What’s new for developers? (January 2026)

[justintadlock]

This is a rolling discussion for a monthly series that is intended to keep track of the items, PRs, Trac tickets, and Make blog posts that are interesting/important for developers. The goal is to publish a post on the 10th of each month with the previous month's updates.

Everyone is welcome to contribute to this monthly document. If you find something interesting, just create a new reply to this discussion below.

Google Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zvGbkrUeOyJKhLiuR5X9756wGInwkmIdd9kOvjnKLlA/edit?usp=sharing

Author: @justintadlock and @abhansnuk have volunteered to wrangle the news for January.

[github-actions]

Heads-up @bph @adamziel @jonathanbossenger @alexapeduzzi @fellyph: To include your project's news for developers, please add the information or a link as a comment to this issue.
Deadline 5th of next month.

[bph]

Deprecate Pullquote Block. (73228)

[github-actions]

📢 Reminder @bph @adamziel @jonathanbossenger @alexapeduzzi @fellyph The publication deadline is approaching (5th of the month).

[fellyph]

On Playground, we have three new UI updates. A brand new WordPress Playground DevTools extension allows editing WordPress playground in Chrome DevTools. Skip WordPress installation when WordPress files already exist and Add standalone playground block demo page.

[jonathanbossenger]

1st review done, all looks good to me.

Something that I only discovered this week was that during November and December, experimental support for the Abilities API JavaScript client was added to Gutenberg in version 22.2, and then the package was updated in version 22.3. This paves the way for the Abilities API JavaScript client to be shipped in core in WordPress 7.0. It'd be nice if we can include something about this in the January WNFD.

[juanmaguitar]

2nd review done. LGTM! 👌