Hi friends 👋🏻

This week, a couple of cautions for everyone out there with a website running on WordPress.

It's an exciting time, with a major new release available! But with that excitement comes some risk and a couple of things to watch out for.

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It's WordPress major release update time

WordPress "core" – the underlying open source platform that powers self-hosted WordPress websites – has new update releases fairly often. Most of these are "minor" releases. A move like version 6.9.3 to 6.9.4 is often just minor bugfixes and tweaks. A step like 6.8 to 6.9 is often a feature release, with some more significant changes and adjustments.

And periodically, we get a major release, like the one that dropped last week, with the move from version 6.9.4 to WordPress 7.0.

A major release like this may well cause some disruption to your site. Hopefully nothing too significant if you only use a reputable and well maintained theme and suite of plugins. But this is a big change, so please please please:

• Take a full back up of your site (you should be doing this regularly anyway)
• Clone your website to staging environment or a local environment, and install and test the update there first
• Only once you are confident all key functionality is working and everything still looks the same should you install the update on your live, production website.

That backup you took? That's there so you can quickly roll back to the previous version if something unexpected happens.

It is WILD to me how often the folks managing WordPress sites just hit the update button on a live site, and hope for the best.

Please don't do this! And now is a good time to check in with your developer or whoever handles website updates for you to make sure they test updates on a staging environment before updating your live website.

(This message is brought to you by the owners of all the 1,000s of WordPress sites who hit update on their live sites last week and found that there were incompatibilities between their theme or plugin — of the random custom code someone inserted years ago — and WordPress 7.0)

If you want to be extra cautious — and I'm generally in this camp — there's little harm in waiting until the first bugfix release of the 7.0 era, and updating then. In a week or two, we'll likely see a 7.0.1 release arrive, which will fix whatever unexpected and high-impact issues slipped past all the testers.

​WordPress 7.0 Official Announcement​

​Coverage from The Repository​

What's in WordPress 7.0?

Here's a quick list (and then I have more to say about the last item on the list):

• A modernized dashboard, with faster screen loads, updated colors, and a command palette
• Centralized fonts management, regardless of theme
• Visual review of revisions
• Four new core blocks: icon block, gallery block with lightbox slideshow support, heading block with additional controls, breadcrumbs block. If you've been relying on plugins to provide any of that functionality, you might be able to retire some plugin bloat now.
• Responsive visibility controls for all blocks (crazy that this didn't exist before...)
• Menu overlays constructed from blocks and patterns
• and ... drumroll 🥁 ... AI connectors!!

This last one isn't quite as exciting to your average WordPress user as it might sound. The "AI Connectors" functionality WordPress 7.0 shipped is a single settings screen that allows you to enter an API key, generated from your Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini account. That's it. It doesn't immediately mean that you can start managing your WordPress site from Claude as soon as you plug in that API key.

But the impact here is bigger than you might think. The idea here is that WordPress has provided a centralized place in your website's settings to manage the connection between your site and your preferred AI tool, or tools.

This means that each plugin or theme that wants to offer AI functionality doesn't have to manage it's own separate AI tool connections – that all just happens once, through WordPress's central "AI Connectors" settings screen.

Based on this infrastructure, we can now expect a wave of "manage your WordPress site with AI" type plugins to hit the market, encouraging us to make use of this new functionality.

Here's my caution:

This is not just a casual connection between a free ChatGPT or Claude account. It's not even a connection with a paid account on one of those platforms, in the $20 - $100/mo range.

When you generate an API key that you could use in the WordPress settings, you're entering the world of pricing based on token usage. So if you create an API key, plug it into WordPress, and then use a plugin to do a task that consumes a huge number of tokens, you'll be on the hook for a huge bill from your AI platform.

When you set up your AI platform API key, set a pricing cap on token usage to avoid unpleasant surprises.

And another caution:

As this corner of WordPress use evolves, be very careful about what "abilities" are granted as you integrate AI tools with your website.

Consider: do you want the AI tool to be able to take actions an administrator-level user could take? Or do you actually want to limit the actions that an AI tool can take to just the author user level? Or a custom role entirely that is tailored to the specific tasks you're using AI to take.

If it's just pulling and analyzing data about your content, for example, it only needs contributor level access.

It's an exciting new world, and a risky one. Run your experiments on a staging copy of your site first!!

Final note – unrelated to WordPress! Check out this free training on June 4

Talented nonprofit people & culture consultant Olanike Mensah is running a free, 90-minute workshop on June 4 for nonprofit HR leaders and Chief People Officers. It's titled:

‘Why Your Nonprofit Staff Is Leaving - And How to Fix It Without Bigger Budgets or Broken Surveys.’

If this is a problem your org is trying to fix, forward this along to the right person and encourage them to sign up. Olanike does great work.

​Register here.

And find more info about the Mosaic Culture Clarity System here.

Until next time ✨

— Ed Harris (your digital strategy guide)

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