WordPress 7.0 development lost real-time collaboration this month over race conditions and load concerns. What’s left for the May 20 release: a native content types system, the @wordpress/grid package, and HEIC and per-block CSS fixes.
WordPress 7.0 RTC has been pulled from the release. Race conditions and TTFB regressions from bypassed persistent caching drove the call, and RC3 now moves back toward a beta state while the core team focuses on stability.
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.
WordPress wants to build Block Editor Handbook pages straight from block.json at build time. That would kill doc drift and give core blocks a reference that matches the code you are actually running.
Manual regression testing was my bottleneck, so I automated it. This covers wp-env setup, Playwright with the WordPress test utils, and testing block variations and meta bindings without clicking through the editor.
WordPress 7.0 stopped hardcoding which blocks support Block Bindings and Pattern Overrides. Support is resolved through a filter now, so any lookup table you were trusting is out of date. Also new: a native Accordion block and an Icon block.
Gutenberg 23.0 adds an experimental revisions panel for templates, template parts and patterns, plus a flag that stops legacy meta boxes from disabling real-time collaboration. The Guidelines rename will catch you out on update.
WordPress 7.0 reworks the core design tools roster: Verse becomes Poetry, Accordion, Breadcrumbs and Math arrive with full design support, and pattern overrides are opt-in per attribute through a filter. Includes the updated support table and a registration snippet.
Ten block themes I tested for personality without the performance hit, from the Afrofuturist Sankofa to the halftone lo-fi of Punk. Includes a CSS clip-path snippet for custom image shapes.
Notes from the April 8, 2026 dev chat: WordPress 7.0 makes the collaboration sync layer provider agnostic, so polling is only the default. What that means for WebSocket providers, CRDT reconciliation and block API v3.