What's new for developers? (September 2025)

[justintadlock]

This is a rolling discussion for a monthly series that is intended to keep track of the items, PRs, Trac tickets, and Make blog posts that are interesting/important for developers. The goal is to publish a post on the 10th of each month with the previous month's updates.

Everyone is welcome to contribute to this monthly document. If you find something interesting, just create a new reply to this discussion below.

Google Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/178PrsrfDkxT-uXzprltDAw_kJsp6GyvLSX4ZVOZMGBw/edit?usp=sharing

Author: @ryanwelcher has volunteered to wrangle the news for September.

[github-actions]

Heads-up @bph @adamziel @bgrgicak @jonathanbossenger @alexapeduzzi @fellyph: To include your project's news for developers, please add the information or a link as a comment to this issue. Deadline 8th of next month

[jonathanbossenger]

All the Core AI updates:

• Abilities API v0.11 released: https://github.com/WordPress/abilities-api/releases/tag/v0.1.1
• help test client-side package for Abilities API: Add client-side package for Abilities API abilities-api#60
• PHP AI Client first stable v0.1.0 release: https://github.com/WordPress/php-ai-client/releases/tag/0.1.0
  • Felix also released an AI chatbot demo, which uses the PHP AI Client and Abilities API: https://github.com/felixarntz/wp-ai-sdk-chatbot-demo
  • MCP Adapter now supports Cursor
    • Add type property to empty input schema mcp-adapter#36
    • Add structuredContent to tool callback response mcp-adapter#37

[fellyph]

Some updates from the WordPress Playground:

• The Playground Contributor Badge is available now. Playground contributors can claim their Badges
• Playground has a new landing page, where users can learn more about the project and try other blueprints.
• @adamziel has created a PHP Playground for developers to prototype PHP code in the Browser
• Now the Query API has support for multiple themes and plugins(#2581), which allows users to install themes and child themes via URL, for example: http://playground.wordpress.net/?theme=acai&theme=skincare-brand
• New flags on Playground CLI --site-url=http://adamadam.blog/ to set a custom URL for the local env and --auto-mount=path to allow users to specify the folder where the auto mount will be applied #2525
• XDebug Bridge, an experimental feature that allows developers to debug WordPress playground on Chrome, has received several improvements, such as highlighting the debugged code to better connect with devtools #2409, #2454, #2527, #2566, and #2612.
• PHP WASM, php.cli() is exposed for being used by PHP wasm, #2590, and has support for intl, dynamic extension for internationalization #2557, #2613, and #2501

[ryanwelcher]

This is ready for first review: https://docs.google.com/document/d/178PrsrfDkxT-uXzprltDAw_kJsp6GyvLSX4ZVOZMGBw/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.qqk1zvz1lphq

[ryanwelcher]

I've made the updates based on @justintadlock review. Looking for a second review now.