WordPress 6.9 Beta is now available. This is the first beta released as part of the 6.9 development cycle and can be deployed to non-production environments in your WordPress VIP dashboard.
The current target for the final release is December 2, 2025
What is being added or changed?
Here’s a glimpse of what’s coming:
Content Creation & Editor Features
- Notes: Notes can now be attached to individual blocks. This enables asynchronous collaboration and more efficient editorial workflows. This was formerly known as ‘Block Comments’.
- Hide Blocks on Frontend: You can hide blocks from the frontend while leaving them editable in the backend—supporting staging, alternate design explorations, and non-destructive workflows.
- New Blocks: Accordion, Terms Query, Math block and Time to Read. The ‘Fit text’ formatting option is now available for paragraph and heading blocks, providing more flexibility for site building.
- Drag and drop block experience: Instead of dragging a copy, users now move the actual block itself within the editor while rearranging content. The result is a visually enhanced and accessible editing experience for all users
Command Palette
- Command Palette (Press Ctrl+K or Command+K anywhere in the dashboard to use the command palette) is available across both the Editor and the Dashboard, making navigation and actions faster and easier. Simply type in the Command Palette to search, jump to specific screens, or trigger actions directly. This also lays the groundwork for future integrations with the new Abilities API.
Developer & API Updates
- New Abilities API: A unified registry of callable WordPress capabilities with defined inputs and outputs, built for AI integrations and developer automation.
- Interactivity API Improvements: A new algorithm powers client-side navigation, enabling instant search and better asset management. Includes support for conditional asset loading, region-specific content, and opt-in full-page navigation.
- DataViews & DataForm components: The release introduces support for more field types & new layouts. DataViews now offers infinite scroll for large datasets and allows for locked filters and improved multi-selection via the new DataViewsPicker.
- HTML API: These upgrades make parsing, transforming, and validating HTML safer and more efficient across blocks, site editor, and custom plugins, boosting programmatic HTML manipulation accuracy.
- Block Binding API: Date block supports block bindings, image block allows binding the caption, an improved and extensible user interface that allows custom sources in the bindings editor.
Performance
- Introduced the “template enhancement output buffer” to unlock new optimization opportunities.
- Block styles loaded on demand in classic themes to reduce overall CSS used.
- Support for
fetchpriorityon scripts and script modules. - Support for printing script modules in the footer.
- Increased inlining of stylesheets to reduce render blocking.
- Minification of stylesheets in core block themes.
- Scripts and styles for hidden blocks omitted by default.
- Emoji detection script converted to a script module and moved to footer.
- Database query optimizations and caching.
- Cron spawned at shutdown instead of init to reduce impact on TTFB.
- Improvements to RSS feed caching.
- UTF-8 processing optimizations.
Additional Notes
- No new default theme in 6.9: There is no bundled theme shipping with 6.9; the focus is on enhancing the editor experience, API support and performance.
- Early Preview Plugins: MCP Adapter, and PHP AI Client are launching as canonical packages and plugins alongside 6.9, but are not part of Core.
- The MCP Adaptor turns WordPress Abilities into MCP Tools that can be used by AI agents.
- The PHP AI Client allows WordPress to connect to LLMS for AI powered content creation.
How to test the upgrade on a local environment
The quickest way to test locally is to use the VIP Local Development Environment.
To update an existing environment:
vip dev-env update -w=6.9-beta1 --slug=mytestsite
To create a new one:
vip dev-env create -w=6.9-beta1 --slug=mytestsite
How to test the upgrade on a VIP Platform environment
You can update your non-production environments by running the trunk version of WordPress from within the Software Management section of the VIP Dashboard or by running the vip config software update command with VIP-CLI.
For example:
vip @mytestsite.develop config software update wordpress trunk