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 Wrigleycolleague, Tim Nashcolleague 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
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.
🗓️ 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.