Last week in CMS

WordPress released version 7.1 with responsive block styles and configurable theme.json breakpoints, inline Notes with mentions, new Tabs and Playlist blocks, a public SVG Icon API, and browser-side image processing. The new native design and review tools give WordPress developers more options in the editor.

This release changes several editor, theming, API, and media workflows, so agencies should regression-test affected integrations before rollout.

The Drupal Security Team marked Screenshot, Link Content Parser, and Gammu SMS Daemon unsupported because each has an unfixed security issue. All three advisories carry a Critical 16/25 rating, with six CVEs between them, affecting all versions of the respective module. The published remedy is to uninstall rather than update.

Exploitation is rated theoretical and requires administrator authentication, but the potential confidentiality and integrity impact is listed as complete.

We recommend that Drupal developers search every managed codebase and dependency inventory for these projects, uninstall them, and assess affected client workflows for replacement.

The WordPress Accessibility Team has published an initial prototype that provides an additional pathway for testing accessibility experiments and sharing practical tools before—or independently of—their adoption in Core.

Accessibility Lab is intended to become a canonical plugin modelled partly on Performance Lab and the AI plugin. Its two proposed roles are testing difficult Core experiments and providing community-maintained practical tools; the initial modules add configurable Media Library views and real-time block checks for issues such as missing alternative text and skipped heading levels. The team explicitly cautions that the plugin is not an accessibility solution or a substitute for fixing Core bugs.

Gutenberg 23.8 added shareable URLs and an in-editor code-diff view to visual revisions. Users mentioned in Notes can now receive email notifications, while List View received substantial performance work for large posts. The release also replaces the empty-canvas appender with a real default block to make initial writing behaviour more predictable.

These changes give editorial teams better tools for reviewing revisions and working with complex pages, while giving plugin and theme teams visibility into current Gutenberg development.

The WordCamp US retrospective documents reusable approaches to migration validation, editor involvement, design-system governance, and human review of AI-generated work.

The official recap documents The Ankler’s migration of 15 newsletters, subscriber data and thousands of paywall boundaries to a new block theme, alongside Daily Kos’s move involving 1.5 million posts, 88 million comments and 2.7 million users. That move used a public beta involving more than 500 community members. Other sessions showed large content stores being converted into block patterns with editors retained for judgment, and argued that approved patterns, templates and design tokens provide guidance and guardrails for AI-assisted page building. A multilingual WordPress multisite case study found that machine translation could be correct word by word while still missing the intended meaning, making native-speaker review essential.