bbPress: bbPress 2.6.20 is out!

bbPress 2.6.20 is a security and maintenance release. Everyone running bbPress should update. This release strengthens topic and reply password validation and keeps bbPress post shortcodes literal in ordinary WordPress content loops. It also adds a site-wide Forum Status setting with Open, Closed, and Frozen modes. Existing sites remain Open unless that setting is changed. […]

WordCamp Central: WordCamp Jinja 2026 Recap: Three Tracks, Two Days and Creative Currents on the Nile

On 19th and 20th September 2026, the WordPress community gathered at Civil Service College Uganda, a venue close to River Nile, for the fifth edition of WordCamp Jinja. The event brought together more than 300 diverse participants across 2 days and 3 parallel tracks of sessions full of learning, collaboration and connection. In a city […]

Matt: Pushing Standards

We get a lot of flak at WordPress.org for supporting older PHP versions, but an area we’ve always pushed the frontier is in Web Standards, getting websites and browsers evolving together to make the web richer. Ever since I caught the religion from Zeldman, promoting more functionality in the browser has been a life mission. […]

#237 – Robert Abela on WordPress Security and the Battle Against AI Threats

Transcript [00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley. Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, the state of WordPress security in 2026, and the battle against AI threats. […]

Open Channels FM: Rethinking Access and Dependence in Tech From AI Outages to Open Source Lifelines

Who maintains education AI, the backbone of software infrastructure, and a new open source document tool.​ 

Matt: Neal Stephenson Live!

Speaking of sci-fi authors, Automattic is hosting Neal Stephenson for a livestream about his new book soon, please tune in! Neal was a big influence on WordPress! I got hip to him from Tantek. In the source code of billions of pages you’ll see this: <link rel="profile" href="https://gmpg.org/xfn/11"> GMPG is the Global Media Protocols Group, […]

OpenStation Blog: I Deleted 168,000 Lines of Comments. My AI Agent Didn’t Notice

Almost a third of our source code was comments. I deleted all of them and asked an AI agent to build the same features on both versions of the codebase, three times each. The code it wrote was just as good with or without comments. If you use agents on a real codebase and wonder […]

Matt: RIP Eric Binnion

For the next 30 days, a few billion of you will get an extra header in honor of Eric Binnion. The code in Nginx to do this is poetic: add_header X-Remembering "Eric Binnion <https://friendsofericbinnion.wordpress.com/>" always; Our design team will make that less AI and more humane in the coming days. Automattic.com will have a mourning […]

Matt: Board Agent

Automattic is always 5–15 years ahead of other companies, but things happen faster now. I predict other companies will start scrambling to add great writers to their boards, because, well, look at the headlines in AI. United’s board already has Walter Isaacson. Authors are awesome, akin to founders in the startup/tech ecosystem. Public offer to […]

Open Channels FM: Open Channels FM Heading to the Web Summit 2026 in Lisboa

Next month in November, I’ll (Bob) be attending the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal. I have been to conferences in the past that have had attendance up to 15,000, but never one that has over 70,000 attendees. That’s a lot of people. A few months ago I applied for media creditation, unsure of their parameters […]