DEV: Let’s Git This Bread

Welcome to DEV.
This ain’t your grandma’s newsletter… unless she codes in WordPress, of course. (In which case, hi Grandma! 👵🏼)
Buckle up for the final fortnightly round-up of the year, bringing you the latest tools, events, updates and cool stuff built by smart people.

Stick around to the end to see a very good name for a snow plow.

In today’s edition:

• Your nudge to stop “thinking about speaking someday” and actually submit a WordCamp talk.
• 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 Presses: What’s New?

Okay, hear me out: this meme is funny, but it’s also a genuinely healthy way to think about New Year’s resolutions.

You don’t need to completely reinvent yourself with one huge, dramatic, life-altering resolution just because the calendar flipped to January. Sometimes the best move is much simpler: fix a bunch of small things and get a little better overall.

When software release notes say “various bug fixes and improvements,” you know what that really means. A bunch of small issues were cleaned up. Stability, efficiency, and quality were quietly improved. Some code probably got refactored. Nothing headline-worthy, it just runs better now.

If you approach your habits the same way, it’s a far more realistic (and sustainable) path to growth that doesn’t require a vision board meltdown.

So instead of going full “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.
• Pick 1–3 small fixes per month, max. Make them specific and trackable: “add a 10-minute walk after lunch,” not just “get healthier.”
• Ship improvements, not perfection. If a habit helps even a little, it counts.
• Keep a running changelog of what works and what doesn’t.
• If a habit doesn’t stick, get curious instead of ashamed. It’s not a failure, it’s just a fix that didn’t hold under stress.

If your year ends with more predictable routines, less background stress, and faster recovery after bad weeks? That’s a major upgrade worth shipping, even if nothing looks flashy from the outside.

Honestly, the only resolution you really need is this:
“I’ll keep noticing what isn’t working, and gently improve it.”

After all, you’re running a long-lived system that deserves thoughtful maintenance.

Now, let’s dive into what’s new in WordPress as we head into 2026, starting with some opportunities to level up your skills and visibility.

Here’s Your Chance to Upgrade to “WordCamp Speaker”

If “speak at a WordCamp someday” has been sitting on your personal backlog of “various fixes and improvements”, consider this your nudge. 🎤

The Call for Speakers for WordCamp Europe 2026 is officially open!

It’s happening June 4-6, 2026 in Kraków, Poland, and you’ve got until January 31, 2026 to throw your virtual hat in the ring.

You don’t need to be a household WordPress 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 talk, a quick to-the-point 10 minute lightning talk, or an in-depth workshop to get into the nitty-gritty of your chosen subject.

👉 Full details here

(Also open: the Call for Sponsors, if your company wants to support the event and be part of the magic.)

And if the thought of public speaking makes your palms sweat just a little, you’re not alone. It’s not easy to get up in front of a crowd and express your ideas! Fortunately, there’s a new community founded by Jill Binder called Speak Tech Confidently, designed to help folks get more comfortable speaking in tech spaces, with plenty of practical guidance on creating great content and speaking with more clarity and confidence.

👉 Level up your public speaking skills here

Future You on a WordCamp stage might be closer than you think. Even submitting a talk proposal is a great way to level up your courage, so why not go for it?

Troy Rolls Into WordPress Plugin Distribution

If you’ve ever thought “I love WordPress, but plugin distribution feels a bit… centralized,” this one’s for you.

A new open-source project called Troy has launched, offering developers a way to distribute and update plugins independently of the WordPress.org plugin directory.

Troy was created by Sybre Waaijer, the developer behind The SEO Framework, and the idea is simple but significant: give plugin authors more control over how their plugins are hosted, updated, and delivered, without relying on WordPress.org as the gatekeeper.

At a high level, Troy lets you:

• 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 can still feel native inside WordPress… just without having to pass through the main gates.

This isn’t a replacement for WordPress.org (and probably won’t be for most plugins), but it is an interesting alternative for:

• commercial or client-only plugins
• niche tools with smaller audiences
• developers who want fewer policy constraints
• folks thinking seriously about long-term plugin ownership and independence

As you might expect, it’s already sparked some healthy debate around trust, security, discoverability, and what decentralization should look like in the WordPress ecosystem. And if nothing else, it’s a reminder that sometimes, thinking outside the walls can open new doors.

👉 Read more about Troy
👉 Explore 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 bring three major releases, strategically timed to coincide with flagship events: WordCamp Asia, WordCamp USA, and State of the Word.

Meanwhile, a maintenance release for 6.9 is likely to drop in January, fixing post-release bugs and smoothing out any rough edges. (6.9 has been downloaded over 13 million times as I write this!)

Plans for The Next Big Glow-Up

Matias Ventura shared some of the big-ticket items being explored for 7.0, including:

• More collaboration features, so teams can work together more seamlessly
• Notes improvements are planned, adding even more juice to this new feature
• An admin area refresh that’ll give a more modern look and feel to the place where we spend a lot of time
• Customizable keyboard shortcuts for the hyper-productivity nerds
• Block API validation levels, so your blocks behave exactly how you expect

👉 Full planning details here: WordPress 7.0 Planning

👉 And the proposed release schedule: 2026 WordPress Release Calendar

It’s shaping up to be another year of steady improvements. WordPress keeps getting better, one thoughtful fix at a time, powered by love, creativity, and community effort. And if it can, so can you.

Mind Bloggling Facts & Stats

• WordPress is still the most widely used CMS on the web. According to Cloudflare’s 2025 Radar Year in Review, it’s used by 47% of the web’s top 5,000 sites (although that’s a decrease from 53% last year.) (Source)
• Enterprises are locking it down with WordPress, with 2025 State of Enterprise WordPress Survey data revealing that 95% of organisations 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 are accounting for up to 70% of web requests. (Source)

Blogs & Resources You Shouldn’t Miss

What will 2026 bring for WordPress? Matt Medeiros hosts a panel discussion where pros peer into the future and speculate.

Beaver Builder 2.10 has 60+ new templates, so you can pretend you’re a design genius. (Ngl, those Bento Grids look pretty nice.)

Slower sales for WordPress products don’t necessarily mean no demand. Matt Cromwell explains why “remarkable” still matters.

Need the TLDR on what happened in SEO in 2025? Here’s the official Yoast wrap-up.

“Disagreement is a feature. Logical fallacies are the bug.” – Remkus de Vries on how we can argue with each other better.

Wanna load CSS faster than your mom’s Christmas shortbread disappears? Read this.

Who says blogging is dead? Here’s why it’s still worth starting one in 2026.

Coffee Break Distractions

A thought-provoking piece on why creativity’s greatest impact can be felt when designing within project constraints.

Sometimes chubby middle-aged guys just want to get their K-pop dance on, and we’re here for it. 💅🏻

When Typepad shut down, 3,684 blogs dating back to 2005 moved over to WordPress. Here’s the story of the epic migration.

Avoid over-committing yourself this year with this handy “no-as-a-service” excuse generator.

Speaking of over-committing… if, like me, you tell yourself you can do 17 hours of work in one afternoon, you might need this.

Why Jamie Marsland thinks LinkTree is a symptom of something “gone badly wrong.”

Do you know why the Norwegian navy has barcodes on the sides of all their ships?

And finally…

The perfect snow plow name doesn’t exi…

Love this mix of nerdery and nonsense? Forward it to your favorite WordPress weirdo. 💖