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Program transcript

Hello, I’m Alicia Ireland, and you’re listening to WPpodcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.

In this episode, you’ll find the information from June 8 to 14, 2026.

The Core team has integrated into the WordPress 7.1 development branch the system that enables user registration with email accounts compatible with UTF-8 characters.

The is_email() and sanitize_email() functions now natively accept these addresses, and a new WP_Email_Address class is added that allows access to both the ASCII representation of the address — useful for HTML attributes like the href of a mailto link — and the Unicode representation, designed to be displayed to the user.

Support can be disabled via filters for cases where a plugin integrates with an external service that doesn’t yet support this type of address.

Important notice for those using WP Now in their local development flow: