Gutenberg Times: WordPress 6.9 Dev Notes, WordCamp Canada talks, Interactivity API — Weekend Edition #349

Hi there,

We are getting close to the WordPress 6.9 release. Below you find links to published Developer notes. You can also wait for the Source of Truth to be published next week to learn about besides developer changes coming to WordPress 6.9.

On a personal note, I had great fun facilitating the first WordPress Meetup in München after an 11-month hiatus. I met the wonderful people who co-founded the meeting back in 2014, the same year I started co-organizing a meetup in Naples. It’s quite a mixed group of bloggers, developers, designers and agencies. I am glad to now have a local meetup to go to every month and learn more about the German WordPress users and businesses. If you don’t have a local WordPress meetup, you might consider starting one. It’s a lot of fun networking with like-minded people.

Yours,
Birgit

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

Gutenberg 22.1 RC1 is now available for testing.

WordPress 6.9 RC1 is now available and it’s time for you, if you haven’t yet, to test your themes, plugins and custom code against the new version. The contributors also published Dev Notes for this release.

The Source of Truth for WordPress 6.9 is in review and on the publishing schedule here for November 18th, 2025. You can take a sneak peek of the draft on Google Doc, in case you need it earlier to comply with any of your publishing deadlines.

State of the Word 2025 will include highlights and demos of the most important features of this release. The event will be livestreamed on YouTube.

Dev notes for WordPress 6.9

More dev notes are available on the Make Core blog.

• Theme.json Border Radius Presets Support in WordPress 6.9.
• Heading Block CSS Specificity Fix in WordPress 6.9
• Interactivity API’s client navigation improvements in WordPress 6.9
• Changes to the Interactivity API in WordPress 6.9
• Preparing the Post Editor for Full iframe Integration
• Block Bindings improvements in WordPress 6.9
• Theme.json Border Radius Presets Support in WordPress 6.9
• DataViews, DataForm, et al. in WordPress 6.9
• Abilities API in WordPress 6.9
• Prettier Emails: Supporting Inline Embedded Images

Dev notes on accessibility updates, frontend performance enhancements, the underlying architecture of the new Notes feature, updates to the HTML API, the new Block Processor, and PHP and UTF_8 supports are still in the works and are expected to be published next week together with the Fieldguide.

I mentioned them before, there are a few tutorials on the WordPress Developer blog about how to use WordPress 6.9 features.

• How WordPress 6.9 gives forms a theme.json makeover
• Styling accordions in WordPress 6.9
• Border radius size presets in WordPress 6.9
• Registering custom social icons in WordPress 6.9

The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #124 – Gutenberg 22.0 and WordPress 6.9 with Ellen Bauer, project lead at Automattic.

The latest monthly roundup post is What’s new for developers? (November 2025) was again stoke full of information. It covers al lot you might already know, but also lesser-known updates, like PHP-only block registration, enhanced Gallery aspect ratios. WordPress Playground gains file browser capabilities; AI team stabilizes core packages implementing server-side Abilities API.

Jonathan Bossenger published an introduction to the WordPress Abilities API that’s coming to WordPress in the next release. You’ll learn what this new Ability will unlock for developers and how to use it in your plugins and themes now.

Block editor-related talks from WordCamp Canada

The team of WordCamp Canada published the recordings of the talks on WordPress TV here is a selections:

Back on the Block: My Reasons for Returning to the Full Site Editor with Joe R Simpson. This interactive presentation explores WordPress’s current state, Full Site Editor capabilities, and emerging features like AI and the Style Guide.

Building for Content Editors: Why Designers and Developers Need To Care More with Jesse Dyck. Block editors offer powerful flexibility but require deliberate curation through guardrails and customization to prevent brand inconsistency, accessibility failures, and editor overwhelm while empowering content teams to work efficiently.

Interactivity API for common DOM interactions with Austin Atkinson. Leveraging WordPress’s Interactivity API to handle typical front-end interactions—like clicks, hovers, form submissions, or dynamic content updates—by directly manipulating the Document Object Model (DOM) rather than relying on separate JavaScript frameworks or libraries.

The Block Developer Cookbook: WCEH 2025 Edition with Ryan Welcher. Expand your block development skills with hands-on guidance and real-world examples.

Plugins, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners

In episode 445 of the WPBuilds podcast, Nathan Wrigley interviews Nick Hamze, a lawyer-turned-Pokemon-card-shop-owner who builds peculiar WordPress blocks using AI. Hamze championed fun over convention, running Automatic’s merch operations before launching Izzy’s Gym. Armed with Telex, he constructs dozens of quirky blocks—dice rollers, glitchy text effects, custom integrations—in minutes. He dismisses distribution concerns, arguing WordPress needs personality restored; creation trumps monetization. Hamze advocates democratizing development: AI enables everyone, not just coders, to build niche solutions.

In his post Breadcrumbs Reimagined. Again., Justin Tadlock announced the update to version 4.0 of his Breadcrumbs block plugin. The update makes previously developer-only features available in the editor, including customizable labels and options for post taxonomy. The public API has been simplified, now offering easier function calls and JSON-LD support for SEO. While the change may affect some users, the plugin now allows for advanced breadcrumb setup without needing coding skills, while still providing robust tools for developers. Check out the full changelog with all the updates.

Andrew Butler, a Content Strategist over at WordPress VIP, reported on the future of collaborative editing and how it’s making teamwork way easier. Think Google Docs-style editing right in WordPress! Now, multiple folks can jump in and edit posts together, seeing each other’s cursors and presence indicators in real time. Plus, those in-line Notes are super handy for providing feedback without having to leave the editor. WordPress VIP tested and implemented what will come to WordPress core in upcoming releases. Anne McCarthy mentioned contributor efforts in her Update on Phase 3: Collaboration efforts (Nov 2025)

Joe Fylan shared via WordPress.com blog, 12 Cool AI-Powered WordPress Blocks Made with Telex, showcasing Automattic’s free browser-based Telex tool that transforms plain-language descriptions into functional WordPress blocks. Featured blocks range from interactive games like Minesweeper and personality quizzes to practical tools like recipe publishers, weather forecasters, and scroll indicators. If you have an idea for block but are not a programmer, you can create, customize, download, and share blocks without coding knowledge, making block development accessible to everyone.

If you are keen to learn how to do some more comprehensive prompting, Check out Tammie Lister‘s site Blocktober.fun where you can look at her collection of blocks and the instructions she gave to the AI.

Jake Spurlock shared an update on his Raptorize plugins to bring it into the block ear: Raptorize It: 15 Years Later, Now With Blocks. “Look, I could tell you it’s about maintaining legacy code or demonstrating modern WordPress development practices. And sure, those are valid reasons. But really, it’s 2025 and the world still needs more velociraptors on websites. Some traditions are worth preserving.”, he wrote. You can see it in action on my other site. Switch on sound for the full experience.

New in the WordPress Plugin repository: Any Block Carousel Slider by Arthur Ballan, aka Web Lazer, a freelancer from Rennes, France. It stands out as it is implemented with CSS only. A “carousel slider block plugin that instantly converts supported native WordPress blocks (Query Loop/Post Template, Group, Gallery) into a responsive carousel slider without adding a dedicated block or loading a JavaScript library.” Ballan wrote in the description. I tested it with a few images and it’s super fast.

Wes Theron published another short tutorial using WordPress. This time on how to create a custom 404 page, a page that’s displayed when someone comes from a bad or broken link. He walks you through the process of changing the template and also shows a few examples you can use as inspiration.

Themes, Blocks and Tools

Rich Tabor started a new series called WordPress Explorations, “where I’m exploring new, far-out ideas about WordPress”. In his first post, Pages & Layers, Tabor explores a WordPress interface concept addressing user confusion: navigating pages requires leaving the editor entirely. He proposes a persistent sidebar with tabbed navigation between pages and block layers, allowing seamless page switching and creation without context-switching.

As a follow-up to his post on styling an accordion block, Justin Tadlock published Snippet: Schema.org microdata for Accordion block FAQs. It’s a short example of how to add structured data for FAQs via the HTML API in plugin of functions.php.

In his livestream Using every Interactivity API feature in one site: Part 2, Ryan Welcher continues his series on the Interactivity API and his attempt to build something that uses every directive and feature it offers. Part 1 is also available on YouTube.

Questions? Suggestions? Ideas?
Don’t hesitate to send them via email or
send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.

For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog,
send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com