Guide

PRC Platform 1.7

Release Date: May 21, 2026 Previous Version: 1.6.4

PRC Platform 1.7 brings the publishing platform into the WordPress 7 era: smarter newsletters, reusable inline Block Bits, passwordless accounts, AI-assisted editorial tools, and platform hardening across security, performance, and release operations.

Welcome to PRC Platform 1.7!

This release focuses on the tools editors, researchers, and developers use every day. Newsletters become a first-class publishing workflow. Inline dynamic text is easier to reuse across blocks and research products. Account flows move away from passwords. AI features begin using the new WordPress agent and ability patterns. Behind the scenes, the platform gets safer, faster, and easier to ship.

What's inside

Explore reusable inline content, richer newsletter production, passwordless user accounts, better design controls, research audience workflows, and the next generation of PRC's AI infrastructure.

AI and Agents for Publishing Work

PRC Platform now has a deeper AI foundation. Trending News has moved into the agents-api architecture with discrete abilities, workflow history, Slack follow-ups, and a renamed prc-agents-trending-news surface.

This builds on the WordPress Agents API, which gives us a path to fully featured AI agents inside the platform. Instead of one-off generation buttons, future agents can hold conversations, remember useful facts from earlier exchanges, call approved PRC abilities, and help editors complete multi-step publishing tasks.

The old monolithic trending-news analysis pipeline is now split into independently callable steps:

  • Fetch headlines
  • Filter and deduplicate
  • Extract categories
  • Enrich with related PRC posts
  • Rank by importance
  • Analyze stories

This makes analysis easier to rerun, debug, and extend. It also introduces a Trending News analyst agent for Slack DMs and follow-up questions.

Editors also get more AI assistance in the places where draft copy matters most:

  • Newsletter subject-line suggestions
  • Newsletter preview-text suggestions
  • Story Item title generation

AI prompts now explicitly select from PRC-approved Claude and Gemini providers, avoiding accidental fallback to unconfigured models.

Newsletters Become a First-Class Publishing Channel

Newsletter Builder has grown from an editor helper into a fuller publishing workflow for email.

This release adds a file-based email template system, a newsletter editor sidebar, template selection, Mailchimp segment support, system-email delivery through Mandrill, and category support for the prc_newsletter post type.

Editors can now choose between Mailchimp and System Email delivery modes. System Email sends the rendered newsletter HTML to a pre-built recipient list, which makes dataset and quiz audience workflows possible without building a Mailchimp campaign first.

Newsletter Glue migration support is also included. Legacy newsletterglue posts can be converted into prc_newsletter posts, with proprietary blocks transformed to core equivalents. Migration runs automatically on activation through Action Scheduler, and a WP-CLI command is available for dry-runs, debugging, and retries.

Other newsletter improvements include:

  • Email templates discovered from PHP template files
  • Campaign status labels in the newsletter list table
  • Slack notifications when Mailchimp campaigns move to sent
  • More accurate editor-to-email preview rendering
  • New-post pattern chooser support for newsletter patterns
  • Sender-name display in the preview inbox bar

Block Bits: Reusable Inline Content

A new prc-block-bits plugin centralizes inline dynamic text and link behavior.

Block Bits let plugins register small pieces of dynamic inline content that editors can insert into paragraphs and headings. This replaces several one-off rich-text format systems with a shared registration API, editor UI, and render pipeline.

This initial release includes:

  • PHP and JavaScript registration APIs
  • A central render walker
  • An editor toolbar picker
  • Category grouping for larger bit libraries
  • Modal search when many bits apply to a block
  • Settings toggles to enable or disable registered bits
  • Built-in bits for icon spans, copyright text, and shareable text

Religious Landscape Study, Quiz Builder, Political Typology, Religious Typology, and Political Typology 2026 have all started migrating to this shared Block Bits system.

Passwordless Accounts and Self-Service Controls

User Accounts now supports passwordless magic-link sign-in and federated provider sign-in through Google, Apple, Microsoft, and GitHub.

New users are guided through profile completion, and account state can be represented with more flexible blocks:

  • Logged-out new visitor
  • Logged-out returning visitor
  • Logged-in new visitor
  • Logged-in returning visitor

Editors and site builders also get new account-related blocks:

  • prc-user-accounts/user-state
  • prc-user-accounts/user-data-download
  • prc-user-accounts/delete-user

Authenticated users can download their stored profile data as JSON, and they can permanently delete their account after email verification and confirmation.

This release also includes significant account security hardening:

  • Firebase ID token verification for opt-in flows
  • Permission checks for user-data REST routes
  • Safer error handling
  • Better output escaping
  • Sanitized optional REST parameters
  • Cleaner loading states during sign-in and profile completion

Better Editor and Design Tools

Editors get several new design and block-editing improvements.

The new Dark Mode Toggle block lets visitors override their operating-system color-scheme preference. The choice is stored locally so the design system's light and dark tokens resolve to the visitor's preference.

Button icons are now handled through one unified has-icon style with a searchable Font Awesome Pro icon picker. The older icon__* and brand__* styles are retired from the picker and migrated on edit.

Navigation Mega Menu now uses the browser's native <dialog> element for its overlay. That moves focus, escape handling, outside-click behavior, and top-layer rendering closer to browser primitives while preserving existing markup compatibility for one release.

Other editor improvements include:

  • A shared IconPicker component in @prc/components
  • Inspector control limits for nested password-field inputs
  • More reliable Tokens List rendering when values collide
  • ARIA-friendly role support on input markup
  • Updated RLS button templates using the new has-icon style

Image Mismatch Repair

Attachments Inspector now includes an image-mismatch module for legacy core/image blocks left behind by the early site migration.

When an image block points to a legacy asset URL but the post has a matching attachment, editors can fix the mismatch directly from the block toolbar. If there is one match, the block updates immediately. If there are multiple matches, the editor shows a thumbnail picker.

On the frontend, users with edit permission see an admin-bar warning on singular posts when image mismatches are detected. The warning links back to the editor and lists the affected filenames.

Research Products and Audience Workflows

Datasets and quizzes now have audience-building WP-CLI commands backed by Firebase Cloud Functions and OIDC ID tokens.

New commands include:

wp prc datasets build-audience --dataset-id=<id>
wp prc quiz build-group-owners-audience --quiz-id=<id>

These commands resolve user activity into deduped, verified email lists and can create draft prc_newsletter posts in System Email mode.

Religious Landscape Study also gains formal Block Bits support for dynamic language in templates:

  • Banner title
  • "Among…" title text
  • Survey year

RLS SQL queries have been hardened with prepared statements for URL-derived input, and year pills now update active state correctly when switching survey years.

Publish Workflows Improvements

Status Board and Calendar now share a Content Type filter. Editors can view all workflow-enabled post types together or narrow the board and calendar to one type without a full page reload.

When multiple post types are loaded in parallel, calendar results are re-sorted and capped consistently so ordering stays stable across post types.

Presence hooks now degrade cleanly when the optional Presence API plugin is not active. That removes repeated 404s, avoids unnecessary heartbeats, and prevents downstream render churn in editor SlotFills.

Developer's Toolbox

This release updates key platform dependencies and improves local and release workflows.

Composer-managed WordPress plugins now include newer versions of:

  • WP AI
  • AI Provider for Anthropic
  • AI Provider for Google
  • Gutenberg
  • Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer

The platform also now excludes /wp-json/ paths from the VIP lowercase redirect, preserving case-sensitive REST path segments such as VideoPress GUIDs.

Other behind-the-scenes improvements include:

  • Playground and Turbo bootstrap cleanup
  • Print Engine dependency declarations
  • Icon Library crawler exclusions for SVG sprite assets
  • Public open-source shipping workflow for prc-icon-library
  • Backport workflow improvements for conflicted release PRs
  • Release automation fixes for title formatting and dependency setup

Migration Notes

Trending News has a breaking rename and architecture migration. Update MCP clients, Slack app URLs, automations, and runbooks for the new names:

  • Plugin slug and workspace: @prc/agents-trending-news
  • Ability prefix: prc-agents-trending-news/*
  • Workflow ID: prc-agents-trending-news/daily-analysis
  • Agent slug: prc-agents-trending-news-analyst
  • REST routes: /wp-json/prc-agents-trending-news/v1/* and /v2/slack/*
  • WP-CLI command: wp prc agents-trending-news run
  • Settings option: prc_agents_trending_news_settings

Legacy v1 Slack routes proxy forward with a deprecation header, but clients should move to the new routes.

Newsletter Glue

Newsletter Glue migration runs on activation through Action Scheduler. Use WP-CLI for dry-runs, retries, and debugging:

wp prc newsletter migrate

Migrated posts are excluded from the active email pipeline so they do not generate new Mailchimp drafts, email HTML, Mandrill sends, or sidebar JavaScript.

Audience Builders

Dataset and quiz audience builders now use Firebase OIDC ID tokens instead of shared x-api-key secrets.

Runbooks should stop depending on PRC_PLATFORM_FIREBASE_AUDIENCES_API_KEY and use the new CLI flows:

wp prc datasets build-audience --dataset-id=<id>
wp prc quiz build-group-owners-audience --quiz-id=<id>

User Accounts

Password-based registration and reset-password code paths have been removed. Custom account flows should move to magic-link or provider sign-in.

The old prc-user-accounts/login-logout block is replaced by prc-user-accounts/user-state.

Button Icons

Legacy icon__* button styles are replaced by the unified has-icon style and icon attributes. Existing content is migrated when edited.

Learn More

  • Full changelog: v1.6.4...release/1.7
  • Previous end-user release notes: docs/release-notes/1.6/1-6-end-user.md

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