Editorial Updates for WordPress AI

AI that applies an editor's unresolved notes to post content, block by block, and lets the author review and roll back the result.

Overview

The official WordPress AI plugin could already add AI editorial notes to blocks. Issue #250 asked for the next step: apply those notes automatically, without taking control away from the author. It shipped as "Refine from Notes" and was later renamed Editorial Updates (#528).

Key challenges

Revisions are whole-post snapshots.

Rolling back one block's AI edit would undo all the others. I proposed shipping apply-all with review in revisions as the MVP, and tracking per-change accept/reject as a follow-up (#324).

The view we needed was behind a private API.

The block-based visual revisions view was gated to core. I documented the blocker in #289. Then, in #861, I opened the view by triggering core's own Revisions button (the same approach WordPress's test utilities use), with a fallback to the classic revision.php screen.

Output in the content's language.

An English context wrapper was biasing the model toward English. I removed it and added a language-matching rule, following the maintainers' pattern from #357.

What shipped

Block-by-block refinement in batches of 4 with a live progress indicator
Results saved as a revision for review and rollback
Provider errors shown to the user instead of a generic failure
A link to visual revisions with a classic-screen fallback (#861)
PHPUnit and end-to-end tests

← All work