WordPress 7.0 Launches 20 May: What's Shipping, What Got Cut, and What We're Testing

WordPress 7.0 ships in four days. The version that arrives on 20 May 2026 is not the version that was promised in February, and not the version most blog posts you'll read next week are going to describe. Twelve days before release, Matt Mullenweg pulled the headline feature out of the core code entirely. We've been testing every beta since February and we want to set out what's actually shipping, what isn't, and the test plan we'll run on the stable release.

The State of Play, Four Days Out

The release schedule is locked. RC3 shipped 8 May, RC4 shipped 14 May, the 24-hour code freeze lands 19 May, and general availability is 20 May 2026. Amy Kamala signed off the RC3 announcement on the official WordPress news site. The release squad has been running this cycle since January with Matias Ventura as Release Lead.

What's changed in the last twelve days matters more than the schedule. On 8 May, Matt Mullenweg pulled real-time collaboration from the release entirely. Not paused. Not feature-flagged off. The code was deleted from core for RC3. That's the single most important fact for anyone planning their WordPress upgrade this month, and it's the fact most published "what's new in WordPress 7" pieces still get wrong because they were written before 8 May.

What's Shipping in WordPress 7.0

The confirmed feature list, with RTC removed, looks like this:

• AI Client in core. A provider-agnostic PHP API that gives plugins a standard way to call AI models. Entry point is wp_ai_client_prompt() returning a fluent WP_AI_Client_Prompt_Builder. Supports text, image, speech and video generation through a consistent interface.
• Three official provider plugins. Anthropic, Google and OpenAI provider plugins ship as separate plugins on wordpress.org. They are not bundled in core. Configure them at Settings > Connectors after install. AI features only activate if at least one provider is configured, so the upgrade is no-cost and no-risk for sites that don't want AI.
• Block-level Notes. Single-user editorial comments attached to specific blocks and text fragments, with @mention notifications by email or dashboard. This is what shipped from the original collaboration roadmap once multi-user editing was pulled.
• DataViews. The Posts, Pages and Media admin screens get replaced by a React-based interface with filtering, sorting and bulk actions. Plugins that hook the old WP List Tables DOM may break, which is the single biggest compatibility risk on launch day.
• Cover block embedded video backgrounds. The Cover block can now use an embedded video (YouTube, Vimeo) as a background instead of requiring a local upload. Helpful for hosting and bandwidth costs.
• PHP-only block registration. Reduces the JavaScript required to ship a functional block, with auto-generated inspector controls. A useful change for anyone building lightweight blocks.
• Visual revisions and customisable navigation overlays. A timeline slider for restoring past versions, plus fully block-based mobile menu design.

Requirements: PHP 7.4 minimum, PHP 8.2+ recommended for the AI Client. MySQL 5.5.5 is still the hard minimum (an earlier piece of ours had this wrong and we've corrected it); MySQL 8.0 or MariaDB 10.6 is recommended for fully-supported security updates.

What Got Cut: Real-Time Collaboration

Real-time collaboration was the headline feature of WordPress 7.0 for over a year. Phase 3 of the Gutenberg roadmap. The thing that was meant to turn WordPress from a single-player editor into something that looked like Google Docs. It was running in betas from February. It was the reason the cycle was extended in April so the team could rebuild the database storage. And then on 8 May, twelve days from release, Matt Mullenweg pulled it.

"Not confident the current approach is robust enough to include in Core at this time, citing concerns around surface area, race conditions, server load, memory efficiency, and recurring bugs found through fuzz testing."

Matt Mullenweg, Make WordPress Core, 8 May 2026

The RTC announcement on RC3 is unusually direct for a WordPress release post. Amy Kamala's wording in the RC3 release notes doesn't soften it either:

"Real Time Collaboration will not be included in the 7.0 release and will be re-evaluated during the 7.1 release cycle. Because of this, this RC3 version is no longer considered a 'new Beta 1'."

Amy Kamala, WordPress 7.0 Release Candidate 3 announcement

Read "re-evaluated during the 7.1 release cycle" carefully. That's not "shipping in 7.1". It's "we'll look at it again". On a project with a roughly four-month release cadence, that means the earliest realistic ship date for actual multi-user editing is now late 2026, probably 2027. For the hosting decisions you're making this month, treat RTC as gone.

The block-level Notes feature still ships in 7.0 and partly fills the gap. Notes lets a team leave threaded comments on specific blocks or text fragments inside the editor, with @mention notifications. It's asynchronous, not simultaneous, but it removes the "copy the draft into Google Docs, comment there, paste back" workflow that most agencies were stuck with. Useful, just not the headline feature it replaced.

Our WordPress 7 Coverage So Far

We've been tracking 7.0 development since the original features guide in September 2025. The trail of posts on this site is the test of whether we kept up:

• WordPress 7.0 Release Date & Features Guide 2026 (September 2025, since corrected after RTC was pulled)
• WordPress 7.0 Beta 1: AI Agents and Real-Time Collaboration (February, when Beta 1 dropped)
• What the AI Connectors Actually Do on WordPress 7 Beta 2 (March, the first hands-on test)
• WordPress 7.0 Hosting Readiness: What Your Provider Won't Tell You (March, the host-side checklist)
• WordPress 7.0's AI Experiments Plugin: We Tested Every Feature (March, the AI Experiments plugin on Beta 5)
• WordPress 7.0 Misses Its April 9 Launch as Core Team Redesigns Collaboration Database (April delay coverage)

All of these were corrected on 16 May once RTC was pulled. The articles still cover what they covered originally, but the editor's notes at the top of each piece flag the change so a reader landing from a search engine doesn't pick up stale claims. We mention that not to pat ourselves on the back. It's a working example of why dated, attributed editorial maintenance matters more than publishing volume. Press Forge's piece on the AI Client's API-key spend risk is the deepest companion read if you want the AI side of the release in detail.

What We'll Test on Launch Day

On 20 May we'll run the stable release through a deliberate test plan on a staging environment, and the findings will be published here on this same URL. The plan is the same methodology we use for every major WordPress release, refined across roughly five years of testing release candidates ahead of clients:

1. Fresh install of 7.0 stable on staging. Document the new admin UI, the default settings, the Settings > Connectors page. Screenshots of everything that's visibly changed since 6.9.
2. Install the three official AI Provider plugins. Anthropic, Google and OpenAI from wordpress.org. Configure API keys at Settings > Connectors. Record what fails and what works on first save.
3. Smoke-test the AI Client API. A `wp_ai_client_prompt()` call from wp-cli, generating a text completion. The minimal call looks like this:

   wp eval 'echo wp_ai_client_prompt()
       ->with_system_instruction("You are a helpful assistant.")
       ->with_max_tokens(64)
       ->generate_text("Say hello in one sentence.");'

   Capture provider used, default model, response time, error path on misconfiguration.
4. 6.9.4 to 7.0 upgrade on a real client clone. Snapshot of an active client site, in-place upgrade, document everything: plugin compatibility warnings, DataViews behaviour on Posts and Pages, any white-screen errors, any "not tested with this version" warnings on active plugins.
5. Block-level Notes test in the editor. Leave a note on a block. @mention a second user. Verify the notification fires by email and in the dashboard. Test the resolve workflow.
6. Cover block embedded video. Drop a YouTube URL into a Cover block as background video. Confirm it plays on the front end without uploading.

Everything that breaks, breaks in screenshots. Everything that works, works with timings. That's the launch-day report that'll publish here on 20 May.

What This Means for Your Hosting

With RTC out, the hosting requirements for 7.0 simplify considerably. The HTTP-polling architecture that was the source of the database load concern is gone. What's left is the AI Client, which doesn't run on your server; it just sends prompts out to provider APIs and reads responses back. The requirement that actually matters is unrestricted outbound HTTPS on port 443. Most managed hosting allows this by default. Some budget shared hosts throttle or block outbound calls from PHP, and on those hosts the AI provider plugins will fail with errors that look like timeouts.

PHP 7.4 is the new hard minimum, PHP 8.2+ is the practical floor for the AI Client. We run 8.5 as default on every new install. For the database, MySQL 5.5.5 still installs (technically) but it's well past End Of Life. MySQL 8.0 or MariaDB 10.6 is the recommendation for any production WordPress site this year. The full eight-point hosting readiness checklist is on the site, updated to reflect what actually ships.

If you're already on a modern managed WordPress plan, you're almost certainly fine. If you're on a 2018-era shared plan that hasn't been touched in years, this is the upgrade that surfaces it.

Should You Upgrade on Day One?

No. Wait one to two weeks. This is the same advice we've given for every major WordPress release since 5.0, and it is the same advice we'll be following ourselves with client sites.

The reasoning isn't fear of 7.0. The reasoning is that every major WordPress release triggers a round of plugin compatibility fixes in the first 48 to 72 hours, and DataViews replacing the legacy WP List Tables DOM means this round will be larger than usual. Plugins that add columns to the Posts or Pages screens, modify bulk actions, or hook the old admin list tables are all at risk. Those updates land in the first week. Updating on day one means being the test case for plugins you depend on.

The 365i helpdesk has handled 449 customer support tickets in its entire lifetime, with a median first-response under five minutes. That's a small enough number that we look at every plugin compatibility report personally on release days. The pattern is consistent: most plugin issues are resolved within five to seven days of a major release. Wait for those resolutions before updating production.

If you want to be helpful: install 7.0 on a staging copy this week and report compatibility findings back to plugin authors. That's how the wider WordPress ecosystem gets through these transitions cleanly.

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