WordPress 7.0 just announced its release squad, and if you have been digging into the source code lately, there is a catch you need to pay attention to. While the headlines focus on the “Exciting News,” as a developer who has seen major version bumps since the 3.x era, I look at the architecture of the team itself. The formation of a streamlined, focused Release Squad under Matias Ventura signals that we are moving deeper into the Phase 3 collaboration era with a heavy emphasis on stability over raw feature volume.
The Strategy Behind the WordPress 7.0 Squad
This cycle continues the trend established in versions 6.7 through 6.9, opting for a smaller core group that collaborates directly with Make Team Reps. From a maintenance perspective, this is a “Refactor” of the release process itself. By reducing the overhead on the squad, the project aims to minimize the “Race Conditions” often found in massive community contributions where triage and testing leads get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of commits.
However, a smaller squad doesn’t mean a smaller release. With leads like Ella van Durpe and Sergey Biryukov on the tech side, the focus is clearly on the foundational infrastructure. Sergey, in particular, is the master of the Trac timeline; if there is a bottleneck in the core, he’s usually the one to find it. This squad structure is specifically designed to ensure that the jump to a major version—7.0—doesn’t suffer from the regressions that sometimes plague significant milestones.
If you’re planning your own development roadmap, you should already be preparing for WordPress 7.0 and the accompanying shifts in environment requirements. Historically, version .0 releases are when the core team takes a harder stance on legacy code and technical debt.
Technical Tip: Testing the 7.0 Horizon
Don’t wait for the official release candidate to start debugging. You can use WP-CLI to track the progress of the alpha builds. I always recommend running these in an isolated Docker container to see how your custom hooks and filters react to the latest core changes.
# Update core to the latest 7.0 alpha build for testing
wp core update --version=7.0-alpha-nightly
# Check your current version and environment stability
wp core version --extraSpecifically, keep an eye on how the official WordPress 7.0 Core updates handle the new AI Client infrastructure. Early proposals suggest this will be one of the most significant API changes we have seen in years, potentially shifting how we handle content generation and automation within the block editor.
Look, if this WordPress 7.0 stuff is eating up your dev hours, let me handle it. I’ve been wrestling with WordPress since the 4.x days.
Takeaway for Business Owners and Developers
The assemble of the 7.0 squad is a signal to ship it when it’s stable, not just when it’s new. For developers, this is the time to get involved in handling regressions and triage. For business owners, it’s a reminder that a major version bump requires a professional audit of your tech stack. WordPress is maturing, and the “Lean Squad” approach is the pragmatic response to a platform that now powers nearly half the web.
