WordPress 7.0 was supposed to ship on April 9th. It will not. And the reason tells you a lot about how seriously the project is taking what comes next.
Matt Mullenweg, WordPress co-founder, stepped into the official Making WordPress Slack workspace and essentially called time on the current trajectory. His message was direct: pull back, extend the pre-release phase, and get the real-time collaboration feature right before anything goes out the door. The delay will run weeks, not days, and Mullenweg made clear this marks a one-time exception to the project’s usual date-driven release model.
The feature driving all of this is Real-Time Collaboration, or RTC, which lets multiple editors work inside the same post simultaneously. It sounds straightforward until you look at what it actually requires underneath. RTC introduces new database tables and fundamentally changes how WordPress handles active editing sessions. During those sessions, the system disables persistent post caches entirely, a performance problem the team has not yet resolved.
The database design question alone has generated serious internal debate. Real-time editing produces rapid, bursty writes that need to happen with minimal delay. Synchronization between environments, by contrast, involves slower and more structured updates. Some contributors flagged that cramming both workloads into a single table creates unnecessary risk and complexity. The team has not reached a final decision on the structure.
Contributors also floated a proposal to revert to beta builds for more testing time, but the project dropped that idea quickly. Returning to beta would break PHP version comparison behavior and disrupt plugin update logic that depends on standard version sequencing. The team will instead extend the release candidate phase, pushing through additional RC builds as needed.
For hosting providers, uncertainty persists. Managed WordPress host Kinsta confirmed it is still running tests on the feature. RTC will ship turned off by default, but nobody yet fully understands how it will perform in shared hosting environments once customers start switching it on.
Mullenweg has signaled the project wants to return to a regular cadence by 2027, targeting roughly four releases per year as AI-assisted development picks up speed. For now, WordPress 7.0 is waiting on one feature to be done properly. That is probably the right call.
