This isn’t your grandma’s newsletter… unless of course she’s coding in WordPress. (In that case: hello grandma! 👵🏼)
Brace yourself for the final biweekly recap of the year, featuring the latest tools, events, updates, and cool stuff built by smart people.
Stick around until the end to see a really good name for a snow plow.
In today’s edition:
- Your push to stop “thinking about ever speaking” and actually submit a WordCamp speech.
- Troy sneaks through the city gates to decentralize plugin distribution.
- The WordPress roadmap for 2026: Releases, timing and the big ideas on the horizon.
Hot off the press: what’s new?
Okay, listen up: This meme is funny, but it’s also a really healthy way to think about New Year’s resolutions.
You don’t have to completely reinvent yourself with one huge, dramatic, life-changing resolution just because the calendar turned to January. Sometimes the best move is much simpler: fix some little things and get a little better overall.
When software release notes say “various bug fixes and improvements,” You know what that really means. A number of minor issues have been resolved. Stability, efficiency and quality were quietly improved. Some code has probably been reworked. Nothing newsworthy, it just works better now.
If you approach your habits the same way, it’s a much more realistic (and sustainable) path to growth that doesn’t require a vision board meltdown.
So instead of going all out “New year, new me,” try this:
- Do a quick bug audit of the friction points in your life, the little things that keep slowing you down.
- Choose a maximum of 1 to 3 minor repairs per month. Make them specific and trackable: “add a 10-minute walk after lunch,” not just “get healthier.”
- Improvements to the ship, not perfection. If a habit helps even a little, it counts.
- Keep an up-to-date changelog of what works and what doesn’t.
- If a habit doesn’t stick, be curious instead of ashamed. It’s not a failure, it’s just a solution that didn’t hold up under stress.
If your year ends with more predictable routines, less background stress and faster recovery from bad weeks? That’s a big upgrade worth shipping, even if nothing looks flashy from the outside.
Honestly, the only resolution you really need is this one:
“I continue to notice what isn’t working and gently improve it.”
After all, you have a system with a long lifespan that deserves careful maintenance.
Now let’s take a look at what’s new in WordPress as we head into 2026, starting with some features to improve your skills and visibility.
This is your chance to upgrade to “WordCamp Speaker”
If “speak at a WordCamp one day” is on your personal backlog of “various fixes and improvements,” consider this your push. 🎤
The Call for speakers for WordCamp Europe 2026 is officially opened!
It takes place from June 4 to 6, 2026 in Krakow, Poland, and you have until January 31, 2026 to throw your virtual hat into the ring.
You don’t have to be a WordPress household name or have a perfectly polished keynote voice. What you DO need is an idea, a perspective, and a willingness to share something useful with the community. You can give a classic 30-minute lecture, a quick to-the-point lightning 10-minute speech, or an in-depth workshop to get to the heart of your chosen topic.
👉 Full details here
(Also opened: the Call for sponsorsif your company wants to support the event and be part of the magic.)
And if the thought of public speaking makes your palms sweat a little, you’re not alone. It’s not easy to stand up in front of a crowd and express your ideas! Luckily, there’s a new community founded by Jill Binder called Speak Tech Confidently, designed to help people feel more comfortable speaking in tech spaces, with plenty of practical guidance on how to create great content and speak with more clarity and confidence.
👉 Improve your public speaking skills here
Future You on a WordCamp stage may be closer than you think. Even submitting an interview proposal is a great way to boost your courage, so why not go for it?
Troy’s role is WordPress plugin distribution
If you ever thought “I love WordPress, but plugin distribution feels a bit…centralized,” this one is for you.
A new open source project called Troy has been launched that gives developers a way to distribute and update plugins independently of the WordPress.org plugin directory.
Troy was created by Sybre Waaijer, the developer behind it The SEO frameworkand the idea is simple but important: give plugin authors more control over how their plugins are hosted, updated, and delivered, without relying on WordPress.org as a gatekeeper.
At a high level, with Troy you can:
- Host your plugin updates yourself
- Push updates directly to sites using standard WordPress update mechanisms
- Keep things open-source, transparent and portable
In other words, your plugin still works feeling natively within WordPress… simply without having to go through the main gates.
This isn’t a replacement for WordPress.org (and probably not for most plugins), but it is is an interesting alternative for:
- commercial or customer plugins
- niche tools with a smaller audience
- developers who want fewer policy restrictions
- people who are seriously thinking about the long-term ownership and independence of plugins
As you might expect, this has already sparked a healthy debate about trust, security, discoverability, and what decentralization should look like in the WordPress ecosystem. And what’s more, it reminds us that thinking outside the walls can sometimes open new doors.
👉 Read more about Troy
👉 Discover the project on GitHub
👉 Download and deploy Troy
New year, new WordPress: what’s coming in 7.0
WordPress 7.0 is on the horizon and the team has some ambitious plans.
Next year will see three major releases, strategically timed to coincide with flagship events: WordCamp Asia, WordCamp USA and State of the Word.
In the meantime, a maintenance release for 6.9 is likely in January, which will fix post-release bugs and smooth out any rough edges. (6.9 has been downloaded more than 13 million times as I write this!)
Planning for the next big glow
Matias Ventura shared some key items being explored for 7.0, including:
- More collaboration featuresso teams can work together seamlessly
- Notes: Improvements are plannedgiving this new feature even more power
- A renewal of the management area that gives a more modern look to the place where we spend time a lot of of time
- Customizable keyboard shortcuts for the hyper-productivity nerds
- Block API validation levelsso that your blocks behave exactly as you expect
👉 Full schedule details here: WordPress 7.0 Scheduling
👉 And the proposed release schedule: WordPress release calendar 2026
It will be another year of steady improvements. WordPress keeps getting better, one thoughtful solution at a time, powered by love, creativity, and community effort. And if it’s possible, you can do it too.
Mind Blogging Facts and Statistics
- WordPress is still the most used CMS on the internet. According to Cloudflare’s Radar Year in Review 2025, it’s used by 47% of the top 5,000 sites on the web (although that’s down from 53% last year.) (Source)
- Businesses are closing in on WordPress, with the 2025 State of Enterprise WordPress Survey data showing that 95% of organizations plan to stick with it long-term. (Source)
- Knock-knock. Who’s there? Probably a robot. WP Engine’s 2025 Website Traffic Report shows that non-human requests make up up to 70% of web requests. (Source)
Blogs and resources not to be missed
What will 2026 bring for WordPress? Matt Medeiros hosts a panel discussion attended by professionals Look into the future and speculate.
Beaver Builder 2.10 has 60+ new templatesso you can pretend you’re a design genius. (Ngl, those Bento Grids look pretty nice.)
Slower sales for WordPress products don’t necessarily don’t mean a question. Matt Cromwell explains why “remarkable” still matters.
Do you need the TLDR on what happened in SEO in 2025? Here is the official Yoast wrap-up.
“Disagreement is a feature. Logical fallacies are the bug.” – Remkus de Vries op how we can discuss better with each other.
Want to load CSS faster than your mom’s Christmas cookies disappear? Read this.
Who says blogging is dead? Here’s why it’s still worth starting in 2026.
Distraction during the coffee break
A thought-provoking piece on why creativity’s greatest impact can be felt and when designing within project constraints.
Sometimes chubby middle-aged boys just want to get their K-pop dance goingand we are here for it. 💅🏻
When Typepad closed, 3,684 blogs from 2005 switched to WordPress. Here is the story of the epic migration.
Make sure you don’t overcommit this year with this handy tool “no-as-a-service” excuse generator.
Speaking of over-commitment… if, like me, you tell yourself you can do 17 hours of work in one afternoon, Maybe you need this.
Why Jamie Marsland thinks LinkTree is a symptom of something has gone ‘completely wrong’.
Do you know why the Norwegian Navy did that? barcodes on the sides of all their ships?
And finally…
The perfect name for a snow plow does not exist…
Do you like this mix of nerdery and nonsense? Forward it to your favorite WordPress geek. 💖
#DEV #Lets #give #bread