One of the more exciting things about working on an open-source project of the size and scope of WordPress is that anything can happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On March 31, 2026, it was announced<\/a> that the WordPress 7.0 release cycle needed to be extended to get the Real-Time Collaboration (RTC) database architecture right. Then, on April 2nd, a follow-up post<\/a> spelled out exactly what that means in practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s an unusual situation. Returning to beta status after entering the Release Candidate phase is, as the post itself notes, unprecedented. But the reasoning is sound: the current RTC implementation has a performance issue that requires a deeper architectural fix, not a late-cycle patch, before this ships to millions of sites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pre-release versions are paused until April 17th<\/strong>, at which point the release squad and project leadership will have enough context to set a new schedule, to be announced no later than April 22nd.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The good news? Everything else in the 7.0 feature set is ready to go. There’s a lot to cover in this post, so let’s get into it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Note:<\/strong> WordPress 7.0 will drop support for PHP 7.2 and 7.3. The new minimum will be PHP 7.4, with PHP 8.2+ recommended. If you’re managing sites still running older PHP, that’s your first action item before the update lands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Table of Contents<\/p>\n\n\n\n