WordPress 7.0 brings real-time collaboration, and it asks a lot of the database and object cache. The Core team wants host test data by May 4th, so here is what the suite checks and where hosts usually get bitten.
Where the WordPress Core AI work stands before 7.0: the MCP adapter moving to a standalone plugin, the connector approval experiment, and a release plan that puts polish ahead of new features.
WordPress 7.0 slipped to May 20, 2026 because RC3 is closer to a second Beta 1 than a release candidate. Early real-time collaboration code fired around 4,000 SQL queries in two minutes of editing, so core is rebuilding the storage layer.
WordPress 7.0 (Armstrong) is past the foundational AI work and into ecosystem plumbing. The connector approval experiment blocks plugins from your API keys until an admin says otherwise, and RC1 lands May 14, so provider plugins need updating now.
Real time collaboration is out of WordPress 7.0, and the benchmark data says why. Across eight hosting environments, custom-table-with-transients came out about 52% faster than the post-meta baseline, and post-meta-transients collapsed on hosts with no object cache.
WordPress 7.0 RC3 landed without Real-Time Collaboration. Core pulled it over race conditions, memory use and server load, and pushed the work to 7.1. This post covers testing RC3 from WP-CLI and what plugin authors built on the RTC endpoints need to change.
The WooCommerce REST API documentation left its 4.2MB single-page site for per-endpoint files on developer.woocommerce.com. What that changes for coding assistants, raw markdown fetches, and doc updates that ship inside the PR.
Gutenberg 23.1 finalizes image uploads in parallel instead of one thumbnail at a time. It also adds an experimental taxonomy UI in the admin, Drawer and Autocomplete primitives, and a filter that hides the Classic block from the inserter.
WordCamp US 2026 runs August 16 to 19 in Phoenix, and the calls for speakers, sponsors, and volunteers are open. Speaker applications close May 29, 2026, and volunteer applications close June 15.
WordPress 7.0 benchmarks show TTFB about 10% worse than 6.9 while LCP holds steady, which puts the cost on the PHP side. Notes on the script module dependency ticket, oversized Link headers that make Nginx return 502, and polling in real-time collaboration.