Each WordPress release celebrates an artist who has made an indelible mark on the world of music. WordPress 6.7, code-named “Rollins,” pays tribute to the legendary jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins. Known as one of the greatest improvisers and pioneers in jazz, Rollins has influenced generations of musicians with his technical brilliance, innovative spirit, and fearless approach to musical expression.

Sonny Rollins’ work is characterized by its unmatched energy and emotional depth. His compositions, such as “St. Thomas,” “Oleo,” and “Airegin,” are timeless jazz standards, celebrated for their rhythmic complexity and melodic inventiveness. Rollins’ bold and exploratory style resonates with WordPress’ own commitment to empowering creators to push boundaries and explore new possibilities in digital expression.

Embrace the spirit of innovation and spontaneity that defines Rollins’ sound as you dive into the new features and enhancements of WordPress 6.7.

Welcome to WordPress 6.7!

WordPress 6.7 debuts the modern Twenty Twenty-Five theme, offering ultimate design flexibility for any blog at any scale. Control your site typography like never before with new font management features. The new Zoom Out feature lets you design your site with a macro view, stepping back from the details to bring the big picture to life.

Introducing Twenty Twenty-Five

Endless possibility without complexity

Twenty Twenty-Five offers a flexible, design-focused theme that lets you build stunning sites with ease. Tailor your aesthetic with an array of style options, block patterns, and color palettes. Pared down to the essentials, this is a theme that can truly grow with you.

Get the big picture with Zoom Out

Explore your content from a new perspective

Edit and arrange entire sections of your content like never before. A broader view of your site lets you add, edit, shuffle, or remove patterns to your liking. Embrace your inner architect.

Connect blocks and custom fields with no hassle (or code)

A streamlined way to create dynamic content

This feature introduces a new UI for connecting blocks to custom fields, putting control of dynamic content directly in the editor. Link blocks with fields in just a few clicks, enhancing flexibility and efficiency when building. Your clients will love you—as if they didn’t already.

Embrace your inner font nerd

New style section, new possibilities

Create, edit, remove, and apply font size presets with the next addition to the Styles interface. Override theme defaults or create your own custom font size, complete with fluid typography for responsive font scaling. Get into the details!

Performance

WordPress 6.7 delivers important performance updates, including faster pattern loading, optimized previews in the data views component, improved PHP 8+ support and removal of deprecated code, auto sizes for lazy-loaded images, and more efficient tag processing in the HTML API.

Accessibility

65+ accessibility fixes and enhancements focus on foundational aspects of the WordPress experience, from improving user interface components and keyboard navigation in the Editor, to an accessible heading on WordPress login screens and clearer labeling throughout.

And much more

For a comprehensive overview of all the new features and enhancements in WordPress 6.7, please visit the feature-showcase website.

Learn more about WordPress 6.7

Learn WordPress is a free resource for new and experienced WordPress users. Learn is stocked with how-to videos on using various features in WordPress, interactive workshops for exploring topics in-depth, and lesson plans for diving deep into specific areas of WordPress.

Read the WordPress 6.7 Release Notes for information on installation, enhancements, fixed issues, release contributors, learning resources, and the list of file changes.

Explore the WordPress 6.7 Field Guide. Learn about the changes in this release with detailed developer notes to help you build with WordPress.

The 6.7 release squad

Every release comes to you from a dedicated team of enthusiastic contributors who help keep things on track and moving smoothly. The team that has led 6.7 is a cross-functional group of contributors who are always ready to champion ideas, remove blockers, and resolve issues.

• Release Lead: Matt Mullenweg
• Release Coordinator: David Baumwald
• Core Tech Leads: Peter Wilson, Kira Schroder
• Editor Tech Leads: David Smith, Kai Hao, Robert Anderson
• Core Triage Leads: Stoyan Georgiev, Ahmed Kabir Chaion
• Editor Triage Leads: Nick Diego, Damon Cook
• Documentation Leads: Fabian Kägy, Mumtahina Faguni
• Test Lead: Ankit K. Gupta
• Design Lead: Joen Asmussen
• Performance Lead: Mukesh Panchal
• Default Theme Design Lead: Beatriz Fialho
• Default Theme Development Leads: Carolina Nymark, Juan Aldasoro

Thank you, contributors

The mission of WordPress is to democratize publishing and embody the freedoms that come with open source. A global and diverse community of people collaborating to strengthen the software supports this effort.

WordPress 6.7 reflects the tireless efforts and passion of more than 780 contributors in countries all over the world. This release also welcomed over 230 first-time contributors!

Their collaboration delivered more than 340 enhancements and fixes, ensuring a stable release for all—a testament to the power and capability of the WordPress open source community.

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More than 40 locales have fully translated WordPress 6.7 into their language making this one of the most translated releases ever on day one. Community translators are working hard to ensure more translations are on their way. Thank you to everyone who helps make WordPress available in 200 languages.

Last but not least, thanks to the volunteers who contribute to the support forums by answering questions from WordPress users worldwide.

Get involved

Participation in WordPress goes far beyond coding, and learning more and getting involved is easy. Discover the teams that come together to Make WordPress and use this interactive tool to help you decide which is right for you.

In the midst of our legal battles with Silver Lake and WP Engine, I wanted to take a moment to highlight something positive.

Because of my friendships with the co-founders of Slack, Stewart Butterfield and Cal Henderson, WordPress.org has had a free version of the Pro version of Slack since they started in 2009. We switched from IRC to Slack, and it was like superpowers were unlocked for our team.

Over the past 10 years, Slack has been our secret weapon of productivity compared to many other open source projects. Its amazing collaboration features have allowed us to scale WordPress from running just a few blogs to now powering around 43% of all websites in the world, almost 10 times the runner-up in the market.

As we have scaled from very small to very large, Slack has scaled right alongside us, seemingly effortlessly. WordPress.org currently has 49,286 users on its Slack Business+ instance, which would cost at least $8.8M/yr if we were paying. (And we may need to go to their enterprise grid, to support e-discovery in the lawsuit attacks from WP Engine, which would cost even more.)

This incredible generosity was continued by the enlightened leadership of Marc Benioff at Salesforce when they bought Slack in 2020. However, it has not been widely known or recognized on our Five for the Future page, which only highlights self-reported contributor hours and doesn’t mention Salesforce at all.

This is a grave error, and we are correcting it today. Going forward:

• I would like every business in the world to see the amazing collaboration and productivity gains Slack has enabled for our community of tens of thousands of volunteers worldwide and consider adopting it for their own business.
• Salesforce will have a complimentary top sponsor slot at our flagship WordCamp events in the United States, Europe, and Asia, which attract thousands of people each.
• We will update our Five for the Future program to reflect contributions such as Salesforce’s going forward.

We just want to repeat: Thank you. We hope to deepen our partnership with Salesforce in the future.

On behalf of the WordPress security team, I am announcing that we are invoking point 18 of the plugin directory guidelines and are forking Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) into a new plugin, Secure Custom Fields. SCF has been updated to remove commercial upsells and fix a security problem.

On October 3^rd, the ACF team announced ACF plugin updates will come directly from their website. Sites that followed the ACF team’s instructions on “How to update ACF” will continue to get updates directly from WP Engine. On October 1^st, 2024, WP Engine also deployed its own solution for updates and installations for plugins and themes across their customers’ sites in place of WordPress.org’s update service.

Sites that continue to use WordPress.org’s update service and have not chosen to switch to ACF updates from WP Engine can click to update to switch to Secure Custom Fields. Where sites have chosen to have plugin auto-updates from WordPress.org enabled, this update process will auto-switch them from Advanced Custom Fields to Secure Custom Fields.

This update is as minimal as possible to fix the security issue. Going forward, Secure Custom Fields is now a non-commercial plugin, and if any developers want to get involved in maintaining and improving it, please get in touch.

Similar situations have happened before, but not at this scale. This is a rare and unusual situation brought on by WP Engine’s legal attacks, we do not anticipate this happening for other plugins.

WP Engine has posted instructions for how to use their version of Advanced Custom Fields that uses their own update server, so you have that option, though the WordPress Security Team does not recommend it until they fix the security issues. You can uninstall Advanced Custom Fields and activate Secure Custom Fields from the plugin directory and be just fine.

There is separate, but not directly related news that Jason Bahl has left WP Engine to work for Automattic and will be making WPGraphQL a canonical community plugin. We expect others will follow as well.

The right to fork the software is at the heart of open source. WordPress itself started as a fork of the b2/cafelog project. WordPress was one of several forks from b2, which included b2++ (which eventually became WordPress Multisite) and some like b2evolution which still continue today.

The last decent fork attempt for WordPress was ClassicPress in 2018, over disagreements about Gutenberg being integrated into core.

We’re very proud to announce that Vinny Green, a former WordPress community member, has started his fork, FreeWP. We strongly encourage anyone who disagrees with the direction WordPress is headed in to join up with Vinny and create an amazing fork of WordPress. Viva FreeWP!

If there are other forks of WordPress we should highlight, let us know.

Updates with complete fork list:

• AspirePress “AspirePress exits [sic] to be a community of individuals focused on helping WordPress become the platform we all aspire for it to be.”
• b2evolution, which forked b2/cafélog at the same time WordPress did, so contains some of the same root source code.
• FreeWP, by Vinny Green.
• OpenPress is not a fork, but their name implies they want people to consider it as an alternative to WordPress. They are building on Laravel, using the CC-0 license, and claim to be optimized for AI. Their plugin to export from WordPress is here.
• WP Engine is the most confusing fork of WordPress because it claims it’s actually WordPress despite disabling core features like revisions, hiding the news and meetups widget, and running its own plugin, theme, and core update system (which is slower than core’s). This is the one fork we recommend not touching with a ten-foot pole.

Happy to announce that WP GraphQL is becoming canonical on WordPress.org. I could say more, but I’ll let Jason tell his story.

I’ve heard from WP Engine customers that they are frustrated that WP Engine hasn’t been able to make updates, plugin directory, theme directory, and Openverse work on their sites. It saddens me that they’ve been negatively impacted by Silver Lake‘s commercial decisions.

On WP Engine’s homepage, they promise “Unmatched performance, automated updates, and bulletproof security ensure your sites thrive.”

WP Engine was well aware that we could remove access when they chose to ignore our efforts to resolve our differences and enter into a commercial licensing agreement. Heather Brunner, Lee Wittlinger, and their Board chose to take this risk. WPE was also aware that they were placing this risk directly on WPE customers. You could assume that WPE has a workaround ready, or they were simply reckless in supporting their customers. Silver Lake and WP Engine put their customers at risk, not me.

We have lifted the blocks of their servers from accessing ours, until October 1, UTC 00:00. Hopefully this helps them spin up their mirrors of all of WordPress.org’s resources that they were using for free while not paying, and making legal threats against us.

Any WP Engine customers having trouble with their sites should contact WP Engine support and ask them to fix it.

WP Engine needs a trademark license, they don’t have one. I won’t bore you with the story of how WP Engine broke thousands of customer sites yesterday in their haphazard attempt to block our attempts to inform the wider WordPress community regarding their disabling and locking down a WordPress core feature in order to extract profit.

What I will tell you is that, pending their legal claims and litigation against WordPress.org, WP Engine no longer has free access to WordPress.org’s resources.

WP Engine wants to control your WordPress experience, they need to run their own user login system, update servers, plugin directory, theme directory, pattern directory, block directory, translations, photo directory, job board, meetups, conferences, bug tracker, forums, Slack, Ping-o-matic, and showcase. Their servers can no longer access our servers for free.

The reason WordPress sites don’t get hacked as much anymore is we work with hosts to block vulnerabilities at the network layer, WP Engine will need to replicate that security research on their own.

Why should WordPress.org provide these services to WP Engine for free, given their attacks on us?

WP Engine is free to offer their hacked up, bastardized simulacra of WordPress’s GPL code to their customers, and they can experience WordPress as WP Engine envisions it, with them getting all of the profits and providing all of the services.

If you want to experience WordPress, use any other host in the world besides WP Engine. WP Engine is not WordPress.

It has to be said and repeated: WP Engine is not WordPress. My own mother was confused and thought WP Engine was an official thing. Their branding, marketing, advertising, and entire promise to customers is that they’re giving you WordPress, but they’re not. And they’re profiting off of the confusion. WP Engine needs a trademark license to continue their business.

I spoke yesterday at WordCamp about how Lee Wittlinger at Silver Lake, a private equity firm with $102B assets under management, can hollow out an open source community. (To summarize, they do about half a billion in revenue on top of WordPress and contribute back 40 hours a week, Automattic is a similar size and contributes back 3,915 hours a week.) Today, I would like to offer a specific, technical example of how they break the trust and sanctity of our software’s promise to users to save themselves money so they can extract more profits from you.

WordPress is a content management system, and the content is sacred. Every change you make to every page, every post, is tracked in a revision system, just like the Wikipedia. This means if you make a mistake, you can always undo it. It also means if you’re trying to figure out why something is on a page, you can see precisely the history and edits that led to it. These revisions are stored in our database.

This is very important, it’s at the core of the user promise of protecting your data, and it’s why WordPress is architected and designed to never lose anything.

WP Engine turns this off. They disable revisions because it costs them more money to store the history of the changes in the database, and they don’t want to spend that to protect your content. It strikes to the very heart of what WordPress does, and they shatter it, the integrity of your content. If you make a mistake, you have no way to get your content back, breaking the core promise of what WordPress does, which is manage and protect your content.

Here is a screenshot of their support page saying they disable this across their 1.5 million WordPress installs.

They say it’s slowing down your site, but what they mean is they want to avoid paying to store that data. We tested revisions on all of the recommended hosts on WordPress.org, and none disabled revisions by default. Why is WP Engine the only one that does? They are strip-mining the WordPress ecosystem, giving our users a crappier experience so they can make more money.

What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it.

This is one of the many reasons they are a cancer to WordPress, and it’s important to remember that unchecked, cancer will spread. WP Engine is setting a poor standard that others may look at and think is ok to replicate. We must set a higher standard to ensure WordPress is here for the next 100 years.

If you are a customer of “WordPress Engine,” you should contact their support immediately to at least get the 3 revisions they allow turned on so you don’t accidentally lose something important. Ideally, they should go to unlimited. Remember that you, the customer, hold the power; they are nothing without the money you give them. And as you vote with your dollars, consider literally any other WordPress host as WP Engine is the only one we’ve found that completely disables revisions by default.