DEV: One Does Not Simply Deploy On A Friday

Welcome to DEV, your fortnightly peek into what’s happening in WordPress.

WordPress is always changing. Quietly, constantly, and occasionally all at once.

DEV is where we try to keep up, and bring you the most interesting bits worth your attention.

Stick around to the end to find out what they’re actually singing in the opening sequence of The Lion King…

In today’s edition:

• Plugin submissions are exploding, and the review team is officially outnumbered.
• A zero-setup WordPress that lives entirely in your browser storage.
• WordPress 7.0 is never late. It arrives exactly when it means to.

Hot Off The Presses: What’s New?

So it’s not just me who compulsively presses Ctrl+S 72 times just to make extra, extra, super-duper sure everything is saved?

Yes, I know these days autosave makes this reflex useless. It’s just superstitious by now, like the pigeons that B.F. Skinner trained to superstitiously spin in circles to get food.

But that doesn’t matter. It’s hardwired muscle memory at this point. The fingers of my left hand will continue the endless Ctrl+S twitch until you lower me into my grave.

So, until then, why not Ctrl+S yourself some time and scroll down for a condensed catch-up on what’s new in WordPress?

(Ow… that one hurt. 😂)

WordPress 7.0 Needs a Wee Bit Longer in the Oven

WP 7.0 Release Candidate 1 was scheduled to be released on March 19th, but as the team prepared for the release they realized a few things were slightly half-baked and needed more time.

So, back in the oven it goes for a few more days!

• The timer’s been reset: The release party has been rescheduled for March 24th at 3pm UTC, while the final release date of April 9th remains unchanged.
• The recipe’s slightly changed: Client-side media processing is no longer in this batch of updates – it’ll be included in WordPress 7.1 instead. (It’s still performing too slowly to ship.)
• Real time collaboration is under-cooked: The tests of this new feature so far has contributors doubting whether it’s ready to serve up.
• The serving size is still a bit too large: The current nightly build is around 60MB uncompressed, which is gluttonous compared to WordPress 6.9.4 at 27MB, so the team’s working on portion control.

In the meantime, if you want to sneak a taste, WordPress 7.0 Beta 5 is ready for download and testing.

👉 Read the official delay announcement here.

My.WordPress.net: Your Little Corner of… Not the Web

Brandon Payton has created something pretty interesting: a private workspace that “lowers the barrier to getting started with WordPress to almost nothing.”

My.WordPress.net is built on WordPress playground and runs directly in your browser’s local storage, existing only on your device. Not on the web. Not in the cloud. Just… in there. Somewhere between your cached images and that one tab you forgot to close in 2022.

There’s no signup, no email, no domain and no password, all you have to do is open the page and there it is. If you ever want to make the site public, you can always move it to a host – but for now it’ll live persistently in your browser storage.

And it’s not a stripped-down demo either. You can install plugins, switch themes, and customize everything to your heart’s content.

This means you can use it for drafting posts before publishing elsewhere, keeping a personal journal, managing your personal CRM, or just a bit of tinkering around with zero risk of live-site consequences.

Just… uh… remember to download a backup before you clear your browser cookies… okay? 🍪

What are people saying about it?

• Matt Mullenweg is stoked about the strategic vision behind this, predicting a future where everyone gets a domain and a WordPress site alongside their phone number and email
• Sarah Perez points out you can plug in AI assistants and turn it into a searchable personal knowledge base.
• Abdul Rahman from WP Kitchen asked, “How is this different from Playground?” (Answer: it persists by default.)
• Ben Werdmuller calls it “absolutely bonkers” and is wondering how it’ll behave across devices.

What do you think? Innovative and game-changing, or just a more end-user friendly version of Playground? We’d love to hear your thoughts!

👉 Read about it in Brandon’s own words

The Plugins Keep Coming and They Don’t Stop Coming…

The Plugin Team has been busier than a centipede in a toe-counting contest, thanks to a staggering increase in the amount of plugins submitted for review.

To put it into perspective:

• Since October 2025, new submission records are being smashed weekly
• Submissions have quadrupled since 2024
• Every two days now equals a full week of 2024 submissions

In other words: if plugins were rain, we’d all be underwater.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing that dozens of new plugins pop up every time you blink – as long as they are good!

Because as much as we all love installing 17 plugins just to solve one problem, it’s the quality that really matters, not the quantity.

Which brings us to the issue: the team responsible for reviewing and maintaining standards and enforcing guidelines is, understandably, a little overwhelmed.

So they’re recruiting.

If you want to roll up your sleeves and offer your sword/bow/axe/keyboard to the quest, the Plugins Team could really use the extra help! There’s a two-month training period, after which you’ll be unleashed upon the queue and can start helping to keep things (relatively) sane.

👉 Find out more on the Make WordPress blog

👉 Wanna join the WordPress plugins team? Fill this out!

Mind Bloggling Facts & Stats

• Remember Nick Hamze’s “Featured Plugins” experiment we told you about in the last edition? It resulted in 26,000 new installs across the 8 featured plugins – a 622% boost! (Source)
• WordPress Campus Connect has taught more than 4,000 students the wonders of WordPress, across 51 institutions and 28 events around the world. (Source)
• The WordPress Photo Directory now hosts over 33,000 photos, from 2,800+ contributors. For context, that’s roughly the same number of photos I’ve taken of my dog sleeping. (Source)

Blogs & Resources You Shouldn’t Miss

“I don’t have it all figured out. I show up anyway.” Indira Biswas on not waiting until you know everything to start contributing.

Real-time collab: Matt Cromwell “warns against “building Google docs in WordPress.” Is it really what the average user needs?

Jamie Marsland is also wondering: “Are we in WordPress asking the right question?”

As You Like It: ActivityPub now has a feature that lets visitors like and boost your posts directly on your site.

Mania disguised as productivity: Kenneth Reitz on how maintaining an open-source project almost broke his mental health.

Can Google actually find your images and understand what they contain? Here’s a checklist that might help.

The WebDev Studios team actually walks the equality walk, with 2x more women than the industry average. Meet them here!

Coffee Break Distractions

The first 90% of the project is much easier than the second 90%. It’s the third 90% that really gets you.

Veils of Fate: Take a journey through Eldermoor in this WordPress-powered choose-your-own-adventure game.

A dude who seems very chill.

Analytics for Beeper: See who you ghost, who ghosts you, and even your average response time.

This little pupper is having an absolute ball.

I think this is the domain my cat is trying to visit when she walks over my keyboard!

Listen to the scam call where Matt Mullenweg almost gets his Apple Account stolen. 😲 Do you think it was an AI bot?

And finally…

It sounds a lot cooler in Zulu, honestly.

Love this mix of nerdery and nonsense? Share it with your fellowship. 💗