A week ago the WordPress 7.0 launch seemed to be on track, but the release candidate phase has prompted some significant second thoughts.

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Program transcript

Hello, I’m Alicia Ireland, and you’re listening to WPpodcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.

In this episode, you’ll find the information from March 30 to April 5, 2026.

WordPress 7.0 will not ship on April 9 as planned. On March 31, an announcement went out that is rarely seen in the project’s history: the release is being delayed after already entering the Release Candidate phase. It’s an unusual decision, and it deserves a detailed explanation.

The root of the problem is the real-time collaboration database layer.

Real-time collaboration is one of the most ambitious features in WordPress 7.0. For multiple users to edit the same post simultaneously, the system needs to store two types of information: changes to the document content, and presence data — who is editing and where each person’s cursor is.

From early in the cycle there was debate about whether a dedicated database table was needed to manage this information. The proposal existed but was put on hold before the RC phase due to time constraints and an insufficiently mature design. Instead, a provisional solution was adopted: storing document changes in postmeta and presence data in transients, with special handling to avoid excessive cache invalidations.

That solution work...

Nothing Ready for WordPress 7.0