Content Guidelines is now available as a 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)
- Block-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:
- Go to Gutenberg > Experiments in your WordPress admin
- Check “Guidelines”
- 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: accessibility requirements, linking practices, formatting conventions, or rules that don’t fit the categories above.
Import, Export, and Revisions
An Actions section at the bottom of the page provides:
- Export — Download guidelines as a
guidelines.jsonfile for backup or sharing across sites. - Import — Upload a previously exported JSON 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 plugin 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 Type (wp_content_guideline) with each guideline category stored as post meta with revision support. This gives us atomic updates, native revision history, flexible schema evolution, and simple import/export.
REST API — The feature exposes endpoints at /wp/v2/content-guidelines for retrieving, creating, and updating guidelines. You can filter 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 API for custom categories — PHP filters and registration hooks 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 core 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:
- Install the Gutenberg plugin (version 22.7 or later)
- Enable the experiment under Settings > Gutenberg Experiments
- 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.