What’s Happening With WordPress in 2026?

A technical one this week, so strap in.

WordPress big picture goals

Earlier this week, Mary Hubbard published a post on the Make WordPress blog outlining the project’s goals for 2026. This year, she says, is ‘about momentum.’

“Momentum means building on what’s already working, being clearer about direction, and making it easier for people to participate and move forward. It means taking the energy that already exists in this community and turning it into progress that compounds.

This is my first time sharing big picture goals with the Make community. My aim is to be clear about priorities and direction, while keeping the door wide open for collaboration. WordPress works because contributors show up. 2026 is about making it easier for more people to do exactly that.”

So what does that mean? Hubbard broke it down into several key areas where improvements are planned.

Core Development and WordPress 7.0

This year, WordPress will return to three core releases, which are planned to coincide with major events in the WordPress calendar. WordPress 7.0 with WordCamp Asia for example.

And there’s some exciting stuff coming in 7.0: Real-time co-editing, improved media handling, and enhancements to the Abilities and AI Client APIs aim to ‘unlock powerful new workflows’

For me, the most thrilling additions are the ones that users will immediately benefit from: The ability to style mobile menus in the block editor and the addition of responsive block controls is a big step forward, giving users more control over their mobile and desktop layouts from within the block editor.

AI Everywhere, With Clear Guardrails and Benchmarks

As with absolutely every other organisation these days, WordPress is all-in on AI in 2026. At the moment, the core team is still working on the base AI API, building a solid foundation that developers can hook into to build AI experiences and workflows in the future. It’s early days, so we’ll see where it goes.

Happily, it seems that the WordPress team is keeping this optional, at least for the time being:

“There is no plan for WordPress to automatically use AI or inject it into sites. AI is intended to be optional and opt-in, surfaced through plugins or themes, and always under the control of the site owner.”

Revamping Meetups

This year, apparently, Mary wants to ‘double down on meetups as places of active participation, not passive attendance.’ It’s not clear just yet what that means in practical terms, but I’m certainly in favour of WordPress giving more support and resources to meetups.

A few days after Mary’s post, Juan Hernando followed up with additional information about some of the planned changes coming to meetups in 2026. He re-emphasised the need for active participation, and outlined a plan for expanding meetups to allow attendees to work directly on WordPress issues and connect with Make teams.

Community, Education, and the Contributor Pipeline

This is another area where I’m a little vague on what the actual plans are. Mary outlines some broad goals in her post, but concrete, practical steps to achieve these are a bit thin on the ground at the moment.

I am keen to see how WordPress’s education options develop over the year, as having a clear, officially recognised education and certification pathway for WordPress would be a valuable tool when it comes to the future of the platform.

FAIR project 2026 roadmap

Elsewhere, the FAIR project has published its own 2026 roadmap, with a roundup of the last six months since launch, and some ambitious plans for the upcoming year.

For those who don’t know, FAIR is a project backed by the Linux Foundation, aiming to provide an open-source alternative to WordPress’s plugin directory – so that site owners can essentially choose where they get their updates from, without having to depend on a single provider.

The roadmap is fairly dry stuff, but there are some cool things in the pipeline. The roadmap is based around three key milestones:

Milestone one: FAIR Trust Systems – April 26th

This is focused on building the verification and security infrastructure that the whole project is built on.

Milestone two: Expanding Federation – August 16th

Aims to drastically scale the number of packages indexed, and offer a simple migration path for packages currently hosted in the WordPress.org repository. There will also be a payment and license validation API, to allow site admins to purchase licenses and manage subscriptions from within their WordPress dashboard.

Milestone three: Increased Resilience & Efficiency – December 6th

This milestone is focused on infrastructure scaling and sustainability, preparing for the vast influx of packages the FAIR team expects to have to deal with. By the end of the year, FAIR wants to have re-bundled the top 5,000 to 10,000 legacy WordPress packages, which is quite a goal.