Content Guidelines is now available as a GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ experiment — a single place in WordPress to define the content standards that shape how your site’s content is written, edited, and managed.

Background

In early February, we proposed Content Guidelines as a Gutenberg experiment. The idea: give site owners a first-class place in WordPress to capture editorial voice, tone, image preferences, and other content standards — so every actor in the ecosystem, whether human or automated, works from the same source of truth. While the original proposal framed this as “Content Guidelines,” we realised during development that the concept extends well beyond content — to design guidelines, coding standards, and more — so we dropped “Content” from the public-facing naming before release.

What’s included

Guidelines in Gutenberg 22.7 delivers:

• A dedicated Settings page for defining site-wide guidelines across multiple categories (#75164, #75420)
• BlockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience.-level guidelines for setting content rules on individual block types (#76187)
• Import, Export, and Revision History to keep guidelines portable and recoverable (#76155)

How to try it

Guidelines is behind the Gutenberg experiments flag. To enable it:

1. Go to Gutenberg > Experiments in your WordPress admin
2. Check “Guidelines”
3. Save changes

A new “Guidelines” submenu will appear under Settings.

You can also try it directly in WordPress Playground.

The settings page

Guideline categories

The page organizes guidelines into expandable accordion sections:

• Site — Your site’s goals, personality, target audience, and industry. Foundational context that any tool or contributor can reference.
• Copy — Tone, voice, brand personality, and vocabulary preferences. An editorial style guide, living inside WordPress.
• Images — Preferred image styles, colors, moods, and subjects to include or avoid.
• Blocks — Per-block-type rules for content blocks. For example, specifying that Paragraph blocks should favour short sentences, or that Image blocks should always include descriptive alt text.
• Additional — Anything else: accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) requirements, linking practices, formatting conventions, or rules that don’t fit the categories above.

Import, Export, and RevisionsRevisions The WordPress revisions system stores a record of each saved draft or published update. The revision system allows you to see what changes were made in each revision by dragging a slider (or using the Next/Previous buttons). The display indicates what has changed in each revision.

An Actions section at the bottom of the page provides:

• Export — Download guidelines as a guidelines.json file for backup or sharing across sites.
• Import — Upload a previously exported JSONJSON JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, is a minimal, readable format for structuring data. It is used primarily to transmit data between a server and web application, as an alternative to XML. file to replace the current guidelines.
• Revision History — Browse and restore previous versions, powered by WordPress’s built-in revision system.

Architecture overview

For developers and pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party. authors interested in building on top of Guidelines, here’s a brief overview. The full technical discussion is tracked in #75258.

Storage — Guidelines uses a Custom Post TypeCustom Post Type WordPress can hold and display many different types of content. A single item of such a content is generally called a post, although post is also a specific post type. Custom Post Types gives your site the ability to have templated posts, to simplify the concept. (wp_content_guideline) with each guideline categoryCategory The 'category' taxonomy lets you group posts / content together that share a common bond. Categories are pre-defined and broad ranging. stored as post metaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. with revision support. This gives us atomic updates, native revision history, flexible schema evolution, and simple import/export.

REST APIREST API The REST API is an acronym for the RESTful Application Program Interface (API) that uses HTTP requests to GET, PUT, POST and DELETE data. It is how the front end of an application (think “phone app” or “website”) can communicate with the data store (think “database” or “file system”) https://developer.wordpress.org/rest-api/ — The feature exposes endpoints at /wp/v2/content-guidelines for retrieving, creating, and updating guidelines. You can filterFilter Filters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output. by category (?category=copy) or block type (?block=core/paragraph), making it straightforward for any plugin to retrieve only the guidelines it needs. All endpoints require the manage_options capability.

Integration surface — Guidelines intentionally focuses on capture and retrieval. It doesn’t enforce rules or generate content on its own. Instead, it creates a shared foundation that other features can build on — whether that’s AI-powered tools from the AI Experiments plugin, style checkers, linting plugins, or onboarding wizards.

What’s next

This is the first iteration. We’re exploring several directions as the experiment evolves:

• AI Experiments integration — Making guidelines available to experiments like Generate Review Notes, so AI-generated feedback reflects your site’s actual standards
• Plugin APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. for custom categories — PHPPHP PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. https://www.php.net/manual/en/preface.php filters and registration hooksHooks In WordPress theme and development, hooks are functions that can be applied to an action or a Filter in WordPress. Actions are functions performed when a certain event occurs in WordPress. Filters allow you to modify certain functions. Arguments used to hook both filters and actions look the same. so plugins can extend the default categories with their own (e.g., “SEO Guidelines”, “Product Descriptions”)
• Richer guideline structure — Support for more structured formats within categories, such as DOs and DON’Ts, examples, and nested sub-sections
• WordPress 7.1 proposal — We’re considering proposing Guidelines for inclusion in WordPress 7.1, moving it from an experiment toward a coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. feature that the broader ecosystem can build on.

Get involved

We’d love your feedback as this experiment evolves. If you’d like to try it:

1. Install the Gutenberg plugin (version 22.7 or later)
2. Enable the experiment under Settings > Gutenberg Experiments
3. Head to Settings > Guidelines and start defining your content standards

The most helpful feedback right now:

• What content standards do you wish tools would consistently follow?
• Does the category structure (Site, Copy, Images, Blocks, Additional) cover your needs?
• If you’re a plugin author, how would you use the REST API?

As always, we welcome feedback, testing, and contributions from the community. The tracking issue is #75171, and feedback is welcome there or in the comments below.

Contributors

Thank you to everyone who helped shape and review this feature, including @aagam94 @andrewserong @aswasif007 @fditrapani @iamchughmayank @isotropic @ramonopoly @saroshaga and the broader WordPress community for feedback on the initial proposal and code reviews.

Props to @dhruvang21 and @gziolo for reviewing this post.