The Repository

WordPress 7.2 Beta 2 is available for testing, with DataViews and DataForm updates, admin asset and icon changes, client-side media improvements, and a December 8 release date. 🔗

Automattic's About page shows the company has shrunk from 2,065 staff in 2022 to 1,385 today, and its headcount has fallen more each month since July. 🔗

Two weeks after launching the WordPress MCP Adapter as a canonical plugin on WordPress.org, the AI Team has been given the green light to make MCP a default part of WordPress. 🔗

AI agents named WordPress as an option for about half the sites they were asked to build, then didn't use it. When asked to make changes to an existing WordPress site, they completed 79% of tasks without the MCP Adapter, and none with it. 🔗

From WordPress .com to Rocket .net, hosting companies in the WordPress space blocked attacks with mitigations before rolling out patched versions of PHP, with some still patching well into Thursday. 🔗

Beyond Notes and the Secrets API, Beta 1 brings text shadows, form styling, and an On This Day widget that resurfaces posts from the same date in past years. 🔗

A site claiming to publish working exploit code went public hours before PHP's 14:00 UTC patch, and WordPress hosts are reportedly moving to disable a PHP setting in response. 🔗

Inspry's using Pressable MCP to diagnose support tickets before a human opens them, while MAXBURST audits 200-plus sites in under 45 minutes. We look at how they're doing it in this sponsored post. 🔗

Rank Math says several hundred customers downloaded a tampered copy of its PRO plugin during an 11-hour window, and has released a clean version alongside recovery steps. 🔗

An attacker is using UpdraftCentral keys stolen from TeamUpdraft to backdoor WordPress sites, including some never knowingly connected. A fix is out, but TeamUpdraft hasn't explained how the breach happened. 🔗

Seven years after Feature Notifications (originally called WP Notify) was first proposed as a solution for admin nags in WordPress, the project is finally on track for a working release in December. 🔗

Automattic’s new lawyers asked for more time to get up to speed on the case. The judge said no, and now they’re scrambling to question expert witnesses before the first summary judgment deadline. 🔗

Days after six years of accessibility work finally landed in core, Matt Mullenweg ordered it reverted, and Andrea Fercia's WordPress.org account was briefly banned. 🔗

Automattic's servers will include an X-Remembering header in Eric Binnion's honor for 30 days, as colleagues remember his 12 years of work across Jetpack, WordPress.com and Woo. 🔗

I built my new portfolio site with Beaver Builder AI, and it was like briefing a designer who'd known me for years and getting back a site that feels like me. Find out more in this sponsored post. 🔗

The application pitches .wordpress as a space stewarded for the open web, but rules out registrations by anyone outside Automattic and its affiliates. 🔗

Mullenweg’s “Signal with disappearing messages” X post was "admittedly problematic," the judge said, but he couldn’t see enough to find that evidence had been destroyed. 🔗

Automattic has paid every WordPress bug bounty since 2017. Now, WordPress's executive director wants GoDaddy, Newfold Digital, and 30 other big companies in the ecosystem to chip in. 🔗

The official WordPress MCP Adapter plugin already has over 40,000 active installs, less than a week after launching in the WordPress .org plugin directory. 🔗

After real-time collaboration was pulled from WordPress 7.0, contributors are testing a new approach where the server, not users' browsers, merges edits and tracks who made each one. 🔗

Anthropic reported three of the fixes, but Patchstack says this isn't a drop-everything release, with most of the bugs needing a logged-in user or a moderator's click. 🔗

Co-founder Rémy Berda's one-month experiment to build a fictional Weglot competitor from scratch ended with paying customers, and convinced the company it needed to rebuild from the ground up. 🔗

WPConsent turns your WordPress site into a privacy-compliant one without pageview fees or a separate dashboard to log into, writes co-founder Mircea Sandu in this sponsored post. 🔗

WP Engine's lawsuit against Automattic turns two today. From a keynote and an 8% royalty demand to a jury trial that's a year away, here's where it stands and why it's far from over. 🔗

Tech Differently will bring tech into conversation with everything from birding to climate change to the people it leaves out, with talks aimed at making the world a "little bit" better. 🔗

Mullenweg's picks include a former head of Automattic's Special Projects team and an author who commented "we love you and will always support you" on his blog days into the WP Engine fight. 🔗

WordPress Executive Director wants the coalition, which includes Drupal, Joomla!, and TYPO3, to build on its Cyber Resilience Act work and give open source a stronger voice as governments regulate AI. 🔗

Court Filings Reveal WordPress .org's "Mission Control" Dashboard Tracked WP Engine's ACF Pro Installs 🔗 www.therepository.email/court-filing...

The free online event will run October 7–8 with talks on AI, development, design and keeping sites accessible, as organizers grapple with a lull in sponsorship. 🔗

For 42.6% of WordPress pros who'd experienced a security incident, it came to light when someone noticed the site acting strangely, not through a monitoring tool. 🔗

In this sponsored post, learn how to set up automated WhatsApp order notifications for your WooCommerce store. 🔗

Collaborative editing has been deliberately left off the roadmap, and the December release will be livestreamed instead of launched during the State of the Word. 🔗

Seven framed release albums, all gathering dust in McCarthy's closet, are now up for bid, with every dollar going to the nonprofit run by the developer who built WordPress's plugin system. 🔗

A recent Ninth Circuit ruling in a separate case about surgical robots has put WP Engine's monopoly claims back in play, and with them the risk of triple damages for Automattic. 🔗

Attackers built probes from the patch diff and started scanning within hours of a fix for a critical WordPress core vulnerability that security engineer Robert Ressl first reported in July. 🔗

Staff say questions in Slack have gone unanswered and an internal anonymous forum has been shut down. One employee describes anger, frustration, and feeling disrespected. 🔗

A year after withdrawing its first official block theme, WooCommerce says the time it spent improving core blocks and the editor made Purple worth bringing back. 🔗

More than 90 people contributed to WordPress 7.1.1, patching 11 vulnerabilities, including two reported by Anthropic and one by AI pentest firm pwn.ai. 🔗

Described as "an intentionally minimal blog theme that centers on a blank canvas to make your own, with built-in room for creativity," WordPress's next default theme is now available for testing. 🔗