Make WordPress

The Connectors API is a framework for managing connections to services like AI, anti-spam, etc. It was introduced on March 18, 2026 with WordPress 7.0 at https://make.wordpress.org/core/2026/03/18/introducing-the-connectors-… and the PR at https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/75833. It introduces a new prominent page in your wordpress settings that recommends popular services to you. All other services are behind a link that says "Find more connectors in the plugin directory" and are less visible. See image https://developer.wordpress.org/news/files/2026/03/image-1.jpeg, which is the second image on "What’s new for developers?" at https://developer.wordpress.org/news/2026/03/whats-new-for-developers-…

Currently looking at how I can help with the official WordPress documentation from (https://make.wordpress.org/) here. But I am confused about how it gets documented on who did what.

Warning that this is an, all told, 1GB page (on desktop): https://i.imgur.com/HbMMuzt.png To the author, I highly recommend using WEBP everywhere[0], and never directly using the `full` image size[1]. The GIFs are also killing you, equivalent OGV/MP4 would be tiny. ...It also looks like the site is suffering from a bad WP Super Cache (TTFB of >30s). [0] Lossless reduces by 20%. 99 quality reduces size >60% https://make.wordpress.org/core/2021/06/07/wordpress-5-8-adds-webp-sup… [1] All other sizes get compressed. Use `add_image_size()` to create a bigger size if needed, and the filter `wp_editor_set_quality` fine tunes compression. (Be sure to regenerate thumbnails)

> "it’s a pretty long read... clearly the author did not learn brevity in his coding" Brevity shouldn't be a virtue of coding. The best code is self-documenting code and self-documenting code is rarely brief. To quote Wordpress PHP Coding Standards: In general, readability is more important than cleverness or brevity. https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/best-practices/coding-standar…

Probably worth noting that WP is planning on requiring PHP 7 by the end of 2019 https://make.wordpress.org/core/2018/12/08/updating-the-minimum-php-ve…

The big problem with 5.0 is that it's not actually ready and they are shipping because of Wordcamp. There are 152 open issues that they conveniently allocated 1 to 5.0, 28 to 5.0.1 and the rest to future point releases. https://make.wordpress.org/core/2018/12/06/5-0-gutenberg-status-update… The introduction of Gutenberg is a huge change and yes if you've been following the development, you're probably ready for the major changes but if you weren't following along you're in for a nasty, buggy, surprise.

The best read about Accessibility in Gutenberg is here: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2018/10/18/regarding-accessibility-in-… Accessibility has been thought about from the beginning, and no design happened behind closed doors (it was kicked off and announced at WCUS 2016), but we are doing a fundamentally more complex task with block manipulation. I'm not sure what the best path forward is there. We'll continue to make the block editor friendlier to accommodate accessibility needs, and I also think it's important that WordPress has a variety of ways to post to it, from email, to other apps, to the command line... by supporting as we always have a ton of ways to get content in and out of WordPress it'll allow people to use the interface they enjoy the most.

I actually just committed my first Open Source contribution patch to the next Wordpress release yesterday afternoon - http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/25086 After asking lots of questions, I was pointed to http://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/, which does a pretty decent job outlining the workflow. It helps to read a lot of tickets first to get a feel for what they're fixing - http://core.trac.wordpress.org/report/14 and then find a neglected (but fairly recent) but and chip away at it. It's overwhelming, but I've found a great amount of confidence in just picking a (tiny) bug, fixing it, and watching the process work. Good luck to you!

It probably wouldn't be suitable for a blog or classic CRUD app. The use cases I've heard about are more for education and online editor/IDE. For example: interactive documentation that runs code in the browser with an ephemeral/temporary database, possibly imported from the user's desktop. For teaching programming languages in the browser, with the compiler compiled to WASM, so the student doesn't have to set up a local development environment. Or a database explorer that's a purely static site with no server, neither remote nor directly on user's computer - just virtually in the browser, which is a more secure sandbox. You could have a folder of HTML, CSS, JS that's a full-stack application with client UI and server (theoretically). Further reading: • SQL Databases in the Browser, via WASM: SQLite and DuckDB - https://blog.ouseful.info/2022/02/11/sql-databases-in-the-browser-via-… • Pyodide - https://pyodide.org/en/stable/ - Pyodide is a Python distribution for the browser and Node.js based on WebAssembly. • Client-side WebAssembly WordPress with no server - https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/09/23/client-side-webassembly-wor… • Stackblitz - Instant development environments - https://stackblitz.com

Author here, it is super encouraging to see this trending on HN, thank you for the great discussion, links, and ideas! I hope to change how learning, using, and contributing to WordPress looks like. This writeup explores how WASM WordPress works and why it's useful: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/09/23/client-side-webassembly-wor… Here's a few possible applications: try a theme without affecting your current website, have live themes and plugins demos right in the directory, enable first contributions directly on wordpress.org without any setup steps, learn WordPress in the browser, or replay and debug failed tests right in the CI. Technically most of these things are possible today with a specialized backend. The problem is that it's either expensive and time-consuming to maintain, like a fleet of custom WP instances, or limited, like iframing a preconfigured 3rd party solution. WASM-based solution is open-source, cheap to run, and doesn't seem to have deal-breaking limitations. I wouldn't run production websites on this just yet, as it sometimes crashes in Chrome and the bundle size is 50MB+, but both problems can be solved. Once they are, this will be so much more than just a cool tech demo.

> There is far less separation between data and how it's presented than there ever was with the "classic" editor. This is not correct, surely? Yes, if you're using FSE you're getting a template from that which is more or less a page. FSE replaces the header/footer/sidebar/widget area thing with an editable scheme. That is, on one level, a big chunk of HTML -- but it is stored as a block graph (see below). And as far as I am aware the work has been done to allow it to produce HTML5 semantic tags? There is an insertion point in the FSE template for content from hooks or the loop, which may or may not be returning block graphs. Post content can also now contain loops as created by query blocks, etc. And yeah, Gutenberg stores as HTML internally. But the distinction I am drawing here still holds. The classic model was a blob of post content that was minimally post-processed to expand shortcodes. It didn't attempt to understand the HTML except in a minimal way to figure out if a shortcode should end up in a wrapper tag. The rest of it was sent straight out into the page (after autop). TinyMCE then tried to deal with it, and had to recognise shortcode patterns. That is what I mean by a "blob": most HTML was handled in an unthinking, unprocessed manner. As text. In the Gutenberg era they still do store HTML in post_content (for good reason) but it is in a form that can be serialised and deserialised into blocks -- it is not simply markup; it's a complete serialisation…

WordPress has, of course, the lion's share of MySQL deployments by server count if not by row count. Yes, WordPress isn't the latest and greatest stuff. Yes, it's <bad thing> and <another bad thing>. But such is the curse of the customer base. They upgraded everybody from utf8 to utf8mb4 (excluding some users of ancient versions of MySQL) with their version 4.2. It went live on April 23, 2015. They announced the upgrade at the beginning of April 2015 here. https://make.wordpress.org/core/2015/04/02/the-utf8mb4-upgrade/ There's some interesting stuff in there about the practical difficulties of the upgrade. The biggest issue was, and still is, the need for prefix indexes. With respect to Adam Hooper, his article was stale when it appeared just over a year after the WordPress schema upgrade. Here's right of course. But the biggest user base was well on their way to abandoning utfmb3 by that time.

For what it’s worth, many WordPress devs are using docker solutions anyways these days. For example, core WordPress and Gutenberg (the block editor) are often developed using Docker. You can do it other ways too, but much of the tooling is built around docker anyways. In fact, myself and a few others have spent some time improving the local environment situation with a tool called wp-env [1]. So long as you have docker & node installed, you can install wp-env with npm. Then you can just use “wp-env start” to get a local WordPress instance running. It’s fairly straightforward to configure for basic needs too! No need to understand Apache, SQL, FTP, or even PHP to get it running. All this to say: there are open source solutions to the local dev environment problem even being developed and supported by core WordPress teams. :) 1: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2020/03/03/wp-env-simple-local-environ…

This line of discussion ("Make it so we can pay you $xxK/mo, don't ask for donations.") comes up a lot on HN. Here's what I did: First, I spent four years developing security libraries for PHP developers that can be considered core infrastructure. Random_compat was an API-compatible polyfill of PHP 7's random_bytes() and random_int() functions for PHP 5 projects (and has over 100 million downloads). sodium_compat reimplemented most of libsodium in pure-PHP, and currently powers WordPress's signature verification functions. That's just two examples, I have over a dozen of distinct and useful libraries-- many of which have been adopted into popular frameworks-- that make your software materially more secure. If you're a serious player in the industry and your code base is PHP, you're running my code. Okay, value delivered through open source? Check. All of the above was also published through an LLC rather than just under an individual's name. Then, I began offering the usual HN recommendations (support contracts, especially for EOL versions of PHP for Enterprise Linux customers). I even created a streamlined workflow section on the company website and linked all of our open source projects to it: https://paragonie.com/enterprise To date, the SQL tables that power that section of our website only has test records I created to make sure it was turned on correctly. So I believe this to mean one of two things: 1. There's a missing step that I'm not doing that, once…

> trivial to build The point was it isn't built, where as there's auto completion support for emojis which wouldn't even need that "trivial" software. That's in the matrix's sdk. If it's so trivial, please, build for the IRC community. I use hexchat on my desktop and weechat on the server. Would you mind building me one if it is trivial? > That's irrelevant. You claimed that the simplicity of the IRC protocol was something unobtainable with those features. That's what I am disputing. Fine, I concede. But I'm surprised you're still going for this. I tried out a bunch of different IRC applications and couldn't find search in any. Oh well. > It's precisely about whether it's possible. You claimed that simple protocols for chat were not compatible with the features you listed. My argument was about the ecosystem and the applications and the contributors worked on those applications. You can extend any protocol to worked with other servers and your own extensions to work with your own version of the server code. If IRC protocol is so amazing, then do you have a reason why it is constantly changed? I've seen it adopted to XMPP, Jabber and others. No sane person today will use the default IRC protocol in an application they intend to keep proprietary. Discussing what's possible is a waste of time because any feature can be built given time and effort. The point is how easy and how maintainable/stable. More importantly, is it available now? >I agree that IRC was never…

Regulation would have to start with simple coding standards. Updated yearly. Much like building codes. A project could pick what standards they wanted to adhere to, and then everyone on the project would have to adhere to those standards -- the whole project would be audited by a third-party after the fact for compliance. There are plenty of good, short, concise coding standards to draw from. Especially useful in giving non-technical people the confidence that things were built consistently... if not correctly even. This is about as simple as it gets: * WordPress Coding Standards – Make WordPress Core || https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/best-practices/coding-standar… I'm sure there are others that aren't terrible. I do think having more standards would help, standards defined by the devs on the project. If they get to choose their benchmark, then it's just about consistency of approach. Not a bad thing, right? Currently it's the wild west, and the only thing a dev can do is say, "It's my word against theirs, their code is bad."

The transport is a completely different concern... (though there's also a websocket implementation). They use Yjs: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2026/03/10/real-time-collaboration-in-…

Just tested on my self-hosted WordPress blog and it works without any plugins. WebP support was added to WordPress in 2021 with version 5.8: https://wordpress.org/documentation/wordpress-version/version-5-8/#add… AVIF support in 2024, with v6.5: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/02/23/wordpress-6-5-adds-avif-sup…

No, they were all community members working for free. Check out the bios of the team reps here: https://make.wordpress.org/sustainability/2024/12/13/proposal-sustaina… Here are all the contributors on the GitHub repo, also all volunteers: https://github.com/WordPress/sustainability/graphs/contributors Mullenweg can shut down the team because he has complete control over all the WordPress.org infrastructure.

Slight correction, you can't publish it without suffering enforcement actions [1]. There's no legal consequence for it beyond the confines of the Wordpress ecosystem. I would imagine if it's something unhinged, people are going to publish it anyway as they'll already be distancing themselves from the ecosystem. [1] https://make.wordpress.org/handbook/community-code-of-conduct/#enforce…

Search for Mullenweg's comment, here: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/10/13/fields-api-team-seeking-new…

Wordpress banned forks from the plugin directory a while ago, so they're doing what they ban everyone else from doing. https://make.wordpress.org/plugins/2021/02/16/reminder-forked-premium-…

WordPress.org seems to be used to refer to Matt Mullenweg [1], as he apparently personally owns it, though one of Automattic's lawyers said last week that it is a non-profit that is separate from the WordPress Foundation [2]. The previous Executive Director of WordPress was also an Automattic employee. When they were announced in the role their employment with Automattic also wasn't disclosed [3]. [1] https://www.pluginvulnerabilities.com/2024/10/02/who-or-what-is-wordpr… [2] https://www.pluginvulnerabilities.com/2024/10/03/automattic-is-now-cla… [3] https://make.wordpress.org/updates/2019/01/16/expanding-wordpress-lead…

Fellow Openverse maintainer here. We'd like to implement video search eventually (and 3D models, text, everything!), but for the time being we're prioritising improving image and audio search. You can read about the project's near-term prioritisation on our Make WordPress blog: https://make.wordpress.org/openverse/tag/openverse-priorities/.

Yes, for example WordPress [1], so I think the push for this feature is good. But also will be good a push to move those communities to a self hosted open source products like Zulip [2], Element [3] or Rocket Chat [4]. [1] https://make.wordpress.org/chat/ [2] https://zulip.com [3] https://element.io [4] https://www.rocket.chat

The core team already has plans to do a backend design refresh: https://make.wordpress.org/design/2022/06/13/thinking-through-the-word…

Don't take my word for it: WordPress treated FLoC as a security concern in 2021: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2021/04/18/proposal-treat-floc-as-a-se… A good overview of the context: https://digiday.com/media/we-cant-un-floc-ourselves-googles-cookieless… More detail: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-idea When it comes to Topics, it's essential that there be hands on the wheel at W3C that approach the solidification of e.g. the Topics taxonomy https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/taxonomy_v… from a neutral perspective that takes into account the various ways in which proposed topics could be dangerous, and how strongly to word the specification to prevent it from creeping in increasingly privacy-eroding ways in the future.

They're working on supporting SQLite as a backend: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/12/20/help-us-test-the-sqlite-imp…

When I tried updating my network of 200+ WordPress websites to 8.0, more than 40 websites broke directly. It's a bit better on 8.1 but in no way is WordPress ready for 8.x at this point. PHP 8 is in "beta support" currently, but that's just Core. A lot of plugin developers are lightyears behind it seems: https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/references/php-compatibility-…

For those wondering about the "why", this post details the motivation: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/09/23/client-side-webassembly-wor… Basically for learning/interactive tutorials, trying out something quickly in different PHP versions (which is cumbersome right now), secure and easy demos for themes and plugins.