3 Things to Be Excited About in the WordPress 6.9 Update

WordPress 6.9 focuses on collaboration, iteration, and intelligent automation. Here are three features that make it worth your attention.

WordPress 6.9 arrives on December 2nd, 2025, and while it may not be the most transformative release in the platform’s history, it brings several thoughtful improvements that solve real problems many site owners and development teams face daily. After years of working with clients across e-commerce, brochure, and non-profit organizations, three features stand out as genuinely useful additions that improve how teams collaborate and what’s possible with WordPress sites.

At Gecko, we’ve seen firsthand how feedback loops, staging bottlenecks, and disconnected tools can slow projects down. These updates target those pain points directly.

Block Notes: Finally, Context Where It Belongs

Anyone who has managed a website with a team knows the familiar frustration of scattered feedback. A designer notices something on a product page and sends a Slack message. A project manager creates a Jira ticket about homepage copy. A client emails about adjusting the call-to-action button. Meanwhile, the development team is trying to piece together exactly which element on which page needs attention—often playing a game of digital telephone that wastes time and creates confusion.

The new Block Notes feature addresses this problem directly by allowing comments to be attached to individual blocks within the WordPress editor. Think of it like the commenting system in Google Docs, but built directly into WordPress and tied to the specific content blocks that need attention.

For teams that have cycled through various project-management tools—Jira for tickets, spreadsheets for tracking, services like BugHerd for visual feedback—Block Notes offers something different. The feedback lives exactly where it needs to be: on the content itself. When a designer wants to flag that a product description needs shortening, they can leave a note directly on that text block. When a client wants to suggest changing an image, the comment sits right on the image block in question.

This approach enables asynchronous workflows where multiple stakeholders can review and comment without needing meetings or translation overhead. A content editor can work through a page in the morning, leaving notes for client approval. The client can respond in the afternoon. The developer can address technical considerations in the evening. Everyone sees the same context, and nothing gets lost between tools.

For agencies managing multiple client sites, this becomes even more valuable. Each site’s feedback and QA process stays self-contained within WordPress, rather than relying on external project-management systems. The barrier to collaboration drops significantly when clients can simply log into their site and leave feedback directly on the content they’re reviewing.

Block Visibility: Embracing Sites as Living Things

The second feature, Block Visibility, sounds deceptively simple—it’s a per-block toggle that lets you show or hide individual blocks on the frontend while keeping them editable in the backend. Each block gets its own visibility control, meaning you can have some sections of a page visible to visitors while others remain hidden and in progress. But that simplicity hides a major workflow shift.

Websites are living things that evolve continuously, yet the traditional publishing model treats them as binary: content is either live or it’s not. This creates awkward situations. An e-commerce team wants to prepare holiday banners. A non-profit needs to stage campaign content. A brochure site wants to test new testimonials without removing the current ones entirely.

Block Visibility allows content to exist in an in-progress state on live pages. The holiday banner can be built and refined in place, hidden from visitors but visible to the team. The testimonial section can have both the current layout and an experimental alternative, with only one visible publicly while both remain editable. This pairs naturally with Block Notes—a team can hide a block, leave notes about what needs to change, and collaborate without affecting what visitors see.

This feature acknowledges a truth about modern web development: sites don’t need to feel complete or perfect before going live. They need to support iterative improvement. By allowing elements to be staged directly within production pages rather than hidden away in draft environments, Block Visibility makes it easier to work with websites the way teams actually work—incrementally, collaboratively, and continuously.

AI Integration: Opening New Possibilities

The third area of excitement is also the most complex: WordPress 6.9 introduces foundational pieces for AI integration through the Abilities API, the PHP AI SDK, and the MCP Adapter. While these tools are still in their early stages, they represent a major expansion of what WordPress can do.

The PHP AI SDK provides a standardized way for WordPress to communicate with various AI services—think of it as a universal translator that lets WordPress talk to Claude, ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and others without developers building custom integrations for each one. Instead of every plugin reinventing this wheel, there’s now a shared foundation.

The Abilities API creates a registry of capabilities—things WordPress can do—in a format that AI systems can understand and use. It’s like giving your website a menu of available actions that AI assistants can read and execute. Rather than guessing how to interact with WordPress, an AI can use these structured definitions to understand what’s possible.

The MCP Adapter (Model Context Protocol Adapter) bridges these two pieces together, allowing AI systems to discover and use WordPress capabilities through a standardized protocol—the same foundation that powers modern AI integrations like those in ChatGPT’s ecosystem.

What makes this approach thoughtful is that it’s infrastructure-first. WordPress isn’t shipping a single opinionated AI feature and hoping it fits everyone’s needs. It’s laying the groundwork that lets developers, agencies, and eventually site owners build AI tools tailored to their specific workflows.

Real-World Applications

For E-commerce Sites:
An AI assistant could analyze product performance data from Google Analytics, then automatically draft product descriptions highlighting features that resonate with customers based on actual search and conversion data. The store owner could connect their WordPress site to an AI that manages inventory alerts, suggests product bundles, or generates alt text for images.

For Non-Profit Organizations:
An AI system could help draft fundraising appeals based on successful past campaigns, maintain consistent messaging across pages, or analyze donor data to suggest personalized content. It might also generate social-media variations from blog posts, helping maintain a presence across channels without adding staff time.

For Brochure and Marketing Sites:
AI could analyze visitor behavior through tools like Microsoft Clarity and recommend content improvements. It could assist with multilingual translation that preserves brand tone and context, or generate SEO suggestions based on current search trends and competitor analysis.

Because the Abilities API is extensible, developers can even create custom “abilities” unique to their site—like importing images from a specific source and generating descriptive alt text automatically, or drafting monthly performance summaries from analytics data.

These are early steps, but they set the stage for a more capable, connected, and intelligent WordPress ecosystem.

A Release About Solving Real Problems

WordPress 6.9 may not be the flashiest release, but it demonstrates something valuable: attention to the real challenges people face when building and maintaining websites. Block Notes tackles feedback chaos. Block Visibility embraces iteration. The AI tools lay the groundwork for flexible, useful integrations that evolve with the platform.

For agencies and development teams, these updates represent quality-of-life improvements that add up—less time translating feedback, fewer awkward staging workarounds, and new opportunities for automation and insight.

The December 2nd release makes WordPress more collaborative, more flexible, and more ready for where web development is heading. That’s worth getting excited about.