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WordPress 7.1 is about to enter release candidate phase, and the calendar still points to August 19 for the final version. With most updates confirmed, it’s time for a complete rundown of this feature-packed release.
Hello, I’m Alicia Ireland, and you’re listening to WPpodcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
In this episode, you’ll find the information from July 27 to August 2, 2026.
WordPress 7.1 is about to enter release candidate phase, and the calendar still points to August 19 for the final version. With most updates confirmed, it’s time for a complete rundown of this feature-packed release.
The standout feature of this version is the responsive block styling system. For the first time you can define how a block looks on desktop, tablet, and mobile directly from the editor, without writing a single line of CSS. It works on posts, pages, templates, patterns, and navigation menus, with an approach where styles adapt from large to small screens until you customize them. It’s especially notable for Image, Featured Image, and Cover blocks, where you can now choose a different crop per device. Themes can also define their own breakpoints between screen sizes, to fit their own design better.
Along with this comes the ability to define how a button or menu link looks when you hover over it, click it, or focus on it — all from the editor itself with no coding needed.
The new image editing modal brings free cropping, proportional cropping, flipping, fine rotation, and metadata editing all into one place. For the Cover block, after cropping the background image, the block itself recalculates the overlay color so text stays readable even if the brightness of the cropped area changes.
This adds to the browser-side image processing we mentioned a few weeks ago: all the work of generating different image sizes now happens on your own computer instead of on the server, which notably speeds up uploads and significantly reduces hosting load. It also brings expanded support for iPhone photos in HEIC format, HDR images, AVIF, and automatic GIF-to-video conversion to lighten page weight.
SVG icons, which were a closed set in the previous version, become an open system: any plugin or theme can add its own icons and group them in collections, which appear organized by tabs in the editor’s icon picker, alongside WordPress’s. One change to keep in mind: icons now inherit the color of the surrounding text by default, so if you ever customized an icon’s color with custom CSS, you may need to review it.
The admin bar, the one that appears at the very top, now shows inside the editor by default too, so you never lose quick access to the rest of the WordPress dashboard while editing.
The Playlist block creates audio playlists with visual waveforms, ideal for showing podcast episodes or music tracks directly on a page without depending on external services.
The Tabs block organizes content into tabs that visitors can open, perfect for FAQs or presenting multiple options without overwhelming with a wall of text.
When changing a block’s style, you now see a live preview before applying it. Converting one block to another has been simplified quite a bit: for example, a Group can convert directly to Row or Column without intermediate steps, and pasting an old video link (by shortcode) automatically generates the modern embed block — very useful for anyone maintaining older content.
Six blocks, including Group, Quote, and Post Content, gain the ability to combine a color gradient with a background image at the same time, something that before only worked with custom CSS. The Cover block now lets you restrict which video services can be embedded. The Gallery debuts a button to auto-populate it with all images already uploaded to that same post, without selecting them one by one. And the Image block adds a checkbox to mark an image as purely decorative, so screen readers ignore it without needing to leave the alt text blank by convention.
Notes, the editor’s internal comment system, continue maturing. The most visible update is notes anchored to a specific piece of text rather than the entire block, which can be formatted with bold, italics, or links, mention colleagues with an at-sign, and organize into multiple separate conversation threads within the same block, with a separate section for resolved ones.
A new screen at Appearance > Editor > Identity brings the logo, favicon, title, and site tagline together in one place, with direct editing right there. And the option to apply a local style change to the entire site (with “Apply Globally”) stops being an all-or-nothing action: now a panel opens where you choose exactly which specific changes you want to apply globally and which you prefer to keep just on that block.
Not everything planned makes it in time. Anne McCarthy has shared on her personal blog the process behind setting aside a much-anticipated feature that would have shown in the editor which block styles are inherited from the site’s overall design. Several visual designs were tested and none fully satisfied due to accessibility concerns or too many elements on screen, so the team preferred to postpone it to do it right in the next version rather than ship something half-baked.
The command palette better organizes its results and remembers what you use most often. You can correct a comment thread that’s in the wrong place from its editing screen. Posts without titles now show a content snippet in the list, to distinguish them at a glance. And a new dashboard widget appears, “On This Day,” that reminds you what was published on the same date in previous years.
The most relevant technical change is that the post editor now always runs isolated (inside an iframe), the same as the Site Editor already does; this is mainly relevant for anyone developing custom blocks.
In theme styling territory, the theme.json, there’s quite a bit of activity: support for text shadows, more blocks with standardized text alignment, the possibility for a theme to completely disable per-device block visibility, and a new minimum width option so a block doesn’t shrink too much on narrow screens.
The first piece of WordPress’s future design system also appears, which for now doesn’t change anything visible but is the technical foundation that already lets the Site Editor respect the color scheme chosen in the admin profile, instead of always showing a dark background.
The API for connecting to external services (like AI providers) now accepts application username and password as an alternative to API keys. And the Abilities API, designed for AI tools to interact with WordPress in a structured way, gains several additional control points for developers who need to intercept, limit, or modify those executions.
To close out, two maintenance changes worth noting for those administering servers: jQuery UI updates to the latest stable version, which definitively removes support for Internet Explorer and Edge Legacy, so if you maintain any sites with very old dependencies, it’s a good time to review them.
The WordPress Credits lead for Latin America has shared the first two pilot projects of an effort to make it easier for educational centers to join the WordPress community sustainably, not by inventing new contribution areas but by documenting reusable methodologies.
The first pilot came from a one-time opportunity in Costa Rica: three WordPress Credits students from Fidélitas University designed and taught a complete WordPress and Gutenberg workshop to 40 high school students at the international Patrones Hermosos camp, organized by Tecnológico de Monterrey and MIT. Each participant ended up creating and presenting their own website, with one hundred percent satisfaction, and the entire process, methodology, roles, materials, and checklists have become a replicable PDF guide so any university or local community can set up something similar without starting from scratch.
The second pilot goes a step further and aims to document the entire journey of an educational center from deciding to participate in WordPress Credits until its students make real contributions to WordPress, using the Polyglots team as testing ground. The project is a collaboration with the Costa Rican Spanish Polyglots team to translate WordPress.org into Costa Rican Spanish (es_CR), and the first center joining is the Liceo Experimental Bilingüe José Figueres Ferrer, the first high school in the Americas to join the WordPress Credits program: thirteen students are participating as part of their community service program, leveraging their bilingualism to directly contribute to WordPress localization. If the model works, the idea is to adapt it afterward to other contribution areas beyond Polyglots.
The BuddyPress team has published three versions at once — 14.5.2, 12.7.2, and 11.6.2 — all security and maintenance, so it’s time to update right away. The main fix strengthens the security of activity AJAX handlers, checking that whoever requests an activity item actually has permission to see it before returning it.
Along with that security fix, the version brings two minor improvements: Nouveau now requires “strong” level passwords, and several deprecation warnings have been cleaned up in preparation for PHP 8.4.
And finally, this podcast is distributed under a Creative Commons license as a derivative version of the podcast in Spanish; you can find all the links for more information, and the podcast in other languages, at WPpodcast .org.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
