July 17 – 30, 2026 Welcome back to the WordPress.com changelog! Some helpful editor updates headline today’s changelog: two brand-new blocks, a gallery that fills itself, and a much better…

WordPress.com Changelog: New Blocks and Better Async Notes

By WordPress.com Staff on July 31, 2026

July 17 – 30, 2026

Welcome back to the WordPress.com changelog!

Some helpful editor updates headline today’s changelog: two brand-new blocks, a gallery that fills itself, and a much better way to leave notes on a draft. You can also now change your plan yourself, without contacting support.

Editor

Two new blocks: Tabs and Playlist

The Tabs block organizes content, like FAQs and feature comparisons, into tabbed sections. Each panel accepts blocks, and the tab buttons have their own color, typography, border, and spacing controls so they match your theme.

The WordPress editor showing the tabs block

Image from Make WordPress Core

The Playlist block showcases a list of audio tracks with artwork, track metadata, and a waveform. You can set the play order and toggle artwork, artist names, track numbers, and track length individually. If you publish podcast episodes or music, you can do it without pasting in an embed from somewhere else.

The playlist block in the WordPress editor

Image from Make WordPress Core

Type /tabs or /playlist in the editor to use these blocks on your posts or pages.

Galleries that build themselves

The new Dynamic Gallery option in the Gallery block automatically shows every image attached to your post instead of making you hand-pick each one to create a gallery from scratch.

Add a Gallery block in your post or page by typing /gallery, then click “Use attached images.”

Leave more granular feedback in notes

If anyone else touches your posts before they go out — a client, a business partner, a contractor, or the one friend who always catches your typos — you may be gathering feedback from a few different places.

Notes keep all of it on the draft inside WordPress. A note now attaches to a specific phrase rather than the whole block, and you can @mention someone to pull them directly into the conversation.

Image from Make WordPress Core

Nobody has to be in the editor at the same time. You leave a note, they answer when they get to it.

Manage your plan

Change your plan yourself, any time

Moving to a lower-tier plan used to mean contacting support. Now there’s a “View plans” button on any active plan’s settings page that will take you to the plans page where eligible lower tiers show a “Downgrade” option alongside the usual upgrades.

Once you’ve requested a downgrade, it’s scheduled for your next renewal date. This means that you keep everything you’ve already paid for until the term ends, and then you’re charged the lower price.

Fixes and improvements

We also shipped some reliability and polish updates across WordPress.com:

Buy a paid plugin from the marketplace, and you’ll land on your plugins page with it switched on instead of waiting on a progress bar that sometimes stalled.
Your traffic numbers show up reliably on the hourly view instead of constantly loading.
Video stats now show thumbnails so you can tell which video is which at a glance.
Help is a click away while you’re picking a domain during signup. Click the “Need help?” button to search our docs or connect with one of our Happiness Engineers.
We’re retiring Feature Clips, our experimental tool for turning a post into a short vertical video. If you were using it, our guide to working with video walks through the other ways to add video to a post.