Summary

WordPress 7.0 RC2 tightened the Abilities API category slug validation regex to /^[a-z0-9]+(?:-[a-z0-9]+)*$/, rejecting any slug containing a forward slash. The datamachine-events/events, datamachine-events/venues, etc. category slugs that worked silently on 6.9 now fail registration on 7.0+, and every ability assigned to those categories logs category is not registered notices on every init.

On a busy production site (extrachill.com network), this generates ~13,000 notices per few minutes and was filling debug.log to multi-GB scale within hours of the WP 7.0 upgrade.

Fix

Flatten the four category slugs to match Data Machine core's pattern of <plugin>-<category> (e.g. datamachine-content, datamachine-media):

datamachine-events/events   →  datamachine-events-events
datamachine-events/venues   →  datamachine-events-venues
datamachine-events/testing  →  datamachine-events-testing
datamachine-events/settings →  datamachine-events-settings

Scope

• 22 PHP files touched (1 constants file + 21 ability files)
• 35 string-literal replacements
• All ability names (e.g. data-machine-events/get-venue-events) keep their namespace/name slash format — that is still valid and required by the Abilities API name regex.
• Abilities are not persisted in the database, so this is a purely code-side fix. No data migration needed.
• Tests and docs do not reference the old category slugs (only ability names + block names, neither affected).

Verification

# Before fix:
$ tail -1000 wp-content/debug.log | grep -c "Ability category"
~900

# After deploy:
$ tail -1000 wp-content/debug.log | grep -c "Ability category"
0

Refs: data-machine-events#216