the future. Change is inevitable – so why not account for it now?
Let’s explore this different way to do WordPress development. We’ll cover the basics of what it is, how it looks, and how it benefits your workflow.
First, Consider Your Short-Term Goals
It’s easy to go down a rabbit hole during a development project. The finished plugin or theme might not resemble the idea you started with. We get sidetracked by shiny features and the quest to deliver more than advertised.
Our intent is noble. However, we also complicate our project by straying from the initial plan. Did we build something sustainable? How will we manage the code a year from now?
There’s a danger in going too big, too soon. For one, it can lead to sloppy code and structure. The impacts can be felt in performance and security. You could miss something important while attempting to squeeze more into your project’s timeline.
In addition, half-baked features could be a pain to work with down the road. Poor structure means bolting on additions or (gasp) ripping things apart and starting from scratch.
To avoid this fate, consider your short-term goals. Ask yourself:
What are the minimum requirements for the project?
What features do I need now?
How much time do I have to build this?
How much testing will I need to do?
The idea is to focus on what you need to achieve in the time you have. Anything beyond that can probably wait.
Get Organized to Prepare for the Future
The websites we build will evolve. Clients change their mind or have something new to offer. WordPress and the underlying technology of our sites also move forward.
That impacts our custom plugins and themes. There will likely be new features to add or changes to existing ones. It’s all part of the development lifecycle.
Using a modular approach helps when it’s time for a change. The first step is to get organized. Having a sound structure allows you to build logically and efficiently.
The WordPress developer documentation gives you a head start by outlining plugin and theme structure. Following these guidelines ensures a sustainable start to your project. That’s better than reorganizing a messy jumble of files and code.
For example, here’s the suggested plugin structure:
The ability to pick up where you left off is priceless. If you haven’t worked on that custom plugin for a few years, you might have difficulty remembering what you did and where things are. A well-organized plugin removes some of the guesswork.
Adding comments to your code also helps with organization. You’ll receive a high-five from your future self for documenting what each snippet does. It’s a small thing that makes a real difference.
The better your organizational skills, the easier it will be to maintain your work.
Add Plugin and Theme Features One at a Time
Sure, it would be cool if our plugin could do x, y, and z right out of the box. Perhaps that’s not realistic, given the budget and timeline. We don’t have to forget about those big ideas, though.
The priority is building something that works as intended. It should do what we outlined in our short-term goals. Once that is established, we can plan for those extra goodies.
Think of these features as items on a checklist where you can only do one at a time. Pick one, make it the best you can, and move on. That ensures your focus will be on the task at hand, rather than scrambling to fit puzzle pieces together.
Besides, trying to do all the things at once rarely works out. This is a difficult challenge for solo developers as there’s only so much time in the day. Not to mention those of us working on multiple projects.
Remember, good things take time. That’s why committing to a single task makes sense. Train your focus on one thing and do it well. The result will be improved quality and some mental clarity.
A Better Way to Build for WordPress
Every developer has a preferred workflow. We use our favorite tools and techniques to enhance our WordPress projects.
That individuality is both freeing and a bit troublesome. It’s great to write code how you want and when you want. However, a lack of foresight and organization can complicate things. It could lead to a buggy product that is a pain to maintain.
Starting with a modular approach is the cure for future chaos. Everyone benefits when every part of your plugin or theme has a place and purpose. You’ll love that you can find what you need with minimal effort. Clients and users will love that it works (even if they don’t realize it).
Writing code is challenging enough. The right approach can help you focus on getting it right.
The first Release Candidate (“RC1”) for WordPress 6.8 is ready for download and testing!
This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it’s recommended that you evaluate RC1 on a test server and site.
Reaching this phase of the release cycle is an important milestone. While release candidates are considered ready for release, testing remains crucial to ensure that everything in WordPress 6.8 is the best it can be.
You can test WordPress 6.8 RC1 in four ways:
Plugin
Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a WordPress install. (Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream).
Direct Download
Download the RC1 version (zip) and install it on a WordPress website.
Command Line
Use the following WP-CLI command: wp core update --version=6.8-RC1
WordPress Playground
Use the 6.8 RC1 WordPress Playground instance (available within 35 minutes after the release is ready) to test the software directly in your browser without the need for a separate site or setup.
Get a recap of WordPress 6.8’s highlighted features in the Beta 1 announcement. For more technical information related to issues addressed since Beta 3, you can browse the following links:
WordPress is open source software made possible by a passionate community of people collaborating on and contributing to its development. The resources below outline various ways you can help the world’s most popular open source web platform, regardless of your technical expertise.
Get involved in testing
Testing for issues is critical to ensuring WordPress is performant and stable. It’s also a meaningful way for anyone to contribute. This detailed guide will walk you through testing features in WordPress 6.8. For those new to testing, follow this general testing guide for more details on getting set up.
If you encounter an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums or directly to WordPress Trac if you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report. You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs.
For plugin and theme authors, your products play an integral role in extending the functionality and value of WordPress for all users.
Thanks for continuing to test your themes and plugins with the WordPress 6.8 beta releases. With RC1, you’ll want to conclude your testing and update the “Tested up to” version in your plugin’s readme file to 6.8.
If you find compatibility issues, please post detailed information to the support forum.
swoole 6.0.2
- Added `SwooleThread::yield()`, `SwooleThread::activeCount()`, and `SwooleThread::isAlive()` methods. @matyhtf
- Fixed an issue where using single-thread mode and setting heartbeat in `SWOOLE_THREAD` mode would cause exceptions. @matyhtf
- Fixed a segmentation fault issue after enabling `swoole.enable_fiber_mock`. @NathanFreeman
- Fixed an integer overflow issue in the Redis server. @yannaingtun
- The Redis server currently only supports the `RESP2` protocol. When formatting strings that do not comply with this protocol, an exception will be thrown instead of logging. @matyhtf
protobuf 4.29.4
* See github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/releases/tag/v29.4 for release notes.
The following is drawn from a speech I delivered today at Cooper Union's Great Hall in New York City, where I joined Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman to discuss the future of the American Dream:
What is the American Dream?
In 1931, at the height of the Great Depression, James Truslow Adams first defined the American Dream as
“[...] a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. [...] not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which [everyone] shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position”
I wanted to know what these words meant to us today. I needed to know what parts of the American Dream we all still had in common. I had to make some sense of what was happening to our country. I’ve been writing on my blog since 2004, and on November 7th, I started writing the most difficult piece I have ever written.
I asked so many Americans to tell me what the American Dream personally meant to them, and I wrote it all down.
Later in November, I attended a theater performance of The Outsiders at my son’s public high school - an adaptation of the 1967 novel by S.E. Hinton. All I really knew was the famous “stay gold” line from the 1983 movie. But as I sat there in the audience among my neighbors, watching the complete story acted out in front of me by these teenagers, I slowly realized what "stay gold" meant: sharing the American Dream.
We cannot merely attain the Dream. The dream is incomplete until we share it with our fellow Americans. That act of sharing is the final realization of everything the dream stands for.
Thanks to S.E. Hinton, I finally had a name for my essay, “Stay Gold, America.” I published it on January 7th, with a Pledge to Share the American Dream.
Beyond that, we made many additional one million dollar donations to reinforce our technical infrastructure in America – Wikipedia, The Internet Archive, The Common Crawl Foundation, Let’s Encrypt, pioneering independent internet journalism, and several other crucial open source software infrastructure projects that power much of the world today.
I encourage every American to contribute soon, however you can, to organizations you feel are effectively helping those most currently in need.
But short term fixes are not enough.
The Pledge To Share The American Dream requires a much more ambitious second act – deeper, long term changes that will take decades. Over the next five years, my family pledges half our remaining wealth to plant a seed toward foundational long term efforts ensuring that all Americans continue to have the same fair access to the American Dream.
Let me tell you about my own path to the American Dream. It was rocky. My parents were born into deep poverty in Mercer County, West Virginia, and Beaufort County, North Carolina. Our family eventually clawed our way to the bottom of the middle class in Virginia.
I won’t dwell on it, but every family has their own problems. We did not remain middle class for long. But through all this, my parents got the most important thing right: they loved me openly and unconditionally. That is everything. It’s the only reason I am standing here in front of you today.
With my family’s support, I managed to achieve a solid public education in Chesterfield County, Virginia, and had the incredible privilege of an affordable state education at the University of Virginia. This is a college uniquely rooted in the beliefs of one of the most prominent Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson. He was a living paradox. A man of profound ideals and yet flawed – trapped in the values of his time and place.
Still, he wrote “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” at the top of the Declaration of Independence. These words were, and still are, revolutionary. They define our fundamental shared American values, although we have not always lived up to them. The American Dream isn’t about us succeeding, alone, by ourselves, but about connecting with each other and succeeding together as Americans.
I’ve been concerned about wealth concentration in America ever since I watched a 2012 video by politizane illustrating just how extreme wealth concentration already was.
I had no idea how close we were to the American Gilded Age from the late 1800s. This period was given a name in the 1920s by historians referencing Mark Twain’s 1873 novel, The Gilded Age, A Tale of Today.
During this time, labor strikes often turned violent, with the Homestead Strike of 1892 resulting in deadly confrontations between workers and Pinkerton guards hired by factory owners. Rapid industrialization created hazardous working conditions in factories, mines, and railroads, where thousands died due to insufficient safety regulations and employers who prioritized profit over worker welfare.
In January 2025, while I was still writing “Stay Gold, America”, we entered the period of greatest wealth concentration in the entirety of American history. As of 2021, the top 1% of households controlled 32% of all wealth, while the bottom 50% only have 2.6%. It's difficult to find more recent data, but wealth concentration has only intensified in the last four years.
We can no longer say “Gilded Age”.
We must now say “The First Gilded Age”.
Today, in our second Gilded Age, more and more people find their path to the American Dream blocked. When Americans face unaffordable education, lack of accessible healthcare, or lack affordable housing, they aren't just disadvantaged – they're trapped, often burdened by massive debt. They have no stable foundation to build their lives. They watch desperately, working as hard as they can, while life simply passes them by, without even the freedom to choose their own lives.
They don't have time to build a career. They don't have time to learn, to improve. They don't get to start a business. They can’t choose where their kids will grow up, or whether to have children at all, because they can’t afford to. Here in the land of opportunity, the pursuit of happiness has become an endless task for too many.
We are denying people any real chance of achieving the dream that we promised them – that we promised the entire world – when we founded this nation. It is such a profound betrayal of everything we ever dreamed about. Without a stable foundation to build a life on, our fellow Americans cannot even pursue the American Dream, much less achieve it.
I ask you this: as an American, what is the purpose of a dream left unshared with so many for so long? What’s happening to our dream? Are we really willing to let go of our values so easily? We’re Americans. We fight for our values, the values embodied in our dream, the ones we founded this country on.
Why aren’t we sharing the American Dream?
Why aren’t we giving everyone a fair chance at Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness by providing them the fundamentals they need to get there?
The Dream worked for me, decades ago, and I deeply believe that the American Dream can still work for everyone – if we ensure every American has the same fair chance we did. The American Dream was never about a few people being extraordinarily wealthy. It’s about everyone having an equal chance to succeed and pursue their dreams – their own happiness. It belongs to them. I think we owe them at least that. I think we owe ourselves at least that.
What can we do about this? There are no easy answers. I can’t even pretend to have the answer, because there isn’t any one answer to give. Nothing worth doing is ever that simple. But I can tell you this: all the studies and all the data I’ve looked at have strongly pointed to one foundational thing we can do here in America over the next five years.
Natalie Foster, co-founder of the Economic Security Project, makes a powerful case for the idea that, with all this concentrated wealth, we can offer a Guaranteed Minimum Income in the poorest areas of this country – the areas of most need, where money goes the farthest – to unlock vast amounts of untapped American potential.
This isn’t a new idea. We’ve been doing this a while now in different forms, but we never called it Guaranteed Minimum Income.
In 1797, Thomas Paine proposed a retirement pension funded by estate taxes. It didn’t go anywhere, but it planted a seed. Much later we implemented the Social Security Act in 1935 . The economic chaos of the Great Depression coupled with the inability of private philanthropy to provide economic security inspired Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal government programs. The most popular and effective program to emerge from this era was Social Security, providing a guaranteed income for retirees. Before Social Security, half of seniors lived in poverty. Today only 10% of seniors live in poverty.
In his 1967 book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community, Martin Luther King Jr made the moral case for a form of UBI, Universal Basic Income. King believed that economic insecurity was at the root of all inequality. He stated that a guaranteed income — direct cash disbursements — was the simplest and best way to fight poverty.
In 1972, Congress established the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program, providing direct cash assistance to low-income elderly, blind, and disabled individuals with little or no income. This cash can be used for food, housing, and medical expenses, the essentials for financial stability. As of January, 2025, over 7.3 million people receive SSI benefits.
In 1975, Congress passed the Tax Reduction Act, establishing the Earned Income Tax Credit. This tax credit benefits working-class parents with children, encouraging work by increasing the income of low-income workers. In 2023, it lifted about 6.4 million people out of poverty, including 3.4 million children. According to the Census Bureau, it is the second most effective anti-poverty tool after Social Security.
In 2019, directly inspired by King, mayor Michael Tubbs – at age 26, one of the youngest mayors in American history – launched the $3 million Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration. It provided 125 residents with $500 per month in unconditional cash payments for two years. The program found that recipients experienced improved financial stability, increased full-time employment, and enhanced well-being.
In my “Stay Gold, America” blog post, I referenced the Robert Frost "Stay Gold" poem and S.E. Hinton's famous famous novel The Outsiders, urging us to retain our youthful ideals as we grow older. Ideals embodied in the American Dream.
Which brings us to another Robert Frost poem, the Road Not Taken. Our proposal to ensure access to the American Dream is to follow the path less travelled by: Guaranteed Minimum Income. GMI is a simpler, more practical, more scalable plan to directly address the root of economic insecurity with minimum bureaucracy.
We are partnering with GiveDirectly, who oversaw the most GMI studies in the United States, and OpenResearch, who just completed the largest, most detailed GMI study ever conducted in this country in 2023. We are working together to launch a new Guaranteed Minimum Income initiative in rural American communities.
Network effects within communities explain why equality of opportunity is so effective, and why a shared American Dream is the most powerful dream of all. The potential of the American Dream becomes vastly greater as more people have access to it, because they share it.
They share it with their families, their friends, and their neighbors. The groundbreaking, massive 2023 OpenResearch UBI study data showed that when you give money to the poorest among us, they consistently go outof their way to share that money with others in desperate need.
The power of opportunity is not in what it can do for one person, but how it connects and strengthens bonds between people. When you empower a couple, you allow them to build a family. When you empower families, you allow them to build a community. When you guarantee fundamentals, you're providing a foundation for those connections to grow and thrive. This is the incredible power and value of community. That is what we are investing in – each other.
A system where there are no guarantees creates conflict. It creates inequality. A massive concentration of wealth in so few hands weakens connections between us and prevents new ones. America began as a place of connection. Millions of us came together to build this nation, not individually, but together. Equality is connection, and connection is more valuable than any product any company will ever sell you.
Why focus on rural communities? There are consistently higher poverty rates in rural counties, with fewer job opportunities, lower wages, and worse access to healthcare and education. It’s not a new problem, either — places like Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta, and American Indian reservations have been stuck in poverty for decades, with some counties like Oglala Lakota, SD (55.8%) and McDowell, WV (37.6%) hitting extreme levels. Meanwhile, urban counties rarely see numbers that high. The data from the US Census and USDA Economic Research Service make it clear: if you’re poor in America, being rural makes it even harder to escape.
Rural areas also offer smaller populations, which is helpful because we need to start small with lots of tightly controlled studies that we can carefully scale and improve on for larger areas. We hope to build a large body of scientific data showing that GMI really does improve the lives, and the communities, of our fellow Americans.
The initial plan is to target a few counties that I have a personal connection to, and are still currently in poverty, decades later:
My father was born in Mercer County, West Virginia, where the collapse of coal mining left good people struggling to survive. Their living and their way of life is now all but gone, and good jobs are hard to find.
My mother’s birthplace, Beaufort County, North Carolina, has been hit just as hard, with farming and factory jobs disappearing and families left wondering what’s next.
Our third county is yet to be decided, but will be a community also facing the same systemic, generational obstacles to economic stability and achieving the American Dream.
We will work with existing local groups to coordinate GMI studies where community members choose to enroll. We will conduct outreach and and provide mentorship to these opt-in study participants. It will be teamwork between Americans.
We hope Veterans will play a crucial role in our effort. We plan to work with local communities and veteran-serving organizations to engage veterans to support and execute our GMI programs – the same veterans who served our country with distinction, returning home with exceptional leadership skills and a deep commitment to their communities. Their involvement ensures these programs reflect core American values of self-reliance and community service to fellow Americans.
We'll also partner with established community organizations — churches, civic groups, community colleges, local businesses. These partnerships help integrate our GMI studies with existing support systems, rather than creating new ones.
GiveDirectly and OpenResearch will build on their existing body of work, gathering extensive data from these refined studies. We'll measure employment, entrepreneurship, education, health, and community engagement. We'll conduct regular interviews with participants to understand their experience. How is this working for you? How can we make it better? You tell us. How can we make it better together?
Economic security isn't only about individual well-being – it's the bedrock of democracy. When people aren't constantly worried about feeding themselves, feeding their family, having decent healthcare, having a place to live… we have given them room to breathe. We have given them freedom. The freedom to raise their children, the freedom to start businesses, the freedom to choose where they work, the freedom to volunteer... the freedom to vote.
This isn’t about ideology or government. It’s about us, as Americans, working together to invest in our future – possibly the greatest unlocking of human potential in our entire history. I do not say these things lightly. I’ve seen it work. I’ve looked at all the existing study data. A little bit of money is incredibly transformational for people in poverty – the people who need it the most – the people who cannot live up to their potential because they’re so busy simply trying to survive. Imagine what they could do if we gave them just a little breathing room.
GMI is a long term investment in the future of what America should be, the way we wrote it down in the Declaration of Independence, perhaps incompletely – but our democracy was always meant to be malleable, to change, to adapt, and improve.
I’d like to conclude by mentioning Aaron Swartz. He was a precocious teenage programmer much like myself. Aaron helped develop RSS web feeds, co-founded Reddit, and worked with Creative Commons to create flexible copyright licenses for the common good. He used technology to make information universally accessible to everyone.
Aaron created a system to download public domain court documents from PACER, a government database that charged fees for accessing what he believed should be freely available public information. A few years later, while visiting MIT under their open campus policy and as a research fellow at Harvard, he used MIT's network to download millions of academic articles from JSTOR, another fee-charging online academic journal repository, intending to make this knowledge freely accessible. Since taxpayers had funded much of this research, why shouldn’t that knowledge be freely available to everyone?
What Aaron saw as an act of academic freedom and information equality, authorities viewed as a crime—he was arrested in January 2011 and charged with multiple felonies for what many considered to be nothing more than accessing knowledge that should have been freely available to the public in the first place.
Despite JSTOR declining to pursue charges and MIT eventually calling for leniency, federal prosecutors aggressively pursued felony charges against Aaron with up to 35 years in prison. Facing overwhelming legal pressure and the prospect of being labeled a felon, Aaron took his own life at 26. This sparked widespread criticism of prosecutorial overreach and prompted discussions about open access to information. Deservedly so. Eight days later, in this very hall, there was a standing room only memorial service praising Aaron for his commitment to the public good.
Aaron pursued what was right for we, the people. He chose to build the public good despite knowing there would be risks. He chose to be an activist. I think we should all choose to be activists, to be brave, to stand up for our defining American principles.
There are two things I ask of you today.
Visit givedirectly.org/rural-us where we'll be documenting our journey and findings from the initial three GMI rural county studies. Let’s find out together how guaranteed minimum income can transform American lives.
Talk about Guaranteed Minimum Income in your communities. Meet with your state and local officials. Share the existing study data. Share outcomes. Ask them about conducting GMI studies like ours in your area. We tell ourselves stories about why some people succeed and others don't. Challenge those stories. Economic security is not charity. It is an investment in vast untapped American potential in the poorest areas of this country.
My family is committing 50 million dollars to this endeavor, but imagine if we had even more to share. Imagine how much more we could do, if we build this together, starting today. Decades from now, people will look back and wonder why it took us so long to share our dream of a better, richer, and fuller life with our fellow Americans.
I hope you join us on this grand experiment to share our American Dream. I believe everyone deserves a fair chance at what was promised when we founded this nation: Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of The American Dream.
This beta version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it is recommended you evaluate Beta 3 on a test server and site.
You can test WordPress 6.8 Beta 3 in four ways:
Plugin
Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a WordPress install. (Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream).
Catch up on what’s new in WordPress 6.8: Read the Beta 1 and Beta 2 announcements for details and highlights.
How to test this release
Your help testing the WordPress 6.8 Beta 3 version is key to ensuring everything in the release is the best it can be. While testing the upgrade process is essential, trying out new features is equally important. This detailed guide will walk you through testing features in WordPress 6.8.
If you encounter an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums or directly to WordPress Trac if you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report. You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs.
WordPress 6.8 Beta 3 contains more than 3 Editor updates and fixes since the Beta 2 release, including 16 tickets for WordPress core.
Each beta cycle focuses on bug fixes; more are on the way with your help through testing. You can browse the technical details for all issues addressed since Beta 3 using these links:
imagick 3.8.0RC1
- Fixes:
* Imagick::clutImage(...) now respects the images interpolate method.
* You can now pass null to ImagickDraw::setStrokeDashArray() to reset the dash array.
* Fixed memory leak in ImageKernel
* Fixed compiling against PHP 8.4.
* Fixed various reflection issues related to incorrect arginfo
- Added:
* function Imagick::clutImageWithInterpolate(Imagick $lookup_table, int $pixel_interpolate_method): bool {}
* Constants Imagick::COMPRESSION_BC5, Imagick::COMPRESSION_BC7, Imagick::COMPRESSION_LERC, Imagick::DIRECTION_TOP_TO_BOTTOM, Imagick::ALPHACHANNEL_OFF_IF_OPAQUE
This beta version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, you should evaluate Beta 2 on a test server and site.
You can test WordPress 6.8 Beta 2 in four ways:
Plugin
Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a WordPress install. (Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream.)
Your help testing the WordPress 6.8 Beta 2 version is key to ensuring everything in the release is the best it can be. While testing the upgrade process is essential, trying out new features is equally important. This detailed guide will walk you through testing features in WordPress 6.8.
If you encounter an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums or directly to WordPress Trac if you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report. You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs.
WordPress 6.8 Beta 2 contains more than 14 Editor updates and fixes since the Beta 1 release, including 21 tickets for WordPress core.
Each beta cycle focuses on bug fixes; more are on the way with your help through testing. You can browse the technical details for all issues addressed since Beta 1 using these links:
A few months ago I wrote about what it means to stay gold — to hold on to the best parts of ourselves, our communities, and the American Dream itself. But staying gold isn’t passive. It takes work. It takes action. It takes hard conversations that ask us to confront where we’ve been, where we are, and who we want to be.
That’s why I’m incredibly honored to be joining Alexander Vindman in giving a talk at the historic Cooper Union Great Hall 14 days from now. I greatly admire the way Colonel Vindman was willing to put everything on the line to defend the ideals of democracy and the American Dream.
The American Dream is, at its core, the promise that hard work, fairness, and opportunity can lead to a better future. But in 2025, that promise feels like a question: How can we build on our dream so that it works for everyone?
Alexander and I will explore this in our joint talk through the lens of democracy, community, and economic mobility. We come from very different backgrounds, but we strongly share the belief that everyone's American Dream is worth fighting for.
Alexander Vindman has lived many lifetimes of standing up for what's right. He was born in the Soviet Union and immigrated to the U.S. as a child, growing up in Brooklyn before enlisting in the U.S. Army. Over the next 21 years, he served with distinction, earning a Purple Heart for injuries sustained in Iraq and eventually rising to Director of European Affairs for the National Security Council. When asked to choose between looking the other way or upholding the values he swore to protect, he chose correctly. That decision cost him his career but never his integrity. I have a lot to learn about what civic duty truly means from Alex.
I build things on the Internet, like Stack Overflow and Discourse. I write on the internet, on this blog. I've spent years thinking about how people interact online, how communities work (or don't), and how we create digital spaces that encourage fairness, participation, and constructive discourse. Spaces that result in artifacts for the common good, like local parks, where everyone can enjoy them together. Whether you're running a country or running a forum, the same rules seem to apply: people need clear expectations, fair systems, strong boundaries, and a shared sense of purpose.
This is the part of Stay Gold I couldn't tell you about, not yet, because I was working so hard to figure it out. How do you make long-term structural change that creates opportunity for everyone? It is an incredibly complex problem. But if we focus our efforts in a particular area, I believe we can change a lot of things in this country. Maybe not everything, but something foundational to the next part of our history as a country: how to move beyond individual generosity and toward systems that create security, dignity, and possibility for all.
I can't promise easy answers, but what I can promise is an honest, unfiltered conversation about how we move forward, with specifics. Colonel Vindman brings the perspective of someone who embodied American ideals, and I bring the experience of building self-governing digital communities that scale, which turned out to be far more relevant to the future of democracy than I ever would have dreamed possible.
Imagine what we can do if Alex and I work together. Imagine what we could do if we all worked together.
WordPress 6.8 Beta 1 is ready for download and testing!
This beta version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, set up a test environment or a local site to explore the new features.
How to Test WordPress 6.8 Beta 1
You can test this beta release in any of the following ways:
WordPress Beta Tester Plugin
Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a WordPress install. Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream.
The scheduled final release date for WordPress 6.8 is April 15, 2025. Your help testing Beta and RC versions over the next six weeks is vital to ensuring the final release is everything it should be: stable, powerful, and intuitive.
How important is your testing?
Testing for issues is a critical part of developing any software, and it’s a meaningful way for anyone to contribute—whether or not you have experience. Details on what to test in WordPress 6.8 are here.
If you encounter an issue, please share it in the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums. If you are comfortable submitting a reproducible bug report, you can do so via WordPress Trac. You can also check your issue against this list of known bugs.
WordPress 6.8 will include many new features that were previously only available in the Gutenberg plugin. Learn more about Gutenberg updates since WordPress 6.7 in the What’s New in Gutenberg posts for versions19.4, 19.5, 19.6, 19.7, 19.8, 19.9, 20.0, 20.1, 20.2, 20.3, and 20.4.
What’s New in WordPress 6.8 Beta 1
This is a polish release, with user enhancements throughout incorporated into the latest Gutenberg updates. WordPress 6.8 brings a luster and gloss that only a polish release can.
WordPress 6.8 Beta 1 contains over 370 enhancements and 520 bug fixes for the editor, including design improvements, polishing the query loop, and more than 230 tickets for WordPress 6.8 Core. Here’s a glimpse of what’s coming:
Editor improvements
Easier ways to see your options in Data Views, and you can opt to ignore sticky posts in the Query Loop. Plus you’ll find lots of little improvements in the editor!
The Style Book comes to Classic themes
The Style Book now features a structured layout so you can preview site colors, typography, and block styles more easily. You can use the Style Book in classic themes with editor-styles or a theme.json file and includes clearer labels, and you can find them under Appearance > Design.
Support for Speculation browser API
WordPress 6.8 introduces native support for speculative loading, leveraging the Speculation Rules API to improve site performance with near-instant page loads. This feature prefetches or prerenders URLs based on user interactions, such as hovering over links, reducing load times for subsequent pages.
By default, WordPress 6.8 applies a conservative prefetching strategy, balancing performance gains with resource efficiency. Developers can customize speculative loading behavior using new filters, since the API does not include UI-based controls. The existing Speculative Loading feature plugin will adapt to the core implementation, allowing deeper customization. Please test this feature in supported browsers (currently Chrome 108+ and Edge 108+, with more browsers evaluating) and provide feedback on #62503 to help refine its implementation.
Major security boost
WordPress 6.8 will use bcrypt for password hashing, which significantly hardens WordPress. Other hashing is getting hardened, too, throughout the security apparatus. You won’t have to change anything in your daily workflow.
The features included in this first beta may change before the final release of WordPress 6.8, based on what testers like you find.
Caveat on testing 6.8 Beta 1 in versions older than 5.1
Due to an update made to the upgrade routine during this release, (see r59803), any upgrade from versions older than 5.1 will fail. Folks are working to resolve this specific issue, so please hold off on reporting on this while testing the Beta 1 release.
Vulnerability bounty doubles during Beta & Release Candidate
The WordPress community sponsors a monetary reward for reporting new, unreleased security vulnerabilities. This reward doubles during the period between Beta 1 on March 4, 2025 and the final Release Candidate (RC) scheduled for April 15, 2025. Please follow responsible disclosure practices as detailed in the project’s security practices and policies. You can find those on the HackerOne page and in the security white paper.
Just for you: a Beta 1 haiku
March winds shift the tide. Hands unite in open source; WordPress moves ahead.
