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All the good WordPress stuff, once every two weeks

DEV: The Dark Mode Rises

Welcome to DEV, your fortnightly roundup of WordPress news, clever builds, and the humans (for now) behind it all.

Things are changing fast. We’re here to try to keep up… and help you stay in the loop.

Stick around to the end to see the cutest unboxing video of all time.

In today’s edition:

  • WordPress hands AI the keys. (Don’t worry, it asked first.)
  • Meanwhile in Opposite Land, EmDash is the one obsessed with AI.
  • How we made our Premium Plan even more of a handy toolkit for busy devs.

Hot Off The Presses: What’s New?

Tweet from @netcapgirl:

Is it just me, or is the absolute worst thing for your productivity… having a 2pm meeting?

Your brain refuses to start anything meaningful before it. You’re not quite resting, not quite working, just… buffering.

If you’re in procrastination mode right now, we’ve got you. Scroll on for the latest WordPress updates to fill the void until motivation (hopefully) kicks in.

WordPress Now Lets AI Run Your Site (Kinda)

WordPress has shifted from letting AI read your site… to letting it actually do things.

The change is powered by Model Context Protocol (MCP), which allows AI tools to plug directly into your site and perform 19 new types of tasks, including drafting and publishing posts, building pages, managing and replying to comments, and creating, renaming, and restructuring categories and tags.

As Ana-Maria Stanciuc described, it’s like AI agents used to have a “window” into your site, and now they have a “door.” Knock knock. Who’s there? Not a human anymore!

Don’t worry, you’re still in control:

  • The AI agent checks with you before publishing, creating, updating, or deleting anything
  • New posts default to drafts, so you can catch any wild hallucinations before they go live
  • Even “delete” isn’t forever, you can restore content within 30 days
  • It won’t randomly go rogue and turn your company website into a hobbit fanfic blog (without your approval)

For the average WordPress wrangler juggling dozens of client sites and a half-written blog post from 2022… this could actually help. You can spin up draft posts in seconds, clean up formatting and categorization messes, organize content you were definitely going to sort “later,” and maybe even keep client blogs alive without chasing them for content (again).

But of course, there’s a potential dark side: AI content flooding the web, SEO turning into even more of a battlefield, and readers wondering if a human wrote anything on your site.

Turning your site into a “slop factory” still isn’t a strategy. Low-value content is low-value, even if humans are no longer required to produce it.

Have you experimented with giving an AI agent the keys to your WordPress door? How’s it going… and how much do you trust it? We’d love to hear your take.

EmDash: A New “Spiritual Successor” Just Entered the Chat