---
title: "How close is WordPress to Google Docs style collaboration? This Week in WordPress 347"
date: 2025-09-08
author: "Courtney Robertson"
featured_image: "https://courtneyr.dev/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/this-week-in-wordpress-347-evan.webp"
categories:
  - name: "WordPress"
    url: "/category/wptips.md"
  - name: "Speaking"
    url: "/category/speaking.md"
tags:
  - name: "wordpress"
    url: "/tag/wordpress.md"
  - name: "wcus"
    url: "/tag/wcus.md"
---

# How close is WordPress to Google Docs style collaboration? This Week in WordPress 347

How close is WordPress to Google Docs style collaboration? On This Week in WordPress 347, recorded shortly after WordCamp US 2025, I described block level comments as the first step. I joined [Nathan Wrigley](https://wpbuilds.social/@nathan)colleague, [Tim Nash](https://profiles.wordpress.org/tnash/)colleague and Rhys Wynne on the panel.

## 🎙️ Episode details

- **Show:** This Week in WordPress 347, “Evan,” from WP Builds
- **Host:** Nathan Wrigley
- **Panel:** Tim Nash, Rhys Wynne and me, Courtney Robertson
- **Live:** Monday, September 8, 2025. The podcast then followed on September 9.
- **Topics:** block comments in WordPress 6.9, sponsored contributors, Playground blueprints, and selling security
- **Show notes:** [This Week in WordPress 347 on WP Builds, with every news link and a transcript](https://wpbuilds.com/2025/09/09/this-week-in-wordpress-347/)

 Captions and an interactive transcript are in the player controls (Transcript button).The captions come from a machine transcript I generated, and I haven’t proofread them yet. WP Builds also publishes a full transcript on the show notes page.

## 💬 Block comments as step one toward collaboration

My understanding then was that WordPress 6.9 would bring notes at the block level: you could comment on a paragraph, but not highlight words inside it the way Google Docs allows. Real time collaboration had already been named as a project goal, so I saw block comments as the first step, with the rest still in progress.

## 🧰 Beyond block comments: the rest of the panel

### Sponsored contributors after layoffs

I’d been following contributors affected by Google’s layoffs. I was glad that Adam Silverstein, whose WordCamp US talk on AI testing and tooling I enjoyed, had found a sponsored project to contribute to.

### Playground blueprints get a friendlier tool

Meanwhile, Alex Kirk’s update to the Playground Step Library gave people a user interface for building a WordPress Playground blueprint, plus an npm package for those who prefer the terminal.

### Why hosts struggle to sell security

On a survey about what WordPress professionals prioritize, I said hosts want safety and security first, but customers rarely buy on it. So selling hosting means taking that pain off the customer’s plate.

## 🧪 What can you take from this block comments episode?

- **Editorial teams:** test block comments on a staging site before you plan a workflow around them.
- **Trainers:** a prebuilt Playground blueprint makes a workshop start in seconds.

Also, more conversations like this one live in [my podcast and speaking archive](https://courtneyr.dev/category/speaking/).

## 🗓️ Archival note

This panel streamed live on September 8, 2025, and WP Builds published it the next day. On November 9, 2026, I moved this post to the live date and replaced its earlier text. That version was a news roundup that didn’t say what I contributed, so I rebuilt it around my part of the conversation from the publisher’s automated transcript. For the full news list, use the show notes linked above. However, However, I reviewed the transcript, not the recording.





[](https://courtneyr.dev/2025/09/08/block-comments-this-week-in-wordpress-347/)Courtney RobertsonHow close is WordPress to Google Docs style collaboration? This Week in WordPress 347