Beginner
WordPress 7.1 "Mary Lou" is here
Named for jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams, 7.1 shipped August 19 with responsive style controls, client-side media processing, and the groundwork for real collaboration. WPBeginner's screenshot tour is the quickest way to see what changed in your dashboard.
WordCamp US wraps in Phoenix
More than 1,100 people gathered in Phoenix for four days, with thousands more on the livestream and Matt Mullenweg's closing remarks to cap it off. The official recap is a good pulse-check on where the community's head is right now.
Run a full WordPress site in your browser
WordPress Playground spins up a complete site in the browser with nothing to install, handy for testing plugins, teaching, or trying an idea before it touches a real site. Themeisle covers five practical uses and the limits worth knowing before you lean on it.
Developer
Elementor Pro: 6 million sites, critical RCE
An unauthenticated file upload in Elementor Pro's Forms module can be chained to remote code execution, on an estimated six million sites. If you run Elementor Pro anywhere, updating it is the most urgent thing in this issue.
The miniOrange SSO bug that logged anyone in as admin
A flaw across seven editions of miniOrange's SAML SSO plugin let unauthenticated attackers sign in as an administrator. Patchstack's write-up is less about the bug itself and more about how the risk spread through rebranded copies, which is the part worth learning from.
Pods flaw exposes 100,000 sites to takeover
An unauthenticated privilege escalation in the Pods plugin lets attackers promote themselves to administrator on more than 100,000 sites. Patch it now, then audit your user list for accounts you do not recognize.
A hands-on look at 7.1's Icon Registration API
One of the friendlier additions in 7.1 is a public API for registering and rendering custom SVG icons. The developer blog walks a complete example, a small win if you have been hand-rolling icon markup for years.
Business
GEO is not replacing SEO, it contains it
Marketing leads are being told to split budget between SEO and generative engine optimization, which Ellipsis argues is the wrong framing. Most of the work you already pay for feeds both, and this untangles what really changes.
What's next for WooCommerce
Woo developer advocate Brian Coords walked through new and experimental features, plus a plan to work down the existing bug backlog. Useful if WooCommerce is central to how you or your clients make money.
Why agency growth breaks workflows first
The infrastructure usually holds long after the way you work has stopped scaling. Kinsta looks at the process cracks that show up around thirty-plus client sites, before they turn into outages.
Non-WordPress
Keep robots.txt in sync with your bot policy
Cloudflare's Bot Preference Sync keeps your robots.txt aligned with your rules for search, agent, and training bots, so the two do not drift apart. A small quality-of-life fix for anyone trying to control what AI crawlers may take.
GitHub's postmortem on the August 17 outage
GitHub breaks down what caused the August 17 disruption and the reliability work it is prioritizing next. Worth a read for the incident-response framing even if your stack never touches GitHub.
CSS may finally get a prefix selector
A newly resolved proposal would let you target classes by prefix with a wildcard, like .prefix-*. A small syntax addition that would remove a whole category of brittle selector workarounds.