WordPress 7.0 is out, and as of today the cycle for WordPress 7.1 development has begun. The trunk branch is open for commits again and bumped to 7.1-alpha. If you followed the argument over the Real-time collaboration (RTC) feature, you already know that 7.1 is going to be about stability.
Why trunk stayed closed longer than usual
Normally trunk opens for the next version as soon as the current one reaches its first Release Candidate. For 7.0 the core team kept it shut on purpose. Real-time collaboration was still being argued over, and eventually pulled from 7.0, so 7.1 commits landing in the meantime would have made it much harder to work on the 7.0 branch.
I have watched plenty of release cycles on this CMS, and the decision to pull RTC for stability was the right one. A feature that breaks post query caching would have hurt every editorial team running it. With WordPress 7.1 development underway, attention goes back to the database and architectural bottlenecks underneath.
The “double signoff” policy still applies
If you plan to contribute to the 7.1 cycle or work on backports, the rules have not changed. The “double signoff” policy is still enforced on numbered branches. Add the dev-feedback keyword when you want a review, and once a second committer approves the patch, dev-reviewed goes on the ticket. No single dev, however experienced, gets to push a change into a stable branch alone.
Testing against 7.1-alpha
To start testing your plugins against 7.1-alpha, WP-CLI is the quickest route. Do it on a local environment such as LocalWP or Lando before you go anywhere near a staging server. A race condition in an alpha build is not something you want taking down your dev site.
# Switch to the latest development version (trunk)
wp core update --version=nightly
# Verify your current version
wp core versionWatch how the editor handles iframe enforcement in particular. Blocks still on Block API v2 or lower will run into trouble during this cycle. For the wider plan, the official Roadmap to 7.1 is up on the Make WordPress Core site.
If WordPress 7.1 development is eating your dev hours, I can take it on. I’ve been working with WordPress since the 4.x days.
The road to August 19
The target release date for WordPress 7.1 is August 19, 2026. Between now and then expect a lot of iteration on media workflows and on asynchronous “Notes”, the compromise that replaced RTC. It is not the “Google Docs for WordPress” we were promised, but the refactor underneath it is long overdue. Keep your local environments updated.
