WordPress 6.9: The Foundation for AI-Powered, Composable, and Editor-Friendly Websites

The final release of WordPress 6.9 is slated for December 2, 2025, with the first beta already out on October 21st. 

A longer-than-average development roadmap has allowed WordPress 6.9 to grow into a foundational release. As our teams continue to contribute to WordPress core, we can’t hold back our excitement about what’s coming in WordPress 6.9. With important usability refinements, it brings along many of the initial building blocks that will shape the future of WordPress. 

In this post, we highlight what’s most relevant for enterprises currently managing – or planning to manage – their websites with WordPress. 

Editor Refinements

Over the last few years, the Site Editor has evolved from a fun promise to a powerful tool capable of handling even complex enterprise workflows and requirements. In v6.9, WordPress takes several significant steps to improve the Site Editor experience even further.

Hiding Blocks

WordPress 6.9 will let you hide blocks on the front end while keeping them fully visible and editable for your content managers in the Site Editor. This feature was first made popular by the Block Visibility plugin, and empowers non-destructive, iterative workflows such as staging content, A/B testing, or reusing seasonal content without deleting it. It also provides the foundation for conditional blocks and future collaborative features.

Notes  

A precursor to long-awaited real-time collaboration, WordPress 6.9 brings a critical feature to the editor in the form of notes. This enables users to add, view, and resolve comments natively and seamlessly from within their CMS. We expect this to make feedback on content presentation straightforward.

New Blocks

In addition to the above, WordPress will be getting a handful of new blocks aimed at supporting modern design standards, such as the Accordion, Terms Query, Time to Read and Math blocks. By bringing these blocks to Core, teams should be able to trust that these design elements are semantic and accessible, reducing the need to depend on (and audit) third-party block libraries or the number of custom blocks your developers need to maintain.

The Command Palette goes global

In WordPress 6.9, the Command Palette breaks out of the Site Editor to become available throughout the Dashboard, allowing you to quickly navigate to specific parts of your site and take actions with just a few keystrokes, no matter what screen you’re on. This sort of standardized UX has become popular in the last few years for its ability to speed up onboarding for new users and reduce cognitive load for existing ones, and represents a pretty fundamental shift in how users manage their site. 

Expect the Command Palette to become even more central to your site management workflows in future releases as more plugins make their functionality discoverable, and multimodal inputs allow you to use natural language text or voice to interact with WordPress.

Building towards the future of WordPress

WordPress 6.9 is slated to include a bunch of backend, performance, and developer API features and updates – laying the groundwork for the future.

DataViews & the Admin UI Makeover

The DataViews and DataForm packages will be receiving several new field types and filter operators, allowing developers to create more powerful and intuitive admin screens, dashboards, and workflows. While these APIs will be available for immediate use by anyone, future releases will use them to support the long-overdue modernization of the WordPress dashboard, which will see the Site Editor’s UX and Design Language improve other areas of the admin user interface, such as List Views and built-in setting screens. 

Block Bindings Improvements

Updates to the Block Bindings API will improve the way blocks are hydrated and templates use dynamic data, without the need to develop and maintain custom blocks. In addition to UI improvements and support for more blocks, WordPress 6.9 is making the API more extendable to easily hydrate your blocks with custom data sources.

Client-side Navigation with the Interactivity API

The Interactivity API will receive new functionality to power client-side navigation, allowing for same-load replacement of not just HTML, but also the related enqueued scripts and styles for the new page. This represents another step towards supporting full-page client navigation, but can also be leveraged to support client-side form submissions, conditionally-loaded assets based on page context, and other sorts of app-like interactivity that currently require significant amounts of custom code or even fully decoupled frontends to accomplish.

Abilities API and AI Experiments

We have written about this in much more detail. 

As modern LLM models disrupt workflows at a breathtaking spread and companies figure out the best (and worst) ways to use AI, the WordPress project needs to be very careful about how it brings these emerging technologies to almost half the internet. It’s answer? A set of interrelated AI “Building Blocks” that can be adopted and evolved quickly and independently, while keeping things developer-friendly, forward-compatible, and hype-free.

WordPress 6.9 will see the inclusion of the new Abilities API, an abstraction that allows for the registration of “abilities” supported by your site. These abilities can then easily be exposed and triggered in a variety of ways: wrapped as a REST endpoint or WPGraphQL mutation, run as a CLI script or terminal command, the Command Palette, and yes, called by an LLM.

Are you ready for WordPress 6.9

The great thing about WordPress is its promise for backward compatibility, so as long as you have good release hygiene, you shouldn’t have anything to worry about.

Still don’t have a web strategy? Use this time to create one, or contact us for a consultation. Be it bots or a bubble, the future is coming quickly, and it pays to be prepared.