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WordPress 7.1 “Mary Lou” is now active on WP CIM network

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Each WordPress release celebrates an artist who has made an indelible mark on the world of music. WordPress 7.1, code-named “Mary Lou,” honors pioneering jazz pianist, arranger, and composer Mary Lou Williams.

A child prodigy who began playing publicly at six, her influence and work cut across nearly every major era of jazz, moving through swing, bebop, and sacred jazz. Through all of it, she kept reinventing her own sound. In the 1940s, she turned her Harlem apartment into a nightly workshop where Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, and Bud Powell came to trade ideas and shape bebop itself. That combination of reinvention and collaboration inspired WordPress 7.1.

Let the range of Mary Lou’s music carry you through everything 7.1 offers.

Welcome to WordPress 7.1!

WordPress 7.1 is built around how you work: navigating the admin, controlling your designs, collaborating with others, and building what you want. The admin bar now follows you across the entire admin experience, putting the tools you need within reach, whether you’re writing a post or editing your site’s design. Built-in responsive styling, added to the current show/hide options for blocks, means you can ensure your site looks exactly how you want across screen sizes, without custom CSS. A new media editor keeps the familiar Crop button entry point, and brings freeform and aspect-ratio cropping, horizontal and vertical flipping, fine-grained and snap rotation, and metadata editing into one dedicated workflow. Leave Notes anywhere in your content—no longer limited to the block level. Rich text support and @mentions make it easier to collaborate with others as you write. Two new blocks, Playlist and Tabs, as well as a new API to register your own set of icons for the Icon block, give you even more flexibility to build what you want without additional plugins. These are just the highlights! Read on to see everything WordPress 7.1 has to offer.

Download WordPress 7.1

What’s inside

There’s a lot packed into WordPress 7.1 across new styling tools, updated media flows, added Notes functionality, and more. Some changes add new capabilities, while others refine existing tools and workflows.

Here’s a closer look at what’s new in this release, starting with the release video:

Apply responsive styles

Style your content your way, on every screen.

WordPress 7.1 brings more responsive controls directly into the Site Editor. Style how a block looks at different screen sizes from Global Styles or in individual block settings, without custom CSS. You can also preview your changes at different viewport sizes as you work, making it straightforward to build layouts that adapt to the way people browse the web.

Admin bar, now in every editor

Consistent navigation, from dashboard to editor.

The WordPress admin bar now stays with you as you move across all editors, so you always know where you are and have easy access to familiar tools. The admin bar also features some small visual updates to more fully polish the experience. 

A new way to crop

One dedicated workflow for editing your images.

A new media editor modal replaces the previous inline cropping tool, bringing together freeform and aspect-ratio cropping, horizontal and vertical flipping, precise rotation control, and metadata editing together in one place. The familiar Crop button still gets you there.

Inline notes with mentions and rich text

More ways to leave feedback.

Notes now support rich text and mentions, making it easier to leave clear feedback and loop in the right people. Format your Notes with bold, italic, and code, add links, or type @ to mention a collaborator and notify them.

You can also leave a note on a specific piece of text instead of just an entire block, keep multiple conversations going on the same block, and collapse longer notes to keep the margin tidy. It’s built for the back-and-forth that happens when people review content together.

Improved media handling

Faster, more flexible image processing.

Image compression, resizing, and thumbnail generation now happen in the browser, reducing server load and producing smaller files — without hitting PHP memory limits or upload timeouts.

Media handling in 7.1 also includes native support for AVIF, HEIC, and HDR gain maps, adding native support for the image formats modern cameras and phones already produce.

Enhanced details and new blocks

WordPress 7.1 also adds two new blocks, along with more ways to customize how content looks and behaves.

Create playlists

Bring multiple audio tracks together in one playlist, with an optional waveform that gives listeners a visual sense of each track as it plays.

Customize responsive breakpoints

Block themes can now define their own mobile and tablet breakpoints in theme.json, overriding the defaults for responsive styles and block visibility.

Organize with tabs

Organize content into tabbed panels instead of showing everything at once—a cleaner way to present related information without crowding your content.

Add custom icons

Developers can extend WordPress’s icon library with their own collections, making custom icons available throughout the editor alongside the built-in library.

Set interactive styles

Give Button blocks distinct styles for hover, focus, and active states directly in the editor’s style controls. Set the styles for just one button or all buttons.

A more consistent editing experience

The post editor is now fully iframed for all themes, matching the Site Editor.

The editing canvas runs separately from the WordPress admin interface, so admin styles don’t interfere with your content. Viewport-relative units and media queries now target the editing canvas directly, so responsive layouts behave more predictably as you build. The change is mostly invisible, but the result is a more reliable and consistent editor.

Developer’s toolbox

Advanced tools for building your way.

WordPress 7.1 expands several of the APIs and tools developers use to build on WordPress, with new options for icons, automation, admin interfaces, and responsive styling.

The SVG Icon API is now a public API, allowing developers to register their own icon collections and icons and use them throughout the editor with functions such as wp_register_icon_collection(), wp_register_icon(), and wp_get_icon().

The Abilities API builds on the infrastructure introduced in WordPress 6.9 with a filterable execution lifecycle, custom validation, and shared discovery. These additions make it easier to build integrations and automation on top of WordPress, including AI-powered tooling.

A new Design System provides foundational support for theming WordPress admin interfaces, including color, roundness, and cursor styles. Developers can use semantic design tokens and the ThemeProvider React component to bring more consistency to custom admin interfaces while still feeling at home in WordPress.

Theme authors also get responsive styling and pseudo-state styling for hover, focus, focus-visible, and active states through theme.json, along with new filters for configuring the DataViews and DataForm screens that power Pages, Templates, Parts, and Patterns in the Site Editor.

Accessibility

WordPress 7.1 continues to improve accessibility across WordPress Core and the editor. New wp_get_tooltip() and wp_get_toggletip() functions bring accessible tooltips to more areas of the WordPress admin, including post meta boxes and the login screen.

Screen reader support also improves across admin interfaces, with clearer labeling and more predictable navigation in post list tables. The new Tab and Playlist blocks, along with improvements to editor navigation and interaction, add to the broader accessibility work included in this release.

Together, these changes continue to make WordPress easier to navigate and use for more people.

Performance improvements

Image compression, resizing, and thumbnail generation now run in the browser (via a WebAssembly build of libvips), reducing the processing load on your server and helping avoid memory limits and timeouts with larger uploads.

Opt-in GIF-to-video conversion produces typically smaller files, while upload progress indicators and automatic retries make uploads more resilient when connections drop.

The Media Library now uses infinite scrolling by default, with a per-user option to return to pagination. Speculative loading defaults can now be set through environment variables or constants, so hosts and site owners can configure how WordPress prefetches pages without writing a plugin.

And much more!

For a comprehensive overview of everything new and improved in WordPress 7.1, visit the feature showcase website.

WordPress 6.5 “Regina” is now active on WP CIM network

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Say hello to WordPress 6.5 “Regina,” inspired by the dynamic versatility of renowned jazz violinist Regina Carter. An award-winning artist and storied jazz educator known for transcending genre, Regina’s technical foundations in classical music and deep understanding of jazz have earned her the reputation of boldly going beyond what’s possible with the violin. 

Let the stunning twists and subtle turns of Regina’s genre-bending sound surprise you as you explore everything 6.5 offers.

This latest version of WordPress puts more power into the details. It offers new and improved ways to fine-tune and enhance your site-building experience, letting you take control in ways that make it your own. You’ll find new ways to manage your site’s typography, more comprehensive revisions available in more places, and a collection of Site Editor updates paired with impressive performance gains to help you get things done smoother and faster.

“Regina” also marks the introduction of some breakthrough developer tools that will start transforming how you use and extend blocks to craft engaging experiences. The Interactivity API opens up a world of creative front-end possibilities, while the Block Bindings API makes dynamic connections between blocks and data seamless. These, among other developer-focused improvements and updates, are ready to help you evolve how you build with WordPress.

What’s inside 6.5

Add and manage fonts across your site

The new Font Library puts you in control of an essential piece of your site’s design—typography—without coding or extra steps. Effortlessly install, remove, and activate local and Google Fonts across your site for any Block theme. The ability to include custom typography collections gives site creators and publishers more options when it comes to styling content.

Get more from your revisions—including revisions for templates and template parts

Work through creative projects with a more comprehensive picture of what’s been done—and what you can fall back on. Get details like time stamps, quick summaries, and a paginated list of all revisions. View revisions from the Style Book to see how changes impact every block. Revisions are also now available for templates and template parts.

Play with enhanced background and shadow tools

  • Control the size, repeat, and focal point options for background images in Group blocks so you can explore subtle or splashy ways to add visual interest to layouts. 
  • Set aspect ratios for Cover block images and easily add color overlays that automatically source color from your chosen image. 
  • Add box shadow support to more block types and create layouts with visual depth, or throw a little personality into your design.

Discover new Data Views

Every piece of your site comes with a library of information and data—now, you can find what you need quickly and organize it however you like. Data views for pages, templates, patterns, and template parts let you see data in a table or grid view, with the option to toggle fields and make bulk changes.

Smoother drag-and-drop

Feel the difference when you move things around, with helpful visual cues like displaced items in List View or frictionless dragging to anywhere in your workspace—from beginning to end.

Improved link controls

Create and manage links easily with a more intuitive link-building experience, like a streamlined UI and a shortcut for copying links.

What’s fresh for developers in 6.5

Bring interactions to blocks with the Interactivity API

The Interactivity API offers developers a standardized method for building interactive front-end experiences with blocks. It simplifies the process, with fewer dependencies on external tooling, while maintaining optimal performance. Use it to create memorable user experiences, like fetching search results instantly or letting visitors interact with content in real time.

Connect blocks to custom fields or other dynamic content

Link core block attributes to custom fields and use the value of custom fields without creating custom blocks. Powered by the Block Bindings API, developers can extend this capability further to connect blocks to any dynamic content—even beyond custom fields. If there’s data stored elsewhere, easily point blocks to that new source with only a few lines of code.

Add appearance tools to Classic themes

Give designers and creators using Classic themes access to an upgraded design experience. Opt in to support for spacing, border, typography, and color options, even without using theme.json. Once support is enabled, more tools will be automatically added as they become available.

Explore improvements to the plugin experience

There’s now an easier way to manage plugin dependencies. Plugin authors can supply a new Requires Plugins header with a comma-separated list of required plugin slugs, presenting users with links to install and activate those plugins first.

From fast to faster: Performance updates

This release includes 110+ performance updates, resulting in an impressive increase in speed and efficiency across the Post Editor and Site Editor. Loading is over two times faster than in 6.4, with input processing speed up to five times faster than the previous release.

 Translated sites see up to 25% improvement in load time for this release courtesy of Performant Translations. Additional performance highlights include AVIF image support and improvements for registering block variations with callbacks.

A tradition of inclusion

This release includes more than 65 accessibility improvements across the platform, making it more accessible than ever. It contains an important fix that unblocks access to the admin submenus for screen reader users and others who navigate by keyboard. This release also adds fixes to color contrast in admin focus states, positioning of elements, and cursor focus, among many others, that help improve the WordPress experience for everyone.

Learn more about WordPress 6.5

Check out the new WordPress 6.5 page to learn more about the numerous enhancements and features of this release—including short demos of some of the highlighted features.

Explore Learn WordPress for quick how-to videos, online workshops, and other free resources to level up your WordPress knowledge and skills.

Check out the WordPress 6.5 Field Guide for detailed technical information and developer notes to help you build with WordPress and get the most out of this release. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Developer Blog for developer updates, feature tutorials, and other helpful WordPress content from a developer perspective.

For more information about installation, file changes, fixes, and other updates, read the 6.5 release notes.

The 6.5 release squad

Every release has many moving parts with its own triumphs and challenges. It takes a dedicated team of enthusiastic contributors to help keep things on track and moving smoothly. 6.5 is made possible by a cross-functional group of contributors, always ready to champion ideas, remove blockers, and resolve issues.

Thank you, contributors

WordPress believes in democratizing publishing and the freedoms that come with open source. Supporting this idea is a global and diverse community of people collaborating to strengthen the software. 

WordPress 6.5 reflects the countless efforts and passion of around 700 contributors in at least 57 countries. This release also welcomed over 150 first-time contributors!

Their collaboration delivered more than 2,500 enhancements and fixes, ensuring a stable release for all—a testament to the power and capability of the WordPress open source community.