The WordPress community must look forward to something extraordinary this August. WordPress 7.1 release date is August 19, 2026, improving how users collaborate in WordPress and introducing new functionality for site owners, developers, visitors, and other stakeholders.
This blog post will discuss what’s new in WordPress 7.1 for developers, site owners, and users overall.
What’s New in WordPress 7.1?
WordPress 7.1 release provides users with a more complete set of styling controls, a smoother media experience, and a more personalized admin experience. Notes have evolved to include inline notes with @mentions and rich-text formatting, making asynchronous feedback feel more natural.
New styling features unlock long-requested options to style how blocks look across screen sizes and interactive states, all without writing custom CSS. Various client-side media improvements mean better format support, enhanced performance, and stronger uploads when adding media to your website.
A new inline cropping tool makes editing images easier. As a result, the admin experience is now easier to navigate, with an ever-present admin bar in the editors, an improved command palette, and various quality-of-life enhancements.
More importantly, developers get an expanding set of APIs to build on, and site owners get better support for their intended target audiences.
New Suite of Notes features
As you may be aware, notes have evolved into a more collaborative experience, enabling faster, more expressive asynchronous feedback between teams.
Text Formatting
Furthermore, notes now assist with inline formatting like bold, italic, code, links, and emoji, each with a corresponding keyboard shortcut, so feedback reads clearly without breaking your flow.
@mentions
Type “@” in a Note to pull up a searchable list of collaborators and tag someone directly, so feedback points at the right person without leaving the sidebar.
Leave Notes Anywhere
Start multiple conversations on the same block rather than folding every comment into a single thread, making it easier to track distinct pieces of feedback.
Inline Notes
Rather than selecting an entire block, you can leave a note on a text selection.
Show more / Show Less
Long notes now collapse by default with a toggle to expand them, keeping the margin tidy while writing.
Style It Your Way on Any Screen
The WP 7.1 release emphasizes built-in responsive design and interactive styling, allowing users to achieve looks that once required custom CSS.
Responsive Styling
Define how a block appears across different screen sizes directly in the editor, for both Global Styles and individual blocks, without needing to write custom CSS.
Viewport Breakpoint Customization
Theme authors can smartly explain their own responsive breakpoints in theme.json. It gives them more flexibility in indicating how responsive controls affect any site.
Interactive State Styling
Style how blocks respond to interactions, such as a button changing color on hover or focus, and benefit from a standardized set of controls for both Global Styles and individual block instances.
A Smoother Media Experience
As far as media experience is concerned, uploading, editing, and browsing media keep getting more capable and reliable.
Client-Side Media Processing
Image and media processing now runs in the browser, with built-in support for a broader range of formats, including HEIC (the default format for iPhone photos), UltraHDR, AVIF, and WebP, as well as GIF-to-video conversion for lighter, more efficient files. Uploads now include a progress indicator and automatic retries that will come in handy if your data connection drops.
New Media Editor Modal
Users can now use a dedicated image-editing modal that replaces the inline cropping tool, bringing cropping, rotation, and metadata editing into a single streamlined workflow.
Smarter Galleries
If you are tired of manual setup, gallery blocks are an amazing option. They can automatically pull in and sort media already attached to the current post.
View Attached Images
Once you have uploaded images to a post, the inserter will automatically surface them in a new Attached Images section, making them easy to find.
Infinite Scrolling by Default
Fortunately, the Media Library grid view helps you load additional items automatically as you scroll, so you don’t need to click “Load more”. This is crucial for websites that manage large media libraries. You can turn it off using your user profile.
A More Personal, More Navigable Admin
These impactful upgrades make the WordPress admin easier to navigate and more consistent with how you want to work.
Persistent Toolbar (Omnibar)
The admin toolbar moves with you into the Site Editor and Block Editor, delivering a series of polish improvements.
Command Palette Improvements
Navigating the dashboard and editor using the command palette (Ctrl/Cmd+K) is more refined, making it easier to find what you want. Now, results are grouped into Recent, Matching, and Suggestions sections rather than a single flat list.
Admin Color Scheme in the Site Editor
The Site Editor shows your selected admin color scheme rather than always using a fixed background.
DataViews and DataForms Iterations
Refinement of the components has continued, along with the management of lists of posts, pages, patterns, and templates, as well as the forms used to edit them.
Excerpts in the Posts List
The Posts list view now shows a short excerpt for each entry. Hence, users can easily detect the post they are looking for without opening it.
Visual Revisions
WordPress 7.1 includes a picker activity layout for browsing history thoroughly, clearly labeled autosaves in the timeline, and an autosave notice that opens straight into the visual revisions view. Global Styles revisions also experience a small enhancement, swapping the active style’s text label with a badge.
A Dedicated Identity Section
Site identity settings such as your title, tagline, and icon are live in their own clearly labeled section of the Site Editor. In short, they are easily findable and updateable.
On This Day Widget
A new widget has been added: what you published on this date in past years, right on your dashboard. A small nudge to look back on what you’ve written, and a reason to write something new today.
Allow Changing Comment Parent
Luckily, WordPress 7.1 introduces an editable “In reply to” control to the Edit Comment screen. It allows you to pick a new parent from a dropdown of the post’s other comments. Moreover, it has been scoped to the same post, so this is about untangling threads rather than moving comments across posts.
New Blocks and Block-Level Enhancements
WordPress 7.1 release introduces various block refinements that are explained below:
- Playlist Block: This block helps include a collection of audio files in a post or page, with an optional waveform visualization that reveals the audio’s shape as it plays; a more visual way to present podcasts, music, or audio content without using any third-party plugins.
- Tabs Block: This block helps organize content into clickable tabbed panels rather than showing everything at once. Users can cleanly present related content without overwhelming the page.
- Background Gradients: Background gradients and background images no longer conflict in this new release. Previously, the gradient would be silently overridden by the image. However, they are now combined and displayed together. This important solution is available beyond the Group block to Verse, Accordion, Pullquote, Post Content, and Quote blocks.
- HTML Block Editable Content: The HTML block assists editable nested blocks. This suits AI-generated content that arrives as raw HTML.
- “Mark as Decorative” for Images: A new toggle in the Image block helps users hide purely decorative images from screen readers for a more accessible experience.
- Smarter Shortcode Handling: Pasting or converting a shortcode into the Embed block now helps generate a proper Embed block, leaving raw shortcode text behind, and the Shortcode block gains block-specific transforms of its own.
Built for Developers
WordPress 7.1 strives to support developers on different fronts:
- Abilities API Expansion: Refinement of the Abilities API with enhanced querying, filtering, and input validation, providing developers and AI tooling with a more reliable foundation.
- Block Bindings for List Items: Block Bindings extend to List Items, enabling you to connect more block content to dynamic data sources without custom code.
- Custom Icon Registration: New functions help plugin and theme authors register their own icons for the Icons block, available throughout the block editor.
- Enforced iframed Editor: The post editor is embedded in an iframe, separating the editing canvas from admin styles to ensure more predictable rendering. Blocks that use Block API v2 or earlier need to be updated to v3 for compatibility.
- WordPress/Theme Stabilization: The package theme authors use to create block themes has an architecture and API review, laying groundwork for a more stable and better-documented theming foundation going forward.
- Connectors Authentication Improvements: The Connectors screen assists username and application-password login – a more familiar way to connect plugins and services. WordPress 7.1 helps remove a security loophole that allowed browsers to auto-suggest saved credentials into the API key field.
WordPress 7.1 Release Date and Schedule
- Beta 1: July 15, 2026
- Beta 2: July 17, 2026
- Beta 3: July 22, 2026
- Beta 4: July 29, 2026
- Release Candidate 1 (RC 1): August 5, 2026
- Release Candidate 2 (RC 2): August 12, 2026
- Dry Run: August 18, 2026
- Final Release: August 19, 2026
WordPress 7.1 RC1
WordPress 7.1 RC1 comprises over 145 updates and fixes since the Beta 4 release, including 57 in the Editor and 88 in Core.
You can discover the technical details of all issues addressed since Beta 4 using the links below:
- GitHub commits for 7.1 since July 29, 2026
- Closed Trac tickets for 7.1 since July 29, 2026
WordPress 7.1 Beta 4
WordPress 7.1 Beta 4 comprises more than 114 updates and fixes since the Beta 3 release, including 51 in the Editor and 63 in Core.
You can go through the technical details for all issues addressed since Beta 3 with the help of these links:
- GitHub commits for 7.1 since July 22, 2026
- Closed Trac tickets for 7.1 since July 22, 2026
WordPress 7.1 Beta 3
You can explore the following links to analyze 71+ issues discussed since Beta 1:
- Closed 7.1 WordPress Core Trac tickets since July 15, 2026
- 7.1 Gutenberg commits since July 15, 2026
Beta 3 Introduces Two Styling Improvements
Implementing local style changes globally is no longer an all-or-nothing action like it used to be. The Apply globally option in the block inspector offers a quick review step. It lets you select which modified styles to apply globally while keeping the rest as local overrides.
Other crucial fixes include improvements to media uploads: long animated GIF uploads no longer hang, images rotated using EXIF metadata are processed and optimized appropriately, and uploading a single HEIC image in Safari no longer creates two entries.
The editor contains additional fixes for Notes, responsive styling, and custom CSS. WordPress Coding Standards have been updated to version 3.4.0 for developers.
WordPress 7.1 Beta 2 (WordPress 7.0.2)
The WordPress 7.0.2 security release highlights and resolves one critical and one high-severity security issue.
As this is a security release, we recommend updating your sites immediately.
Moreover, the WordPress.org team has activated forced updates via the auto-update system for sites running affected versions.
To manually update, users can visit their WordPress Dashboard, click “Updates”, and then click “Update Now”, or they can download WordPress 7.0.2 from WordPress.org.
For websites that support automatic background updates, the update process will begin automatically.
Security Updates Comprised in This Release
The security team values the efforts made by the people for reporting vulnerabilities and letting them be resolved in this release:
- A facilitated SQL injection issue reported as a team by TF1T, dtro, and haongo
- A REST API batch-route confusion and SQL injection issue leading to Remote Code Execution reported by Adam Kues at Assetnote / Searchlight Cyber
Note: Beta 2 was released on July 17, 2026, as part of the WordPress 7.0.2 release and contains key security fixes.
WordPress 7.1 Beta 1
WordPress 7.1 Beta 1 is available for download and testing. The planned final WordPress 7.1 release date is August 19, 2026.
How to Test WordPress 7.1 Beta 1?
If you want to test WordPress 7.1 Beta 1, follow different ways, including:
WordPress Beta Tester Plugin
Install and enable the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on your WordPress website. Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream.
Direct Download
Download the Beta 1 version (zip) and install it on your WordPress website.
Wrapping Up
WordPress 7.1 is a powerful statement about where the platform is headed. Users can enjoy new Notes features, such as suggestion mode and emoji reactions, making asynchronous feedback richer and more interactive. Likewise, developers can benefit from powerful, developer-focused upgrades.
Scheduled for release on August 19, 2026, alongside WordCamp US 2026, it surely is a defining moment for the WordPress community.
