As of ~16:00UTC today (8 July 2026), all rules configured to enforce the desired contributor workflows and quality requirements in the Gutenberg 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/ repository have been converted from branch protection rules to repository rulesets. This was done to fix a broken step in the plugin 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. release process where the GitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged by the repository owner. https://github.com/ app responsible for pushing version bump commits to trunk was unable to do so.

While rulesets are an iteration on branch A directory in Subversion. WordPress uses branches to store the latest development code for each major release (3.9, 4.0, etc.). Branches are then updated with code for any minor releases of that branch. Sometimes, a major version of WordPress and its minor versions are collectively referred to as a "branch", such as "the 4.0 branch". protection rules, they are not a flat out replacement and can be used together. However, they do have several advantages over branch protection rules, including more flexibility, the ability to layer them, and being publicly accessible for contributors to understand why they may be unable to perform a certain action on a specific branch.

After looking through the pre-existing protection rules, there did not appear to be any benefit to keeping any one branch protection rule over a ruleset. Best efforts were made to ensure the new rulesets function identically to the previous protection rules, but there may be some nuance that was missed.

If you happen to notice any permission or capability A capability is permission to perform one or more types of task. Checking if a user has a capability is performed by the current_user_can function. Each user of a WordPress site might have some permissions but not others, depending on their role. For example, users who have the Author role usually have permission to edit their own posts (the “edit_posts” capability), but not permission to edit other users’ posts (the “edit_others_posts” capability).-related problems, please mention them in the comments below or share them in #core-editor so they can be fixed.

Props @jorbin for comparing the new rulesets with the previous branch protection rules, and proofreading this post.