E131: New Visual Theme Builder, Community Grieves, Cloudflare Global Outage

This week, we’re unpacking one of the biggest internet disruptions of the year — a major Cloudflare outage that rippled across the web, taking down sites and services worldwide after a critical database issue. Meanwhile, WordPress rolls out Release Candidate 2 for version 6.9, the first-ever WordPress AI Client SDK, and a call for mentors for the new Campus Connect program.

Security was also in the spotlight with active exploits in the Post SMTP plugin, affecting over 400,000 sites, while WooCommerce 10.4 prepares for its December release featuring major accessibility and performance improvements. In business news, Seahawk secures investment from CloudLinux, and Adobe announces its $1.9B acquisition of Semrush.

The WordPress community mourns the loss of contributor Zeel Thakkar, whose work with WordCamp Ahmedabad and Asia inspired many. On the product side, DesignSetGo adds new accessibility-focused blocks, Perfmatters introduces in-plugin code snippets, and ACF Pro 6.7 Beta 1 debuts inline editing for blocks.

Rounding things out, Patchstack celebrates 1,000+ plugins now using its platform for vulnerability reporting, Rocket.net expands hosting into India, and Yoast surprises the community with Yoasie Runner, a fun SEO-themed browser game.

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Stay tuned for this week’s mix of WordPress innovation, security alerts, and community stories shaping the open web.