WordPress 7.0 Beta Arrives February 19 With AI Built Into Core

Mark your calendars. WordPress 7.0 Beta 1 arrives on 19 February 2026, with the final release targeted for 9 April at WordCamp Asia. That's eleven days from now, and the feature list makes this the most ambitious WordPress release in years.

The headline features? Google Docs-style real-time collaboration, native AI infrastructure baked into core, and the first serious admin interface refresh since the block editor landed in 2018. But the story most people are missing is the AI angle, and it's the one that matters most for the future of WordPress.

We've been tracking WordPress 7.0 development since our features guide last September, and what's taken shape since then goes well beyond what anyone expected.

The AI Infrastructure Nobody Is Talking About

Here's what caught my attention. WordPress 7.0 isn't just adding AI features. It's building the plumbing for AI to interact with WordPress sites from the outside.

Three pieces fit together. The Abilities API (shipped in WordPress 6.9) lets plugins and themes register their capabilities in a machine-readable format. The MCP Adapter translates those abilities into the Model Context Protocol, the same standard that Anthropic created for connecting AI systems to external tools. And the WP AI Client, proposed for core merge on 3 February, gives WordPress a provider-agnostic way to call AI services natively.

Put them together and you get something the WordPress ecosystem has never had: a standardised way for AI agents to discover what your site can do, read its data, and take actions on your behalf.

The Abilities API is a first-class, cross-context functional API that other tools and applications can use to interface with WordPress.

Jonathan Bossenger, WordPress Developer Advocate, WordPress Developer Blog

That quote sounds dry until you think about what it means in practice. Right now, if you want an AI tool to manage your WordPress site, you need custom API integrations, bespoke plugins, or manual copy-paste workflows. With the Abilities API and MCP Adapter working together, tools like Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, and VS Code can connect to your WordPress installation directly.

And the MCP Adapter documentation makes it plain: "if your code already registers abilities, you are one step away from letting an AI agent use them."

This is WordPress positioning itself as AI-ready infrastructure. Not a chatbot bolted onto the sidebar. Not an "AI content generator" plugin. Actual, standards-based integration that lets external AI systems work with WordPress the same way they work with GitHub, Slack, or any other MCP-compatible service.

For WordPress development agencies, this changes the conversation with clients completely.

Real-Time Collaboration: Impressive, With a Catch

The feature everyone's been waiting for is real-time collaboration. Multiple users editing the same post at the same time, with live cursors and instant updates. Google Docs in your WordPress editor.

Gutenberg lead architect Matias Ventura flagged this as the top priority in his Planning for 7.0 post in December. The editor-side work is reported to be in good shape, with defined UI and diffing mechanics ready for testing.

But there's a catch that most previews gloss over.

Real-time collaboration needs a persistent connection between all editors, which means your hosting environment has to support it. This isn't like adding a new block or tweaking the toolbar. It has a stronger dependency on server support and infrastructure than any previous WordPress feature.

WordPress runs on everything from shared hosting at three quid a month to dedicated cloud infrastructure. Getting real-time sync to work reliably across that spectrum is a different challenge from getting it to work in a demo. The WordPress core team still needs to define what the "baseline experience" looks like, and how it degrades gracefully when the server infrastructure isn't there.

Our WordPress 6.9 beta coverage highlighted similar hosting-dependent features. For 7.0, the stakes are higher. If your host can't support the transport layer for real-time sync, the feature either won't work or will fall back to something less impressive.

That said, for managed hosting environments (including 365i's WordPress hosting), this should work well out of the box. It's the budget shared hosting crowd who'll feel the limitation.

The Admin Gets a Fresh Coat of Paint

WordPress 7.0 brings a visual refresh to the admin interface, but don't expect a total redesign. The approach is a "coat of paint" on the existing structure, not a rebuild from scratch.

DataViews (the modern table component introduced in recent WordPress versions) will expand across more admin screens. Think cleaner typography, consistent spacing, inline filtering without page reloads, and visual alignment between the block editor and the classic admin panels.

There's also a Trac ticket for a visual reskin exploring broader cosmetic changes. Refreshed admin tables, modernised dashboard widgets, and harmonised typography across all screens.

It won't look like a completely different product. But it will feel noticeably more polished, and it sets the groundwork for bigger changes in future releases.

PHP 7.4 Minimum and What It Means

WordPress 7.0 bumps the minimum PHP version to 7.4. If you're still running PHP 7.3 or earlier, your site won't run the update.

PHP 7.4 reached end of life in November 2022, so this is overdue housekeeping. But if you're on older hosting that hasn't been updated, now's the time to sort it. Most decent hosts already offer PHP 8.1+ as the default. Our WordPress 6.9 performance testing showed meaningful speed gains on PHP 8.5, so upgrading beyond the minimum is worth doing anyway.

The Full Timeline

What UK Site Owners Should Do Before February 19

You don't need to do anything drastic. But if you want to be ready for the beta (or just prepared for the April release), here's what's worth doing now.

Check your PHP version. Log into your hosting control panel and confirm you're on PHP 7.4 or higher. If you're on 8.1 or above, you're fine. If not, upgrade before the beta drops.

Back up your staging site. Beta software is for testing, not production. Set up a staging copy of your site and test the beta there. If your host offers one-click staging (365i does), use it.

Audit your plugins. Major WordPress releases often break plugins that use deprecated functions or hook into internal APIs that changed. Check that your critical plugins have released updates recently. Anything not updated since 2024 is a risk.

Think about AI readiness. If you're a developer or agency, start looking at the Abilities API documentation. Registering abilities now means your plugins will be AI-agent-ready when 7.0 launches. The Chrome auto-browse agent and similar tools are already changing how users interact with websites. WordPress catching up with native AI integration is overdue.

And if your site still doesn't have AI discovery files, the combination of WordPress's new AI infrastructure with proper AI visibility creates a much stronger foundation than either approach alone.

Sources

• Planning for 7.0 - Matias Ventura, Make WordPress Core
• Introducing the WordPress Abilities API - WordPress Developer Blog
• From Abilities to AI Agents: Introducing the WordPress MCP Adapter
• Proposal for Merging WP AI Client into WordPress 7.0
• WordPress 7.0 Call for Volunteers
• Trac #64308: Visual Reskin of WordPress Admin for 7.0