WordPress 7.1 'Mary Lou': The Full Album, Track by Track 🎷

It's late, but here is the full breakdown of all the features of WordPress 7.1, and it's worth exploring. 🙌

Yes, I know. WordPress 7.1 landed on August 19, 2026, and I'm showing up with the party snacks when everyone has already gone home. 😅

But here's the thing: most "what's new" posts were written before the release, from beta notes and roadmaps. Now that the dust has settled, we can look at what actually shipped, what quietly got cut, and what's worth your time.

And since I wanted to do this differently, I'm doing it the way WordPress itself named this release.

🎷 Why an album?

Every WordPress release is named after a jazz artist. This one is "Mary Lou", after the pianist, arranger and composer Mary Lou Williams. She started performing at six and moved through swing, bebop and sacred jazz. In the 1940s she turned her Harlem apartment into a nightly workshop where Monk, Dizzy Gillespie and Bud Powell traded ideas. The release team picked her for two words: reinvention and collaboration.

That's a surprisingly accurate summary of 7.1. So I'm treating it like a vinyl record: Side A, Side B, Side C, and a bonus track.

Drop the needle. 🎧

📀 The Tracklist

🅰️ Side A: The Design Side

Where "I need custom CSS for that" starts to disappear.

🎵 Track 1: Responsive Styles

What changed: You can now define how a block looks at different screen sizes from inside the editor. You can do it in Global Styles (applies to every instance of a block) or in an individual block's settings. You can also preview each viewport as you work.

Why it matters: Making the heading smaller on mobile used to mean a media query in a stylesheet, or a page builder. Now it's a setting.

For theme authors: Block themes can define their own mobile and tablet breakpoints in theme.json, overriding the defaults for both responsive styles and block visibility. Your design system, your breakpoints.

💡 7.0 already had show/hide per device. 7.1 adds the actual styling per device on top of it. Responsive support started in 7.0 and is expanded here, so don't expect it to be 100% new.

🎵 Track 2: Interactive States

What changed: Button blocks can now have distinct styles for hover, focus and active states, straight from the editor's style controls. You can set them for one button or for all buttons via Global Styles.

Why it matters: "Make the button change color on hover" used to be one of the most common reasons to open a stylesheet. It's now a color picker.

For theme authors: theme.json gets pseudo-state styling too: hover, focus, focus-visible and active. Block-level support still varies by block, so test the blocks you rely on.

🎵 Track 3: Tabs Block (new!)

What changed: A core Tabs block that organizes content into tabbed panels. Tab titles are edited in place, and each panel can hold any blocks you like.

Why it matters: Tabs were always one of those "install a plugin for it" things. Now FAQ sections, pricing comparisons and "Overview / Specs / Reviews" layouts work with core only.

🎵 Track 4: Playlist Block (new!)

What changed: A core Playlist block bundles multiple audio tracks into a single player with a track list. There's an optional waveform that gives listeners a visual sense of each track while it plays.

Why it matters: Podcasters, musicians, course creators and anyone with a "listen to these 5 audio clips" page no longer needs a plugin. It also fits this release's jazz theme nicely. 🎶

🎵 Track 5: The Small Design Stuff

Short tracks, but you'll use them daily:

• Background gradients + background images no longer fight each other. This now works across Group, Verse, Accordion, Pullquote, Post Content and Quote.
• Minimum width joins the dimension controls, so elements stop collapsing on narrow screens without a media query.
• Text shadow is available in Global Styles, so you set it once per block type.
• Image block → "Mark as decorative." Purely ornamental images can be hidden from screen readers.
• Custom HTML block supports editable nested blocks, which is handy for HTML pasted from AI tools.
• Embed block: pasting a shortcode now produces a real Embed block instead of raw text.

🎵 Track 6: Icon Block + Custom Icon Collections

What changed: 7.0 started the SVG icon work. 7.1 makes it usable. There's a core Icon block backed by an icon library, and developers can register their own collections so custom icons appear throughout the editor next to the built-ins.

Why it matters: No more shipping an icon font or inlining a pile of SVGs just to get icons in the editor. (Developer details in Track 15.)

🅱️ Side B: The Workflow Side

Where the "collaboration" half of Mary Lou lives.

🎵 Track 7: The Omnibar

What changed: The WordPress admin bar now stays with you across the dashboard, the post editor and the Site Editor, plus some small visual polish.

Why it matters: Jumping from writing a post to editing your site design no longer feels like switching apps. You always know where you are, and the familiar tools stay in reach.

🎵 Track 8: The New Media Editor

What changed: A dedicated media editor modal replaces the old inline cropper. The familiar Crop button still opens it, but inside you get:

• Freeform and aspect-ratio cropping
• Horizontal and vertical flipping
• Fine-grained and snap rotation
• Metadata editing in the same workflow
• Undo/redo while you edit

Why it matters: One focused place for "fix this image," instead of a cramped inline tool.

🎵 Track 9: Browser-Side Media Processing (the real headline) ⭐

If I had to pick one track from this album as the hit single, it's this one. And it's the quietest one.

The old way: You upload a photo, your server (via GD or ImageMagick) decodes it and generates every thumbnail size while you wait. That's why "increase your PHP memory limit" is the most common advice in WordPress land, and why big phone photos sometimes just fail.

The new way: The browser does the heavy lifting. Compression, resizing and thumbnail generation now happen client-side, using a WebAssembly build of libvips, before the file reaches your server.

What you get:

• Less server load. No more hitting PHP memory limits or timeouts on big uploads.
• Smaller files.
• Modern formats: native support for AVIF, HEIC and HDR gain maps, which means the photos modern phones actually produce.
• Opt-in GIF-to-video conversion, which usually gives much smaller files.
• Resilient uploads: progress indicators and automatic retries when the connection drops.

Your existing settings still apply (like the big-image threshold and your output format preference), and the old server-side editor stays as a fallback for anything the browser can't handle.

A bonus I like: untrusted uploaded images get decoded inside the browser's sandbox first, instead of always being parsed by image libraries on your host. It doesn't remove the server path entirely, but the common case gets safer.

🎵 Track 10: Media Library Upgrades

• Infinite scrolling in the Media Library grid by default. There's a per-user option to go back to pagination.
• Better galleries. Galleries can pull in media already attached to a post, and the inserter shows an Attached images section for the current post.
• Speculative loading defaults can now be set through environment variables or constants, so hosts and site owners can tune prefetching without writing a plugin.

🎵 Track 11: Notes Grew Up

Notes (the editorial commenting feature) got most of the collaboration love in this release:

• Rich text: bold, italic, code and links inside notes
• @mentions to loop in the right person (with email notifications in the final stretch)
• Inline notes: leave a note on a specific piece of text, not just a whole block
• Multiple conversations on the same block
• Collapsible long notes to keep the margin tidy
• Shareable revisions: hand someone a link to a specific revision for a second pair of eyes

⚠️ One honest note: real-time co-editing (the Google-Docs-style dream) is not in 7.1. More on that in the bonus track.

🎵 Track 12: Daily-Life Admin Fixes

Small things you'll notice by Tuesday:

• Command palette (Ctrl/Cmd + K) groups results into Recent, matching and Suggestions, and remembers what you used.
• The Site Editor respects your admin color scheme instead of a fixed dark background.
• Identity section: site title, tagline and icon now live together.
• Change a comment's parent from the Edit Comment screen. This was a long-standing annoyance.
• "On This Day" dashboard widget (mentioned in several release roundups) surfaces old posts and comments from the same date in previous years.

🎵 Track 13: Accessibility

7.1 includes 46 accessibility-focused tickets. Highlights:

• New wp_get_tooltip() and wp_get_toggletip() functions bring accessible tooltips to more of wp-admin, including post meta boxes and the login screen.
• Better screen reader support in admin screens, with clearer labels and more predictable navigation in post list tables.
• The new Tabs and Playlist blocks were built with accessibility in mind.

🅲 Side C: The Studio Notes (for developers)

Where we look at the mixing board.

🎵 Track 14: The Iframed Editor ⚠️

What changed: The post editor is now fully iframed for all themes, matching the Site Editor. The editing canvas runs separately from the admin UI, so admin styles stop leaking into your content, and viewport units and media queries target the canvas instead of the browser window.

Why it matters: It's mostly invisible, and layouts become more predictable. But it's also the change most likely to break something. Blocks still on Block API version 2 or lower need to move to version 3. WordPress publishes a block migration guide for this.

🧪 If you maintain custom blocks or older third-party ones, test on staging first.

🎵 Track 15: The Developer Toolbox

• SVG Icon API is public. Register your own collections and icons with wp_register_icon_collection(), wp_register_icon() and wp_get_icon(), and use them across the editor. There's also a REST endpoint, so icon collections are queryable.
• Abilities API (introduced in 6.9) gets a filterable execution lifecycle, custom validation and shared discovery, which helps with integrations and AI tooling.
• New Design System for admin UIs: semantic design tokens (color, roundness, cursor styles) and a ThemeProvider React component, so custom admin screens feel at home in WordPress.
• theme.json: responsive styling, custom breakpoints and pseudo-state styling (hover, focus, focus-visible, active).
• DataViews / DataForm filters for the screens behind Pages, Templates, Parts and Patterns in the Site Editor.
• Connectors screen adds username + application password authentication next to API keys.
• Block Bindings extend to List Item blocks.
• 20 new hooks (19 filters and 1 action). Check the Field Guide for a cleaner extension point than your current workaround.
• jQuery UI moves to 1.14.2. Dependency bumps like this break plugins quietly, so test anything that leans on jQuery UI widgets.

🎁 Bonus Track: The Cut Tracks (what didn't make it)

Every album has songs that got left on the studio floor:

• Real-time collaboration: still not enabled. The Field Guide says it got extensive testing during the cycle, but it isn't in the final release while conflict handling is worked out.
• Table of Contents block: it was on the roadmap, but it was pushed to a later release (7.2 per some coverage).
• Guidelines (editorial rules and brand voice for AI tooling): not in 7.1.
• React 19 upgrade: lands in the Gutenberg plugin first, Core later.
• Hiding the Classic block: this was merged, then reverted in July. The Classic block stays in the inserter, so nothing changes if you still use it.

🎧 Liner Notes: Should You Update?

My honest take: 7.1 is a "finish what we started" release, not a reinvention. 7.0 brought the big AI foundation and the dashboard redesign. 7.1 polishes it and finally turns a lot of "I need custom CSS" moments into plain settings.

Some practical advice:

1. Back up first, and test that you can actually restore it. 💾
2. Update a staging copy and check your custom blocks (iframed editor!) and anything using jQuery UI.
3. Run the update from Dashboard → Updates, or with WP-CLI:

wp core update
wp core update-db   # especially on multisite

1. Go straight to the latest 7.1.x. Point releases have already shipped since August, including a security release, so don't stop at 7.1.0.

The release was a team effort: 800+ contributors, 170+ first-timers and 1,500+ enhancements and fixes, led by Anne McCarthy. Thank you to everyone who made it happen. 👏

🎤 Encore

If I had to pick my top three for everyday work:

1. 🥇 Browser-side media, which fixes a 15-year-old pain quietly
2. 🥈 Responsive + interactive styles, which means way less custom CSS
3. 🥉 Notes with @mentions, a real step toward team editing

What's your favorite track on the album? Let me know in the comments. And if you've already moved to 7.1, tell me what broke (or what didn't). 👇

Sources and further reading:

• Official announcement: WordPress 7.1 "Mary Lou"
• Developer notes: WordPress 7.1 Field Guide
• Release notes: Version 7.1 documentation