The WordPress 6.9 release cycle has been in full swing, and according to its schedule, Release Candidate 1 will happen on November 11, 2025, one day after this post is published. That week is also the time when contributors publish their Developer Notes on the Make Core Blog. You can read them via the Field Guide that is coming out as well. The final release will be on December 2, 2025.
Besides WordPress 6.9 updates, this post also covers updates from Gutenberg 21.9 and 22.0 and the Playground and AI teams. With Gutenberg 22.0, work on the next WordPress release has started, which includes more blocks, Phase 3 real-time collaboration, and admin design foundations.
Table of Contents
State of the Word on December 2, 2025
This year, State of the Word, the event where Matt Mullenweg delivers his annual keynote, will be livestreamed from San Francisco. For the first time, the event will take place on the same day as a major WordPress release on December 2, 2025. Although in-person seating is limited, you can request a ticket should you happen to be in the area.
Screening Plugin updates for security, compatibility and compliance.
The WordPress Plugin Review team announced an update to the Plugin Check Plugin (PCP), which will have a broader impact throughout the WordPress ecosystem. The tool will now screen new plugins as well as subsequent versions of plugins for security, compatibility, and compliance.
Currently, the team evaluates internal information and sends reports to authors as needed. They observe PCP behavior during updates for refinement. After this phase, automated security reports will be emailed to authors right after plugin updates.
With Plugins accounting for 96% of WordPress vulnerabilities in 2024, this increased scrutiny on the WordPress plugin repository submissions will have a huge impact on the health of the entire WordPress ecosystem. And it will make the web a better place.
Updates on planned WordPress 6.9 features
During the WordPress 6.9 release cycle, a better picture emerged as to what would actually make it into the release and what had to be punted to WordPress 7.0
The final list of New Blocks in WordPress 6.9 is:
- Accordion Block
- Time to Read Block
- Term Query Block, together with Term Template, Term Name, and Term Count blocks
- Math Block
- Comments Link and Count Blocks
The enhanced Template Management feature, Content-only editing, and an updated Block Binding UI for external sources have been punted to 7.0. A few issues surfaced during testing sessions that can’t be resolved in the remaining time before the string freeze with Release Candidate 1.
Plugins & Tools
Efficiently find and traverse blocks in a document.
A new Block Processor will be available in WordPress 6.9 to efficiently scan through and manipulate block structure in a lazy and streaming manner. For certain workloads, this should dramatically improve the performance of processing parsing blocks, and more importantly, prevent out-of-memory crashes in the worst cases. Here are a few examples of use cases:
- Checking if a post contains a block of a given type.
- Counting or detecting all the kinds of blocks present in a post.
- Modifying a block of a given kind within a post, not touching any of the other blocks.
- Finding the “wrapper element” surrounding the inner blocks and adding a class name to it.
- Extract sections of a document as blocks, modify it, serialize it back, and replace the original blocks with the new HTML.
DataViews, DataForms, Fields API, and Interactivity API
For the upcoming WordPress 6.9 RC 1 release, you can see draft Dev Notes pop up around GitHub that will make it into the Make Core Blog sometime next week.
For a sneak peek, here are the links to the draft posts on GitHub about the updates to the Fields API, DataViews, and DataForm. These updates have been in the works for many Gutenberg releases. You’ll find all the new functions and options with code examples.
Also on GitHub, you can find a draft dev note about the updates to the Interactivity API since the last major WordPress release.
Template enhancement output buffer now standardized
WordPress now provides a standardized “template enhancement output buffer” for plugin developers, eliminating the need for custom solutions. Activated by a `wp_template_enhancement_output_buffer` filter, this buffer is for enhancements, not critical page functionality. It’s enabled by default for classic themes to optimize CSS by loading and hoisting separate block styles. Developers should use the HTML API, not regex, for manipulation. HTTP headers can be sent even after rendering starts while the output is buffered. (cf. #64126). #43258 (PR#8412)
Real-time synchronization for post metadata
Gutenberg 22.0 introduces real-time synchronization for post meta, enhancing the collaborative editing experience with your custom post meta or footnotes. This includes custom blocks using custom post meta fields as well. To test it, you need to enable the real-time collaboration experiment in the Gutenberg plugin.
New Theme Package for the Admin design
For the new Admin design, contributors started building the foundation. The new theme package in Gutenberg 22.0 includes the new design tokens. This package is also a prerequisite for the new UI components package for Admin development. More information about the ongoing work can be found in this overview issue.
PHP-only Blocks (Experimental)
They are still experimental but worth taking a look at for developers who are not keen on writing Blocks in JavaScript. Now it is possible to register blocks in a PHP-only way. Quoting from the issue: “A pure-PHP registration model would simplify the minimum requirements for block development, making them accessible for a wider developer audience, and help grow the block ecosystem beyond advanced JavaScript usage.” In Gutenberg, since version 21.8, now in 21.9, contributors have also updated the documentation to include php-only blocks. Now you can start giving it a test run.
WordPress Playground
WordPress Playground has been updated with a new Filebrowser and further UI Enhancements. You can now create, edit, and test files directly from your browser—no more zipping and uploading. The UI enhancements include a new Import button to bundle menu times and a button to toggle two panels of the left menu and middle panel from the top toolbar. Also new is a dedicated refresh button to use when you just want to refresh a page within the Playground instance and preserve your current PHP and WordPress state. Another new feature is that you can now give your saved sites more meaningful names.
WordPress Studio with Blueprint support
WordPress Studio, the open-source development platform based on Playground now includes lightweight blueprints to start new sites. Developers can select from three prebuilt blueprints or can create their own, specific to their standard way of building plugins, theme, or bespoke websites.
WordPress Starter Sites available in Playground
Speaking of Blueprints, supporting efforts of teachers who want to teach students to work with WordPress, there are eight new blueprints in the Blueprint Gallery for Personal blogs, Portfolio, Newspaper, NGOs, and e-commerce. Any of the sites should get students started on creating their own projects with Playground.
Themes
Latest Comments can now display full content
The Latest Comments block received a minor update on the way it handles content displayed inside the block. The update in 22.0 replaced the “Display excerpt” toggle with a “Display content” dropdown, providing three options: No content, Excerpt, and Full content.
Aspect ratio control for Gallery Block
Content creators can now set the aspect ratio of all images in a Gallery block via a single drop-down list. Theme developers can control the availability via theme.json. The code snippet shows an example of removing the default choice `defaultAspectRatios` and only offering two choices in the editor. This is available in the Gutenberg plugin v 21.9 and will be in the WordPress 6.9 release.
{
"settings":{
"blocks" {
"core/gallery":{
"dimensions":{
"defaultAspectRatios":false,
"aspectRatios": [
{
"name": "Square - 1:1",
"slug": "square",
"ratio": "1"
},
{
"name": "Wide - 16:9",
"slug": "16-9",
"ratio": "16/9"
}
]
}
}
}
}
UI to control Allowed Blocks in Template and Patterns
If a designer or site owner wanted to restrict the allowed blocks for container blocks, it was only possible through the code editor and manipulating the block markup. With Gutenberg 21.9, there is now a workflow available to restrict the allowed blocks via the Advanced section. This feature is particularly useful in templates and patterns that are available to content creators.
Heading Block CSS Specificity Fix
WordPress 6.9 fixes a specificity issue with the Heading block’s background padding. Previously, padding styles applied to headings with backgrounds were affecting other blocks that use heading elements, such as the Accordion Heading block. This fix ensures that background padding is only applied to actual Heading blocks.
The CSS selector used to apply padding to headings with backgrounds has been made more specific. It now targets `.wp-block-heading.has-background` instead of the less specific approach of targeting heading element tags (h1, h2, etc.) combined with the .has-background class.
New Math Block
With the new Math Block, content creators can now add mathematical formulas in LaTeX syntax to their posts and pages. The LaTeX syntax can also be used together with the inline Math format, reachable from the Block Toolbar. It’s coming to WordPress with the 6.9 release.
New Time to Read Block
In Gutenberg 21.9, the Time to Read block was stabilized and deemed ready for WordPress core. It offers two variations, displaying the post’s Time to Read or displaying the Word Count. The Time to Read variation also offers to display a range of time, like “12 to 15 minutes”, rather than a fixed time unit.
New Breadcrumbs Block
The new Breadcrumbs Block is now available for testing via Gutenberg > Experiments > Blocks: add experimental blocks. The user can control whether the Home link and the Last item in the hierarchy are displayed and change the character of the separator. It also supports all styling options for a text block, color, typography, dimensions, and borders. WordPress users need to wait until WordPress 7.0 to have it available in their Inserter.
Core AI Team
The Core AI team reports that the Abilities API is now implemented on the server side and will come to WordPress 6.9. Dev Notes and tutorial are in the works and should land soon after this post has been published.
The team has also officially released new stable versions of:
This ensures that plugin developers using these packages as dependencies via Composer get the latest features.
Work has also started on the AI Experiments plugin, which aims to be a demonstration of WordPress AI features, combining all the AI Building Blocks into a unified experience.
Resources
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Developer Hours
On November 13, an online workshop on WordPress 6.9 will take place at 10:00 UTC. The event will cover DataViews and the Abilities API. RSVP on Meetup.com.
Developer Blog
In preparation for the next release, the WordPress developer block now lists a tutorial on styling accordions via theme.json, block style variations, and patterns. Another recent post covers how to style form inputs and select elements coming to WordPress.
These follow earlier posts on WordPress 6.9
Make Core Blog
Update on Phase 3: Collaboration efforts (Nov 2025): Phase 3 is centered around fostering seamless collaboration, tying together the user experience, and streamlining the content management flows to improve the way creators and teams work together within WordPress. This post gives you an update on what’s finished, what’s in the works, and what to expect.
Playground Make Blog
Things you might have missed about the Playground project over the past few months. It’s a great roundup post about the amazing work of the Playground team. It mentions the PHP-Wasm changes, updates to the Playground CLI, the JavaScript API, how to use Playground with Playwright, and the performance improvements with OPCache enabled by default. It also covers rumors about missing features compared to traditional WordPress installs, noting that this gap is becoming less significant.
Props to @welcher @greenshady and @psykro for reviews and feedback.
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