Contributor Day in Mumbai on April 9 overlaps with the WordPress 7.0 release, so the usual morning of setup troubleshooting is not an option. Here is what I get working before the flight, and where an experienced dev is most useful on the day.
WordPress 7.0 slipped a few weeks so the collaboration layer can sit on a custom table instead of transients. What that means for polling load, cache invalidation, and any plugin still using classic metaboxes.
Trac #64393 pushed the 7.0 branch back to RC2, so every trunk commit now needs two committers to sign off and the Polyglots team cannot start yet. Here is what is still allowed on the milestone.
WordPress 7.0 RC2 landed on March 26 and trunk is now 7.1-alpha. What that means for your test environments, the two-committer backport rule, the string freeze, and which tickets still make the 7.0 milestone.
WordPress 7.0 RC2 is out, with the final release set for April 9, 2026. How to install it with WP-CLI or Playground, and what to stress test first: real-time collaboration, pattern editing, and the Connectors AI endpoints.
An unplanned Beta 6 arrived on March 20, 2026 and pushed WordPress 7.0’s RC1 to March 24. The extra cycle covers the DataViews admin overhaul and the PHP 7.2/7.3 drop, and the release also brings the Connectors API for credential handling.
WordPress 6.9.2 shipped without three of its ten security commits, then broke classic themes that return stringable objects from template_include. What happened across 6.9.3 and 6.9.4, and what the Core team is changing about the process.
WordPress 7.0 ships the PHP AI Client, and the community has already built connectors for Grok, Mistral, Ollama and OpenRouter. What each one covers, how provider registration works, and the switching case worth testing first.
WordPress 7.0 RC1 adds the AI Connectors screen and turns on real-time collaboration, with over 134 changes since Beta 5. Here is what to test on staging before the April 9 release, including the RTC constant and the polling load it brings.
The CSS corner-shape property paired with a scroll timeline, using superellipse() exponents instead of keywords, plus the isolation fix for mix-blend-mode breaking your stacking context.