WordPress 6.8, “Vibe Coding,” Cursor AI, and Local Tech Events

It’s almost time for the March YEG WordPress Meetup — there are only a few setas left, so RSVP quickly. We’ll be talking about How to Pick and Choose the Right Plugins and Themes.

WordPress 6.8 is coming soon

What’s new for WordPress developers in March? WordPress core dev Troy Chaplin (over at Carleton University) and one of the WordCamp Canada organizing leads breaks it down:

WordPress 6.8 is less than a month away, bringing a bucketful (pun intended! It’s March!) of improvements from recent Gutenberg updates.  March brings lots of things to test, contribute to, and prepare for what’s ahead.

Get the details at .org.

Learn all about WordPress 6.8 in full detail from the Source of Truth at Gutenberg Times where Birgit Pauli-Haack always has the latest information and lots of helpful tips.

The current default WordPress core theme, Twenty Twenty-Five is quite powerful. We’ve used it to begin building the WordCamp Canada website. Now there’s a whole book about it available on Amazon from Koji Kuno.

WordCamp Canada: Sponsors, Speakers, and Volunteers Needed

I’m one of the co-organizers for WCEH this year. WordCamp Canada 2025 will take place on October 16-17, 2025 at Carleton University. If you’d like to be involved in any way, please get in touch. Find me and the WCEH team on WP Canada Slack: wpslack.ca

Setting up Your Local WordPress Development Environment

Want to set up a pro development environment to work on custom themes and plugins? Nick has a great blog post on that too over at WordPress.com. It shows you how to set up local WordPress development workflows using Automattic’s fast and free local dev app, Studio.

Brian Coords (Woo) explains how to set up a local WordPress environment with Herd, DBngin, and WP-CLI. He’s also got a helpful how-to guide on pulling WordPress from production to your local environment with a WP-CLI bash script.

If you use VS Code as your IDE, WordPress OG Tom McFarlin has shared an extension that lets you switch between PHP coding standards and use PHP_CodeSniffer.

Building WordPress Themes, Blocks, and Plugins with Cursor AI

Elliot Richmond (squareonesoftware) also showed his work using Cursor AI to build a WordPress Block Theme — not a plugin. Elliot was pretty happy with his results.

Nick Diego and Ryan Welcher (Automattic) also showed their work using Cursor together live to make some WordPress blocks. Ryan thinks it’s great for creating simple starts — POCs and MVPs.

The all-important theme.json file can get pretty big and complicated in modern themes. WordPress core dev Nick Diego (Automattic) shows how to use Cursor to wrangle it.

Using Cursor and Other LLM Agents to Write Code

Here’s how Simon Willison (Datasette) uses LLMs to help him write code.

David Artiss (Automattic) warns that plugins generated by Cursor (and similar tools) “aren’t ready for primetime.” Expect to work through any code you generate and use the WordPress Coding Standards plugin checker plugin.

Remkus De Vries (Scanfully) says there are certain steps you should take to get the most out of coding with Cursor for WordPress projects.

Nick Diego and Brian Coords demoed some live plugin-building with several different LLM agents.

Jon Bossenger, also at Automattic, screen shared his experiment with “vibe “coding and came to a conclusion similar to David Artiss’s.

Technically, “vibe coding” means “building software with an LLM without reviewing the code it writes.” That’s fine if you’re just doing blue sky, experimental, throwaway projects for fun and to see what you might learn — but not distributing that code.

Did you know you can organize the next WP YEG Meetup?

Free Local Tech Events