BeyondWords – AI audio for publishers

7.2.0

Release date: 25th September 2026

Enhancements

• #631 Audio blocks are now marked with the data-beyondwords-audio attribute in the content sent to BeyondWords, so the API handles them as audio.

Fixes

• #630 Fix a block’s language and voice fields staying empty when Customize is switched off and back on.
• #639 Fix the block editor crashing when the BeyondWords API returns an error for script or video templates.
• #638, #640 Fix “Publishing failed” in the block editor for posts with legacy BeyondWords data from older plugin versions.
• #641 Fix audio generation failing on sites where another plugin’s get_the_excerpt filter needs the post, when “Prepend excerpt” is on.

Codebase Enhancements

• #633 Fix the flaky block-voices Cypress spec by waiting for the save to finish before reading post meta.
• #635 Wait for the save to finish in the generate-audio Cypress spec too.

7.1.0

Release date: 4th September 2026

Enhancements

• #626 Import Tool: only offer to import to post types BeyondWords supports, and say why each skipped record was skipped.
• #623 Per-block language and voice in the block editor.

Fixes

• #627 Give audio creates a longer timeout, and recover the content ID when a create still times out after the API accepted it.
• #626 Debug Tool: fix the fatal error raised when activating the plugin.
  • Download the updated ZIP from this release — every earlier build fails on activation.
• #623 Fix “Generation disabled” being ignored on blocks nested inside a Group, Columns or other container.
  • Audio regenerated for an affected post no longer includes those blocks.
• #621 Fix the fatal error shown when the plugin is replaced with a different version from the Plugins screen.
  • Switching away from an existing 7.0.0 install still shows it once; the version being replaced has to be 7.1.0 or later for the fix to apply.

Deprecations

• #626 Removed the SpeechKit Export Tool, which only exported post meta the plugin stopped writing in v4.0.
  • Site Health and the editor’s Inspect panel report the same data for current installs.

Compatibility

• #626 Debug Tool: request logging is now switched off on WordPress VIP, where it could not append to its log file safely.
• #624 Tested up to WordPress 7.1.

Codebase Enhancements

• #626 Install and smoke-test the extension plugins in CI, and document them in doc/extension-plugins.md.
• #624 Turn off Cypress web security so the block editor specs run on WordPress 7.1.
• #629 Finalise the 7.1.0 release notes.
• #628 Dependency upgrades.
• #625 Mount the plugin at a fixed speechkit slug in the local wp-env environments.
• #622 Correct the 7.0.0 changelog entry for the “Add Player” block preview.

7.0.0

Release date: 12th August 2026

Enhancements

• #566 Poll the content status before embedding the player.
  • The block and classic editor previews now wait until content has finished processing — showing a loading spinner meanwhile — instead of embedding the player immediately and caching a 404 when the audio or video isn’t ready yet.
• #520 New settings page and project-wide rewrite.
  • Simplifies the plugin settings — removing many tabs, fields and options — so that audio/video generation and player display are managed from your BeyondWords project settings.
  • Standardises the codebase to WordPress VIP coding standards and migrates CI tooling from Yarn to npm.
• #527 BeyondWords editor redesign for the block and classic editors.
  • New Content (Source, Script template), Format (Output, Video template, Video size), Voice (Language, Model, Voice) and Player (Embed) settings, available in both editors.
  • The Player “Embed” setting replaces the “Display player” checkbox — choose “None” to hide the player on a post.
• #536 Wire up the Player “Embed” setting.
  • The Embed choice (audio/video × post/script) now controls the rendered player, rather than only showing or hiding it.
• #537 Opt-in “Customize” voice and language controls.
  • A per-post “Customize” toggle (off by default) reveals the Language and Voice pickers; the project’s default language is pre-selected when enabled.
  • The Voice and Language settings are consolidated into the plugin sidebar.
• #558 Reorder the voice picker to Language → Model → Voice.
  • “Model” is now a language-level filter that narrows the Voice list.
• #557 Preselect “Generate audio” by taxonomy term.
  • Reinstates preselecting audio generation for posts assigned specific terms, now across all hierarchical taxonomies and without marking posts as having unsaved changes.
• #555 Live player preview for the “Add Player” block. (Reverted in #568 before 7.0.0 shipped — the block shows a static placeholder in the editor; the player still renders on the front end.)
• #563 State-reflecting generation labels and “Legacy” model rename.
  • The “Generate audio” toggle now reads “Generation enabled” / “Generation disabled”; the “Standard” voice model bucket is relabelled “Legacy”.
• #532 Cache API reads and defer audio generation on WordPress VIP.
  • Editor dropdown data is cached in 15-minute transients; on VIP, audio create/update is deferred to WP-Cron so the save request returns immediately.
• #598 Send taxonomy terms as tags.
  • Breaking: the metadata param is no longer sent. Code hooking beyondwords_content_params to write $params['metadata'] must append to $params['tags'] instead, or it will raise a fatal error.
• #611 Tidy the classic editor metabox spacing and Content ID layout.

Fixes

• #618 Poll content status before embedding the block-editor Preview panel player, so a still-processing post (more likely with a customised voice/model) no longer shows a broken preview.
• #613 Fix author names with an ampersand showing as Smith & Sons in the BeyondWords dashboard.
• #612 Fix tags with an ampersand showing as r&d in the BeyondWords dashboard.
• #610 Stop the bulk “Generate audio” notice counting skipped posts as failures.
• #606 Fix posts published with no player when two saves race to create audio.
• #564 Sweep the paired _transient_timeout_beyondwords_* rows on uninstall, so no orphaned option rows are left behind.
• #540 Escape the player onload attribute to prevent stored XSS via the Content ID.
• #539 Add capability checks to the bulk-edit AJAX handler.
• #541 Prevent a player SDK error from clobbering saved content on Fetch.
• #554 Return JSON from the bulk-edit AJAX handler and catch delete errors.
• #553 Resolve the post ID in Content::get_content_without_excluded_blocks.
• #551 Track live meta for the Inspect panel Remove button.
• #550 Coerce non-string API error messages to avoid a fatal TypeError.
• #543 Guard a null languages API result in the classic editor voice select.
• #542 Surface a WP_Error from get_content() instead of a fatal TypeError.
• #588 Ship symfony/dom-crawler 5.4.52 to fix CVE-2026-45071 (XXE / local file disclosure).
  • The composer constraint now floors at the patched release, so a vulnerable version can no longer be bundled.

Deprecations

• Removed the beyondwords_player_style, beyondwords_player_content, beyondwords_title_voice_id, beyondwords_summary_voice_id and beyondwords_disabled post meta keys.
  • Existing values are preserved in the database and only removed on full uninstall; beyondwords_disabled is migrated to the new “Embed” setting on upgrade.
• The beyondwords-* <head> meta tags are now only emitted for the client-side (Magic Embed) integration.
• #601 Removed the “Script” option from the post Source setting, which now offers “Post” or “Post + script”.
  • Posts saved as “Script” are migrated to “Post + script” on upgrade, and keep embedding their script asset.

Compatibility

• Tested up to WordPress 7.0.
• #515 PHP 8.5 support.
  • Run unit and e2e tests against PHP 8.0 and PHP 8.5 in GitHub Actions.
  • Bumped phpVersion in wp-env to 8.5.

Codebase Enhancements

• #619 Run the Cypress suite with pretty permalinks, fixing the block editor Preview panel content-status poll spec.
• #591 Refresh the developer documentation in doc/ against the v7 codebase.
• #608 Fix the intermittent detached-DOM failures in the block editor Cypress specs.
• #607 Update two PHPUnit tests left stale by the Script-only Source removal.
• #602 Align the player-visibility docs and Cypress specs with the “Embed” setting.
• #600 Add must-follow documentation and changelog rules to AGENTS.md, with CLAUDE.md and Copilot pointer files.
• #533 Fix failing Cypress tests for v7.
• #538 Remove the unused updatePostMeta util from the Inspect panel.
• #562 Re-enable Plugin Check on plugin-check-action v1.1.7.
• #560 Cancel superseded CI runs via a concurrency group.
• #516 Remove environment from the GitHub workflows.
• #517, #535 Update GitHub Actions dependencies.
• #514, #529, #534, #616 Dependency upgrades.
• Various dependency updates to clear Dependabot security warnings.

See the previous changelogs here.