From across Automattic.
Updates from all of Automattic’s business units.
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WordPress.com Changelog: Manage Your Site and Build a Store with AI
Build a store by telling the WordPress Agent what you want to sell. Plus: manage your site from your AI assistant, new Professional Email plans, and clearer staging syncs.
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October, 2026
Please be aware of common scams! If someone contacts you with a scam, please report and block them. Outside of our support email and official [tumblr] accounts ONLY on [tumblr] (when in doubt, look for the same Staff Member badge that you see on this blog), Staff will never message you or reply to your…
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Boost peak season conversion rates by answering shoppers’ questions
Turn more holiday browsers into buyers by simplifying promotions, helping shoppers find the right products, answering questions, and streamlining checkout.
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WordPress Accessibility: What’s New in 7.0 and 7.1
WordPress 7.0 and 7.1 quietly shipped 127 accessibility fixes. Here’s what changed, and what it means for your WCAG, ADA, and Section 508 compliance work.
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Why a Shopify Partner Recommends WooCommerce for Manufacturers
MAXBURST is a New York agency that builds websites for manufacturers, aerospace and defense suppliers, engineering firms, and industrial B2B companies. They’re a Pressable Pro Partner and a Shopify Solution Provider, so they build on […] The post Why a Shopify Partner Recommends WooCommerce for Manufacturers appeared first on Pressable.
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Fewer clicks, 18% more sites: redesigning the WordPress.com free‑site bar
We expected a redesigned WordPress.com free-site bar to get more clicks. It lost a quarter of them and still brought in 18% more new sites. Here’s where the gain came from, and how a day-3 health check caught a logging bug.
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When Technology Outruns Its Institutions: Neal Stephenson on AI, Truth, and Control
Technology, truth, and the freedom to shape the tools we use. Neal Stephenson joins Zander Rose for the first Wide Margins conversation.
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How to Choose a Secure CMS Platform for Regulated Organizations
There’s no such thing as the most secure CMS, only vendors who can prove accountability, credential scope, and audit history.
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Meet What’s New: updates and tips, right in Pocket Casts
Pocket Casts keeps getting new features and improvements. But when you’re busy listening, it’s easy to miss something you’d love to use. Meet What’s New, a place for feature updates, useful tips, and important Pocket Casts news, right inside the app. Whether you want to explore something we’ve just added or discover a better way…
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10 Black Friday Ideas for Small Businesses That Go Beyond Discounts
A useful bundle, a thoughtful bonus, or a few well-timed appointments can give customers a reason to buy. Explore ten Black Friday offers that fit a small business — without putting everything on sale.
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Everything your agency needs to learn, sell, and grow, now in one place
Running an agency means learning constantly evolving products, pitching & building trust with clients, and shipping great work. Sometimes, the guides, talk tracks, documentation, and case studies that help with each of those used to live in a dozen different places. When a client asks why WooCommerce beats a closed platform, or your team needs…
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WordPress 7.1.4
This security release features fixes for multiple issues. Because this is a security release, it is recommended that you update your sites immediately. You can download WordPress 7.1.4 from WordPress.org, or visit your WordPress Dashboard, click “Updates”, and then click “Update Now”. If you have sites that support automatic background updates, the update process will…
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Dave Chapman
Dave Chapman is a longtime Vermont organic farmer, co-founder and co-director of Real Organic Project, and host of the Real Organic Podcast. He has spent over 45 years growing food and advocating for a better food system. I’ve spent more than four decades growing organic food, and one thing I’ve learned is that farming is…
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Declaring parent-child cart item relationships in WooCommerce 11.3
WooCommerce 11.3 introduces a filter for tracking product relationships in the cart, enhancing accurate "N in cart" counts for bundled items and extensions. The post Declaring parent-child cart item relationships in WooCommerce 11.3 appeared first on The WooCommerce Developer Blog.
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The AI Readiness Problem Publishing Budgets Can’t Hide
AI is becoming a bigger line item, but that won’t matter if media organizations aren’t prepared to scale.
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How Studio Visual Cut a Client’s Hosting Bill by 70% with Pressable
São Paulo agency Studio Visual moved a high-traffic client from WP Engine to Pressable, cut the hosting bill by 70% in year one, and turned the move into an offer for other clients.
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Web Loft Designs on Easy Migrations, Qualified Leads, and a “no” that Built Trust
Web Loft Designs founder Marina Marsh on closing her first Automattic for Agencies referrals and why a “no” from Pressable made her trust it more.
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WordPress 7.2 Beta 2
WordPress 7.2 Beta 2 is ready for download and testing! This beta release is intended for testing and development only. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, use a test environment or local site to explore the new features. How to Test WordPress 7.2 Beta…
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Subscription churn: Turn retention insights into recurring revenue growth
Using better data on subscription churn helps you decide where to act first. Here's what to know.
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Working towards higher-quality agentic experiences
An agentic experience asks people to trust a system that can act on their behalf. To earn that trust, the design needs to make the system’s intentions clear, show what is happening, and give people control when something needs to change.
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How Nonprofit Revive & Restore Found a Better Home on WordPress.com
Slow pages and difficult updates had Revive & Restore considering a move away from WordPress. A second opinion helped the nonprofit find a different way forward.
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WooCommerce 11.3: What’s coming for developers
WooCommerce 11.3 beta is now available for testing, featuring enhanced styling controls, On-Sale Badge improvements, mobile gallery updates, and improvements to MCP. The post WooCommerce 11.3: What’s coming for developers appeared first on The WooCommerce Developer Blog.
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How Agencies Can Prove AI Discoverability Pays Off
Clients’ CFOs want to know what AI discoverability is worth. WordPress VIP and 97th Floor share how to fund the work, which numbers to track, and a floor-and-ceiling ROI model for finance.
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Scaling ecommerce: Growing sales without losing margin
Learn how to scale your ecommerce business without sacrificing margins. Calculate cost per order and find ways to reduce costs as sales grow.
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Context switching has a cost; empathy can help lighten the load
A dozen Happiness Engineers, a dozen products The “Jetpack Happiness” team name is a bit of a misnomer. Currently, our team of a dozen-ish Happiness Engineers support not only Jetpack, but a dozen-ish other products as well! We’re spread across seven different countries and even more timezones, and we each arrived at Automattic with varying…
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Four Website Chores Your AI Agent Can Help With
Explore four ways to tackle website busywork with an AI assistant, from preparing posts and updating site details to reviewing alt text and comments.
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How WordPress Agencies Can Use AI to Respond to Security Incidents
Four tested incident response workflows and more than 30 ready-to-use prompts to help your agency contain, clean up, and document security issues across client sites.
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Introducing Day One CLI
Command-line access to your Day One account, journals, entries, Daily Chat, and context items. Today we’re launching the beta of Day One CLI: command-line access to your Day One account, journals, entries, Daily Chat, and context items. Day One has never been just a log of what happened. You reread an entry from four years…
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Celebrating Paul Mayne and the Future of Day One
50,000 Entries Later The post Celebrating Paul Mayne and the Future of Day One appeared first on Day One | Your Journal for Life.
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Stop Paying Extra to Keep Your Site Safe
Getting hacked is bad enough. You shouldn't have to pay another bill to clean up your site. Security should be part of what you're already paying your host to do.
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Call for testing: Extensible abilities for extension fields
WooCommerce 11.3 introduces an experimental API enabling extensions to add their data to WooCommerce MCP Abilities The post Call for testing: Extensible abilities for extension fields appeared first on The WooCommerce Developer Blog.
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The First Prompt to Run When a WordPress Plugin Vulnerability Drops
When a plugin vulnerability gets announced, the first question is always the same: which of my sites are running it? If you manage a handful of sites, you can check them one at a time. […] The post The First Prompt to Run When a WordPress Plugin Vulnerability Drops appeared first on Pressable.
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Your Pressable Sites Are Already Protected From the Recent Critical PHP Security Update
The PHP project recently released a critical security update for two vulnerabilities in PHP, nicknamed “PHP2Shell.” If you host with Pressable, you’re covered. Your sites are already protected against the recently disclosed PHP security issues. […] The post Your Pressable Sites Are Already Protected From the Recent Critical PHP Security Update appeared first on Pressable.
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Build multiple WooCommerce stores on a single WordPress installation
Conquer WooCommerce multi-store management with our essential guide from Saucal. Handle inventory syncing, automate marketing, and boost site performance.
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Your WordPress.com Site is Protected Against the Recent Critical PHP Vulnerabilities
Two critical PHP vulnerabilities were disclosed on October 21, 2026. WordPress.com sites are already protected, with no action required from site owners.
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WooCommerce 11.3 MCP Adaptor updates
WooCommerce 11.3 removes its deprecated MCP endpoint. Learn how to move MCP clients and extensions to the WordPress MCP Adapter. The post WooCommerce 11.3 MCP Adaptor updates appeared first on The WooCommerce Developer Blog.
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Your Sites Are Protected Against the PHP2Shell Vulnerabilities
Today, the PHP project released security updates for two critical vulnerabilities in PHP itself, tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 and nicknamed “PHP2Shell.” Both are rated 9.2 out of 10 on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), the industry-standard scale for how severe a security flaw is. Anything from 9.0 up is classed as Critical, the…
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Critical Security Releases for PHP
The PHP project has announced a security release that fixes two critical security vulnerabilities discovered in PHP. Store owners are encouraged to immediately update their installations of PHP. The post Critical Security Releases for PHP appeared first on The WooCommerce Developer Blog.
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Critical PHP Security Release
The PHP project has announced a security release that fixes two critical security vulnerabilities discovered in PHP. Due to the critical severity of the issues, site owners are encouraged to immediately update their installations of PHP. Your web host may already be working to update PHP and put web application firewall (WAF) rules in place…
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How to Build a Portfolio Website That Gets You Hired
Build along with our portrait photography tutorial, from choosing a domain name to showcasing your strongest work and helping clients get in touch.
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WordPress 7.2 Beta 1 is Ready for Download and Testing
This beta release is intended for testing and development only. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, use a test environment or local site to explore the new features. How to Test WordPress 7.2 Beta 1 You can test WordPress 7.2 Beta 1 in any of…
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How AI Is Making Website Consolidation, Migration, and Replatforming Easier
AI won’t migrate your website for you, but it can finally make the consolidation project that nobody wants to touch look like a plan rather than a guess.
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Rescue Your AI Pilot Before It Fails With These Workflow Changes
Getting AI into production means thinking through where people, processes, and technology need to be coordinated.
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Purple development moves to the WooCommerce monorepo
The Purple theme development has transitioned to the WooCommerce monorepo, enhancing collaboration and maintenance while remaining a standalone WordPress theme with independent releases. The post Purple development moves to the WooCommerce monorepo appeared first on The WooCommerce Developer Blog.
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Predicting the past: how big was the internet?
Ordinarily, data scientists spend a lot of time trying to predict the future. Time-series prediction, recommendations, even next-token-prediction…they’ve all broadly got the same flavor. Recently, however, I came across a problem with a distinctly different taste, and I’d like to share it with you today: predicting the past. Surely predicting the past is pretty easy,…
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Figma Tips and Shortcuts I Wish I Knew Earlier
Generally speaking, it's good to learn as many shortcuts as you can. They keep you in a flow state and give you superpowers. Instead of listing every single Figma shortcut in a cheat sheet, this post pulls out the ones we think are super useful to memorize.
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How AI helps us ask for reviews at the right time
In October 2025, a Product team asked Happiness, Automattic’s customer support team, for help with a project. Our part: Happiness Engineers would invite WooPayments users who’d just had a great support experience to share it in a review on WordPress.org (this would be a separate, rarer ask alongside our automated customer satisfaction survey). Because of…
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WordPress.com Changelog: Premium Themes on Paid Plans and an Upgraded Newsletter Hub
Premium themes now come with every paid WordPress.com plan, starting at Personal. Plus a theme-matched comment form and a new newsletter Overview tab.
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The internal collaboration behind a single reply
A customer reached out to our support team about an issue that had already passed through two Happiness Engineers (HEs) before it reached a third. By the time the third HE replied, the customer had never once had to repeat themselves, and they already had the next steps to resolve their request. This is a…
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Build Faster, Edit Your Way: What’s New with WordPress Agent
The WordPress Agent can now build custom themes, help refine your site, and manage plugins. Here's how the latest updates work.
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How Roge Blasco Brought 6,500 Travel Stories Back Online
When years of travel interviews disappeared from the web, Roge Blasco and WordPress.com brought the archive back — and the interviews kept coming.
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When building is cheap, judgment is the job
In September, five of us from design, product, and program management traveled to Copenhagen for Future Product Days. We spent three days attending talks and workshops, and many ideas resonated with us.
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What's new for developers? (October 2026)
Your October guide to WordPress development: the 7.2 roadmap, the Ipsum theme, new block APIs, and what to test before Beta 1.
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Hannah Maguire & Suruthi Bala
Having studied Anthropology at university, Hannah Maguire has worked in theatre and education across the globe. She brings her interest in people and human behaviour to RedHanded, where she is particularly fascinated by the social, cultural and psychological forces behind crime. A lover of stories and an avid audiobook listener, Hannah is known for her…
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Benchmarking our own AI assistant
Last month, we introduced Odie, our AI assistant. We recently tested Odie against a public benchmark, and wanted to share our findings. Gorgias, an ecommerce support software company, published a benchmark that lists 18 AI support vendors and ranks 13 of them on the same scripted conversations against the same public rubric. It tests two…
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Is it time to migrate from Shopify to WooCommerce? Your guide to costs, control, and flexibility
If you're considering migrating from Shopify to WooCommerce, here's what to know about costs, control, and flexibility.
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Connect your hosting account to AI with the Pressable MCP
Your AI tool can now look at your server and help you manage Pressable hosting seamlessly. Here's how the MCP works.
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2026 holiday shipping strategies: Make promises you can keep
Your holiday shipping strategy starts with understanding what you can reliably deliver. Here's how to get through peak season.
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Move beyond default checkout: How shoppers prefer to pay in 2026
WooCommerce and Stripe commissioned new research on the payment trends reshaping ecommerce in 2026.
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Tips for speeding up your WooCommerce store (no code required)
If your WooCommerce store is underperforming, there are a few simple things you can do to speed it up. Here's how to do it — no code required.
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What do customers actually praise when they're happy? We read every positive comment from the last two months.
Support teams track what goes wrong. Negative CSAT gets categories, trends, coaching conversations. Positive feedback gets noted, appreciated, maybe even celebrated, but rarely gets the same systematic attention. I wanted to know what was actually in those comments, so I pulled 62 days of them: 406 Woo customers who rated us well and said why….
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Designing learner-centered documentation (Support Driven Expo 2026)
In August, I traveled from the Philippines to Chicago to speak at Support Driven Expo 2026. At the expo, I met new people from other companies and enjoyed spending time with colleagues from outside my team. Outside the expo, I loved the weather, the food, and our hotel, the Eurostars Magnificent Mile. I spent the…
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WordPress.com Education: How Two Design Students Built a Nonprofit’s Website
For their internship, two UDIT design students worked with Spanish nonprofit Odón Solar to plan, design, and launch a WordPress.com website. The project gave them a real client, a portfolio piece, and hands-on experience with WordPress Studio.
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What’s new for merchants in WooCommerce 11.2
Here’s everything you need to know about updates that’ll impact your store with WooCommerce 11.2.
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Domain Names Explained: A Free Video Course
Domains don’t have to be confusing. Our free 45-minute video course explains how to register, connect, transfer, and manage a domain name on WordPress.com.
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Moving Client Sites to Pressable: Seven Things to Get Right
Most migration problems start small, like an order placed on the old host after the database was copied. Here are seven things to get right when you move client sites to Pressable, from the new Pressable Migration Playbook.
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Black Friday Checklist: 10 Essential Tests to Run Before Your Customers Arrive
Black Friday traffic won’t fix a weak customer journey. Before you promote your offer, use these 10 checks to test the price, page, purchase or booking flow, mobile experience, delivery, and tracking from your customer’s side.
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Connect Your AI to WordPress.com: 7 Ways To Get More Done
WordPress.com MCP connects AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude to your site. Here are seven practical ways to publish and refresh content, check traffic, organize your site, and handle everyday WordPress.com work from your AI assistant.
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WordPress 7.1.3 Maintenance and Security Release
This security and maintenance release features 7 security fixes and 4 bug fixes. Because this is a security release, it is recommended that you update your sites immediately. You can download WordPress 7.1.3 from WordPress.org, or visit your WordPress Dashboard, click “Updates”, and then click “Update Now”. If you have sites that support automatic background…
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Open source is a competitive advantage for ecommerce brands
The next 5 years of commerce are being built on open source. Here's how to decide if it’s right for you.
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Keep Up With Everything You Follow in the Reader
Your blogs, newsletters, and social feeds in one free RSS reader, plus new ways to catch up, get organized, and find your next favorite writer.
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How to be the email they open on Black Friday
Black Friday is when inboxes go from manageable to overwhelming. The emails that cut through are more specific to the customer and the moment. Here's how to stand out.
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Pressable Single Sign-On: Team Access, Managed by Your Identity Provider
For a lot of teams, MyPressable access started with one shared login. Then the team grew. Now 10, 20, sometimes 30 or more people use the same account, and nobody can say for sure who […] The post Pressable Single Sign-On: Team Access, Managed by Your Identity Provider appeared first on Pressable.
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September Wrap-Up
Hey, everyone! 👋🏽 The Beeper team is here to share what we’ve got going on. Let’s dive in! Viber joins the conversation There’s always that one conversation that keeps you switching to another app. If yours is on Viber, you can now bring it into Beeper. Connect your Viber account and keep those chats alongside…
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WordPress.com Changelog: Your Growing AI Toolbox
Let the WordPress Agent install plugins for you, connect Cursor to your site, and catch up on recent WordPress security releases and Reader updates.
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Feeding the machine with chaos
I've always been a bit chaotic. When I start a new project, I really (really!) try to stick to a process. A plan, a structure… something. But my brain often jumps from one idea to the next, and all of a sudden I'm stuck in a loop of “what if…”
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How Much Does a Website Really Cost? Year One vs. Year Two
Your first website probably needs fewer features than you think. The real challenge is knowing exactly what you need and how much it will cost. We compared current pricing ranges across major website platforms to show what a blog, business site, or online store costs in year one and beyond. So, how much does it…
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September, 2026
Please be aware of common scams! If someone contacts you with a scam, please report and block them. Outside of our support email and official [tumblr] accounts ONLY on [tumblr] (when in doubt, look for the same Staff Member badge that you see on this blog), Staff will never message you or reply to your…
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Meet Odie
Odie is Automattic’s internal AI assistant platform. But Odie is more than just a chatbot. It’s a persona, a bot with a job to do and a personality to match.
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Desktop Mode Is Now OpenStation: Your Whole WordPress Site in One Tab
Desktop Mode is now OpenStation, a free plugin from Automattic for working in WP Admin with windows. Keep your draft, media, and comments open side by side in one tab.
