It’s a big week in WordPress education: we just launched the Second Edition of Up and Running, which is awesome, and Zac Gordon is accepting enrollees for his JavaScript for WordPress Master Course.

Over the weekend Brian Krogsgard from Post Status published an audio/video interview he did with Matt Mullenweg (WordPress’s BDFL, for those who don’t recognize the name immediately). They range a little, but the undeniable focus is the two big things that came out of the “State of the Word” session at WordCamp US.

Three major changes in WordPress 4.7 jump out as having the power to significantly transform how I do my work every day.

If you’ve been wanting to get your hands on WordPress 4.7, you can now get the Beta 1 version from wordpress.org. The feature list is looking really spicy. Standouts include:

In line with this week’s interview with REST API educator galore Josh Pollock, here’s a public service announcement that Josh has published a wonderful and completely free (as in beer) e-book introduction to the REST API over on Torque.

Fans of the WordPress REST API will know that it’s taking forever to ship. Some reasons are great—thousands of hours from dozens of volunteers to make sure it’s as right as it can be when it goes into WordPress core—and some are not so great: an oddly political merge process dominated by a few voices with outsize influence.

Last week was the occasion of a serious Slack dispute over the timeline and process for including the Rest API into WordPress core. This summary and editorial on the subject by Brian Krogsgard is characteristically rigorous, thorough, and thoughtful. Strongly recommended reading if you want to understand the major debate shaping the technical future of WordPress.