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All the good WordPress stuff, once every two weeks

DEV: Merge With Caution

Welcome to DEV, your fortnightly glance at where WordPress is headed next.

Buckle up. We’ve got the news, the community moves and the stats to help you merge into 2026 smoothly.

Stick around to the end to see why that package you ordered last year still hasn’t arrived yet.

In today’s edition:

  • WP Engine snaps up Big Bite to level up enterprise WordPress publishing.
  • WordPress 7.0 needs you (yes, you!) and no, you don’t have to write code to get involved.
  • A community scholarship honours Zeel Thakkar’s legacy, helping more people find their place in WordPress.

Hot Off The Presses: What’s New?

LinkedIn post joking about using a fake Cloudflare error page during site outages

Whether you think this is ethical, you gotta admit it’s pretty clever.

Of course, it only works because CloudFlare is about as reliable as a chocolate teapot and a random unexpected outage is not far fetched in the slightest.

It’s kinda the internet version of blaming a particularly bad fart on the dog, isn’t it?

No one will ever suspect you were the culprit all along!

In the meantime, if you’re looking for something to read while you procrastinate on fixing things a little longer… you’re in the right place.

WP Engine Takes a Big Bite Out of the Enterprise Publishing Space

WordPress hosting giant WP Engine has officially acquired Big Bite, a UK-based enterprise agency that has been building editor-centric workflows, newsroom platforms, and custom publishing systems for major media brands for over a decade.

They’ve also made plenty of impact across the open web, such as:

Big Bite’s roster of clients reads like a who’s who of global newsroom heavyweights, from The Times and The Wall Street Journal to New York Post and Metro. The deal means the agency arm of Big Bite will wind down, no longer taking on new clients as they fold into WP Engine’s core engineering organisation.

The aim is to bake editorial tools and publishing workflows directly into WP Engine’s product stack rather than serving them up as bespoke builds.

In a world where content is still king and editorial workflows can feel like herding cats, this move signals WP Engine getting serious about giving publishers some pretty snazzy built-in tools.