DEV: The Bug Stops Here

Welcome to DEV, your monthly WordPress deep dive.

The July issue is packed with Core chatter, support workflow wins, EmDash updates, and just enough nonsense to justify another 12 open tabs.

Stick around to the end to see Boomer, whose bark is way more adorable (and hilarious) than his bite.

In today’s edition:

• Hub Tickets turns client emails into actual tickets, because “I saw it somewhere” is not a workflow.
• WordPress 7.1 is already warming up, with collaboration tools, responsive styling, and a release date that lands during WordCamp US.
• Plus: plugin empire stats, AI burnout, dad mullets and some extremely charming handmade WCEU Wapuus.

Hot Off The Presses: What’s New?

 
If you’re the “Dave” of your team, you can feel this image. You solve ONE issue in a single night and instead of being rewarded with a nap in the sun, you’ve been promoted directly into the blast radius of the next one.

It’s a very dev life. Do something well once and suddenly it’s your specialty.

Fix a WooCommerce checkout issue? Congrats, you’re the payments department. Untangle a DNS mess? You are now the domain whisperer. Reply quickly to one client email? Wonderful, they now expect live chat energy forever.

Anyway, while Dave stares into the middle distance and Googles “how much sleep deprivation until the hallucinations start,” let’s see what’s new, weird, useful, and mildly alarming in WordPress this month.

Work Has Begun on 7.1 🎉

WordPress 7.0 is barely out of its release party outfit, and 7.1 is already queuing up its walk-on music.

Anne McCarthy has been named release lead for WordPress 7.1, her first time in the role, with work now underway on what’s expected to be the second major WordPress release of 2026.

The official release squad has also been announced, with Benjamin Zekavica and Krupa Nanda on release coordination, Aki Hamano and Joe Dolson as tech leads, plus triage and test leads ready to help keep everything on track and on target.

Some quick updates on what’s happening so far with this release:

• This release will be focused on how people work together in WordPress and will bring in features like suggestion mode, emoji reactions and interactive asynchronous feedback.
• Plus, we’ll be getting new options for responsive styling and pseudo-state styling, which means more possibilities for having fun directly in the Site Editor without reaching for custom CSS.
• One of the big storylines to watch is real-time collaboration. It was pulled from 7.0 before release, and there are still questions about whether it belongs in Core, how it should be tested, and what kind of performance tradeoffs come with letting multiple collaborators (both human and AI) work together in real-time. You can join the discussion on that particular feature here.
• There’s also debate over whether a proposed Knowledge Custom Post Type in Core would help actual humans, or just make WordPress more legible to the robots currently reading over our shoulders.

The current release date is August 19, 2026, which coincides with the final day of WordCamp US. So yes, your staging sites may get another summer workout. 😎

👉 Here’s the official Roadmap to 7.1!

NEW: Tickets Now Integrates With Your Branded Email Address! 📬

You can build the slickest client portal in the world, but there will always be someone who replies to a six-month-old thread with, “Also, can we change the button to blue?”

Unfortunately, “I swear I saw that email somewhere…” is not a scalable business model.

Which is why the new feature we’ve added to Hub Tickets is pretty darn cool. Instead of trying to train every client into a new workflow, you can meet them where they already live: their inbox.

Premium members can now connect a branded support email, like [email protected], and turn incoming client emails into organized Hub tickets automatically. Your team gets assignments, replies, status tracking, and conversation history in The Hub.

Meanwhile, your clients just get to send an email like normal humans who have never once thought about ticket taxonomy.

👉 Give clients the ease of email, while your team gets the structure of a helpdesk.

EmDash Hosting So Far: The Rough Edges Are Getting Sanded

Every shiny new thing has a crunchy phase.

You know the one. The idea is great, the potential is obvious, and the first wave of users immediately finds the exact three edge cases nobody invited to the party.

It’s been over a month since EmDash arrived on WPMU DEV Unlimited Hosting, the team has been busy responding to real-world usage, fixing rough edges, improving performance, and making the hosting experience feel more polished for anyone experimenting with EmDash alongside their WordPress sites.

Some wins so far:

• Newly published EmDash pages and projects now behave like pages and projects, rather than launching themselves directly into the 404 abyss.
• Email is also pre-configured on new EmDash sites, transactional messages now work out of the box, and a tasty little dev-bypass endpoint has been blocked at the server level so bots can go bother someone else.
• Media delivery also got snappier, with uploads now served directly by nginx instead of being routed through Node every time.

Meanwhile, Mark Zahra over at WP Mayor took our EmDash Hosting for a spin, calling out the big practical win for WordPress builders: you can experiment with EmDash without spinning up separate infrastructure, juggling new hosting tools, or turning your dev workflow into a second job.

EmDash can sit alongside your WordPress sites in The Hub, with the same backups, security, support, and dashboard muscle memory you already use.

EmDash itself is still moving fast, so expect more template support and Hub improvements next. For now, though, it’s nice to see the Wild West getting a few paved roads, better signage, and slightly fewer tumbleweeds.

👉 Read the full EmDash hosting update here.

Mind Bloggling Facts & Stats

• WCEU was a massive success, with 2,458 attendees from 81 countries nerding out at the ICE Kraków Congress Centre on June 4 to 6. Stats on the number of pierogi enjoyed have yet to be released. (Source)
• According to WP Beacon, Syed Balkhi is the ultimate champion of plugins, creating an impressive 95 of the things, with a total of 23.5 million installs! (Source)
• According to WP Trends, WordPress now powers 33% of the web, down from a 36% peak in 2022. Still a massive slice of the internet pie, but with one less forkfull. (Source)

Blogs & Resources You Shouldn’t Miss

AI promised less busywork. Turns out managing five assistants still counts as work.

Client hired someone else? Set boundaries before you become free tech support.

AI search is changing plugin discovery. Here’s how to make sure your plugin is recommended by the robots.

Pour one out for the Classic Block.

WCEU Wapuus: Come for the cute handmade swag, stay for the genuinely lovely community story.

Remembering Om Malik, through 200+ heartfelt notes from a community that loved him.

Oh, a “Distraction-Free Writer” plugin? Joke’s on you, Jamie… the distractions are coming from INSIDE MY OWN BRAIN. (Editing existing posts from the front end is cool, though!)

Coffee Break Distractions

A helpful gym bro.

A very entertaining date night idea. 💞

Some delightful LOTR behind-the-scenes footage: All hail, Queen Gandalf! 👑

These guys otter be careful!

Self-conscious about using AI in public? Now there’s an extension for that.

The Dad Mullet: The ultimate haircut for childhood-ruining levels of second-hand embarrassment.

If the first computer you owned is in Steve’s Old Computer Museum, your knees make the startup sound when you stand up.

And finally…

The cutest “bark” ever.

Love this mix of nerdery and nonsense? Share it with your favorite WordPress weirdo. 💗