What’s new for developers? (July 2025)

Like so many months in the past, this last one has flown by. And here I am, in a mad rush to make sure to get you the latest development-related news on the usual deadline on the 10th of the month.

While there were not many major features released, there were some nice highlights and improvements over the past few weeks. Personally, I’m having fun with custom Social Icons (read below).

But before you do that: Note that WordPress 6.8.2 is scheduled for release on July 15, 2025, so keep your eye out for that in the coming days.

Since the last edition of What’s new for developers? there has been only one Gutenberg release—version 21.1. So make sure that you’re testing the below changes while at least using that version. And as always, test against WordPress trunk.

Table of Contents

Highlights

Phased plugin releases? Maybe

WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg opened a Meta Trac ticket to discuss phased rollouts for plugin releases. The goal would be to allow developers to roll out a release to a random subset of users first to gather feedback before fully releasing to everyone.

This feature could be beneficial to developers who are serving larger audiences with a much wider range of setups where problems may arise. The idea is not unheard of—both Google Play and the Apple App Store have similar features for developers.

Mullenweg closed with the thought that it’d be great to have it ready for WordPress 6.9 alongside other plugin ecosystem enhancements.

Gutenberg 21.1 introduced a long-requested feature for plugin and theme developers: customizable icons for the Social Icons block.

One of the reasons this has been requested so often is that social media is an ever-changing landscape that is hard to conquer. Core already provides a robust set of default icons and services that it supports, but third-party developers can stay on top of user requests and move at a faster clip than WordPress. This is a nice extensibility feature that I’d like to see more of.

I have it on good authority that there is a forthcoming tutorial right here on the Developer Blog that will walk you through all the steps of registering your own icons. But if you can’t wait that long, check out the testing instructions in the pull request on GitHub. It’s just a tiny bit of JavaScript, PHP, and CSS.

Thought: Is it time to reevaluate this block with this newfound freedom? Is there any reason it couldn’t just be a general-purpose icons block?

No more security updates for WordPress 4.1 – 4.6

Last month, the WordPress Security Team announced the platform would drop security support for WordPress 4.1 – 4.6. The last time such a move was made was in December 2022, when 3.7 – 4.0 was dropped.

It’s now time to move on. According to the latest Security Team announcement, over 99% of all WordPress installations are running WordPress 4.7 and newer. It doesn’t make sense for contributors to expend the resources maintaining extremely outdated versions. Users still on an older version will see a non-dismissible admin notice to upgrade.

As always, remember that only the latest version of WordPress (currently 6.8.1) is officially supported.

Plugins

Taxonomy labels in the post publish panel

Previously, the post publish panel incorrectly displayed a hardcoded “Tags” label for any custom taxonomy. A recent bug fix uses the correct taxonomy-registered label.

Interactivity API updates

Several updates to the Interactivity API landed, bringing nice improvements, primarily, to the API’s router. Dynamic region rendering with attachTo now allows overlays and other elements to appear only when needed. Styles and script modules are also reliably managed during client-side navigation, ensuring assets load correctly when moving between pages.

The API now exports the NavigationOptions and PrefetchOptions types, as well as introduces AsyncAction and TypeYield type helpers.

Documentation updates

Several updates to the Block Editor Handbook landed in the past month:

For the Core Editor Data doc, the isPostSavingLocked selector now includes an example, completing the docs for the lock and unlock post-saving API.
The Commands API includes stylesheet requirements for correct styling.
The Create Block tool now has a section for creating a custom block namespace.
The Block Attributes documentation gained a new section that explains the role attribute and provides examples.
A few bugs, including broken links and a few typos, were also cleaned up.

Playground

Networking is now enabled by default on Playground. This feature was previously disabled by default as a performance optimization, but it was often a frustrating experience when you needed to connect to an external API, such as when installing plugins and themes. This change makes Playground behave much more like a typical WordPress install.

Playground also landed a couple of other big wins in the past month. The first is experimental support for Xdebug, a debugger and profiler tool for PHP. See the latest merged pull requests for this feature:

The second is support for multiple workers in the CLI:

The GitHub pull request was noted last month, but now there is a Make post with a full overview of the new SQLite driver for WordPress. It is currently behind the feature flag but is running on the WordPress Playground website and CLI.

The two Playground-related workshops from WordCamp Europe are also now online:

Themes

Calendar block color fixes

The Calendar block has long been a bit painful to style for theme authors. One change that should make that easier: the text color and <th> and <td> border colors now respect styles defined in theme.json.

There’s still a three-year old ticket that could use some love, extending control over colors and borders. But the current fix is a step in that direction.

Margins removed from Comments Pagination block

In previous versions of Gutenberg and WordPress, blocks nested within the Comments Pagination block (e.g., Comments Next Page, Comments Previous Page, and Comments Page Numbers) had multiple defined margins that were not easily overwritable using theme.json. Previously, you would have to write highly specific CSS to get it to match the theme’s vertical spacing.

The latest change removes all the custom margins because they were unnecessary and, in effect, opens up styling for theme authors.

Navigation Submenu block indicator changes

Initially, a change to submenu item indicators flipped the arrow on submenu expansion. However, that change introduced a visual regression and had to be reverted. There is now another ticket to address this issue.

The progress of this feature, while not yet implemented, is something worth tracking if you build WordPress themes. It may interfere with custom indicator styles or change the expected output.

Form block updates

While the Form block is still in an experimental stage, you should be testing it out while it’s under development. A few theme-related issues were corrected in Gutenberg 21.1:

Global styles no longer unintentionally affect all form elements.
Form block class names are now applied correctly in the editor.
Example previews were added to help visualize forms in the editor.

User and other UI changes

Generally speaking, this is a developer-focused monthly article, but there are often user-facing changes worth keeping in mind as you build projects or support your users and clients. Here is a rundown of some of the more notable changes for users:

The Screencast Embed block variation was removed because a refactor at screencast.com broke existing embeds and removed the existing oEmbed endpoint.
The Avatar block’s performance has been upgraded to optimize user queries, improving load times.
The Video block now prevents duplicate tracks from appearing when editing a video.
The Author, Avatar, Site Logo, and Post Navigation blocks have been refactored to use the ToolsPanel component for a consistent editor experience. This is in line with changes to other blocks in recent Gutenberg releases.

Resources and news

WordCamp US 2025 is just around the corner. The event will take place August 26 – August 29, 2025 with both a contributor and showcase day as well as two full days of sessions and workshops. As usual, there’ll be plenty of sponsor booths and fun swag to snag. Tickets are still on sale, so grab yours as soon as you can if you plan to attend.

In other news, the Developer Blog needs more contributors. Ever wanted to show others how to build cool stuff on top of WordPress? Now is a great time to join. Check out The Developer Blog needs you! for more information.

Props to @areziaal, @psykro, @berislavgrgicak, and @fellyph for notes and feedback on this post.

What’s new for developers? (July 2025)