DEV: Block To The Future

Welcome to DEV, your fortnightly look at the past, present and future of WordPress.

We’ll meet you at Twin Pines Mall at 1:15am to give you the latest developments, smart projects and community updates, to help you speed into your next project with confidence, no flux capacitor required.

Stick around to the end to see a grandpa who insists he doesn’t want a kitty hat.

In today’s edition:

• In Patchstack’s first test, 88% of threats bypassed “secure” hosting defenses. They tried again. Did things improve?
• The Future is Female: The Community Team brings back a super-successful women-led WordPress event initiative.
• Plus, handy tools for bug squashing, 404-dodging, code highlighting and block pattern wrangling.

Hot Off The Presses: What’s New?

Get in, Marty! Where we’re going, we don’t need roadmaps. 🔥

Maybe if you could go back in time and warn your younger self, you wouldn’t have taken that detour to abandon all of your current projects and work on the shiny new thing that caught your attention. After all, there are only so many hours in the day.

But at the same time, sometimes it’s the moments of spontaneous inspiration that lead you to something really great.

So whether you’re working on what you’re “supposed” to be working on, or you’ve branched out into an alternate timeline, you’ve earned yourself a break to catch up on what’s new in WordPress.

P.S. By the way, I’m looking to sell a used Delorean, so let me know if you’re interested. It’s in good shape and has low mileage… it’s only been driven from time to time. 😉

Community Team Brings Back Women-Centric Events For International Women’s Day

Remember last year, when the WordPress Community celebrated International Women’s Day with a push towards hosting more women-centric events around the world?

Well, turns out it was a great success.

Over 25 events were planned as a result, in locations all over the world from Delhi to Madrid to New York City. Women and people of marginalized genders who attended said they felt “welcomed, valued, and encouraged to participate.”

Many of these events took place in communities where women-led formats had not previously existed, and several of the organizers, speakers and volunteers were taking on those roles for the first time. In other words, a huge win for inclusion.

In a post on the Make WordPress Community blog, Junko Nukaga shared that the team is bringing back the initiative again this year, with the aim of creating even more women-focused events in 2026.

This is such a great illustration of the “lead by example” point WP Includes made in their Gender Equality in WordPress Business whitepaper in 2024. Don’t just talk about making WordPress more inclusive – get out there and make it happen!

Can’t wait to see the empowering events this year brings! 🎉

👉 Wanna get the gals together for an event? Here’s how to apply.

Vulnerability Tests Part 2: Patchstack Finds Hosting Still Not So Secure

Last year, Patchstack conducted a limited experiment where they tested 11 vulnerabilities across five different hosting environments, to see if those hosts were really as “secure” as they claimed to be.

The results were, well, worrying to say the least.

88% of attacks resulted in a successful site takeover. 😬

Patchstack wanted to see what would happen if they expanded the scope of the experiment and tried again. Surely everyone has since doubled down on their security, right? Right???

Well, not as much as you’d think. Although the number of exploit attempts blocked increased from 12.8% to 25.89%, version 2 of the experiment still saw roughly 74% of attacks succeed.

WordPress vulnerabilities are, indeed, still a major problem. But, as the report points out, it’s not that hosts don’t care! It’s that the security tools they’re relying on may not be covering them as well as they think they are.

👉 Read the full breakdown here.

A Few Crazy Wild-Eyed Inventions From The Lab

What time is it? Time for another round-up of useful plugins, cool tools and clever projects that just might make your life a little easier.

• A smart little tool with a lot of great uses.
  WPBetterCodeHighlighting is completely free and makes it easy to showcase code snippets on your site.
• Wrangle your patterns.
  Pattern Wrangler helps you manage WordPress block patterns and curate what your client sees in the block editor.
• “Wait a minute Doc. Are you telling me you built a Wayback Machine… out of a Chrome extension?!”
  You’ll never see another 404 with this baby in your browser.
• Don’t let errors in your WordPress code come back to haunt you in the future.
  With Debug Log Manager, you can keep track of them and fix them before they cause you serious headaches.

Mind Bloggling Facts & Stats

• 12,713. That’s how many plugins were reviewed by WordPress Plugins Team last year. That’s a 40.6% increase from the year before. The jump in pace was necessary: the number of submissions sent for review doubled compared to 2024. (Source)
• Speaking of plugins… sales ain’t looking good. A survey by WP Product Talk’s Katie Keith revealed that 80% of plugin companies said their sales were the same or declining in 2025. (Source)
• According to Yoast’s 2025 SEO Wrap-Up, AI Mode and good ol’fashioned organic search results are not too different. 97% of URLs referenced in AI search were also in the top 10 organic results, showing strong traditional SEO still matters. (Source)

Blogs & Resources You Shouldn’t Miss

Release squad, assemble! This tight, focused team, lead by Matías Ventura, is ready to get crackin’ on WordPress 7.0.

It might not be Grays Sports Almanac, but you can bet the CMS chapter of the Web Almanac will set you up for success.

🎶When you wish upon a plugin… 🎶Sabrina Zeidan tested 6 WordPress wishlist plugins, so you don’t have to.

Damnnn… that responsive grid block with set columns is looking 🔥🔥🔥. What’s her secret?!

Open Channels FM: How to make accessibility fun and “brain friendly.”

“I can’t wait to check out the new Playground.” – Things you said when you were 10 that you still say now.

“Humans are just attracted to bad news.” – The Repository’s Rae Morey on why the big stories of 2025 were kind of a bummer.

Coffee Break Distractions

“You mean you have to use your hands? That’s like a baby’s toy!” – The straight-shootin’ history of Wild Gunman.

Happy 25th Birthday, Drupal! Jonathan Desrosiers writes about what WordPress could learn from it.

“Today I was slopped in the face”: Dennis Snell coins a new term.

LOVE the idea of getting builders together to “Keep WordPress Weird” via a hands-on plugin build-a-thon.

Some interesting Biff Tannen head canon.

“How my codebase written entirely with Claude code runs.”

There’s an alternate timeline where I’m a YouTube millionaire because I went back and told myself this.

And finally…

He did, in fact, want a kitty hat.

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