Finally, Real-Time Collaboration will arrive in WordPress 7.1 and not 7.0, given the performance issues and the changes needed for its new implementation.

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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 May 4 to 10, 2026.

The big news this week around WordPress 7.0 is that real-time collaboration will not be in the final release. Matt Mullenweg made the decision to remove it, citing attack surface problems, race conditions, server load, memory efficiency, and recurring bugs found in fuzz testing. It’s a difficult call given the work invested, but it’s made in the interest of shipping a stable release. The feature will be re-evaluated during the WordPress 7.1 cycle, and in the meantime remains available through the Gutenberg plugin for anyone who wants to keep testing it.

The technical data behind that decision has also been published. Eight different hosting environments, including configurations with and without persistent object caching, participated in the performance tests. The analysis makes it fairly clear that a dedicated table storage strategy combined with object caching for user presence det...