WordPress 7.0 has reached alpha, which means the WordPress 7.0 Bug Scrub is starting. Calling it a community meetup undersells it. This is the filter that keeps breaking changes off your production sites. A hook regression or a transient race condition that slips through now becomes somebody’s frantic Friday night after the release.
I have watched releases where one oversight in a wp_head filter caused chaos for thousands of users. That is what the scrubs are for. Contributors pull tickets apart, verify patches, and push core stability forward, session by session. If legacy code keeps dragging your projects down, this is where you get to see how the sausage is made, and maybe change the recipe.
The WordPress 7.0 bug scrub schedule
The core team, led by @audrasjb and @juanmaguitar, is running a tight ship this cycle. Scrubs happen twice a week in the #core channel on Slack. Veteran committers are welcome, and so is anyone who wants to learn their way around Trac.
Alpha bug scrubs: early triage
- January 28, 2026: Focus on tickets marked
early. - February 3, 5, 10, 12, 17, 19: General alpha ticket processing (Tuesdays and Thursdays at 16:00 UTC).
Beta and release candidate phases
At Beta the target changes to regressions, meaning issues that 7.0 introduced. The Beta WordPress 7.0 Bug Scrub sessions start February 24, and they work through bug reports from the previous beta releases first, so nothing new ships broken.
- Beta Scrubs: February 24 through March 19 (Tuesdays and Thursdays).
- RC Scrubs: March 24 through April 8. These are the “if needed” sessions for critical, last-minute fixes.
For the rest of what is landing in this release, I wrote up the WordPress 7.0 developer features and the official roadmap squad separately.
How to contribute
Leading a scrub is one of the fastest ways to learn how WordPress is put together, and it does not require a commit bit. It requires being organized. Start with Report 5, which lists every open 7.0 ticket.
When testing core patches, spin up a fresh trunk environment with WP-CLI. It beats manual FTP uploads any day of the week.
# Download the latest WordPress trunk for testing
wp core download --version=trunk --force
# Check current version to ensure you're on the 7.0 alpha path
wp core versionSome components have their own recurring sessions. The Accessibility Scrub runs every Tuesday at 15:00 UTC in #accessibility, and the Performance Scrub every other Tuesday in #core-performance. If Core Web Vitals matter to you, that is the room to be in.
If the WordPress 7.0 Bug Scrub is eating your dev hours, I can take that off your plate. I have been wrestling with WordPress since the 4.x days.
The pragmatic takeaway
A stable release comes out of thousands of small decisions made in these sessions. Turning up is self-interest as much as community service: the tickets you check are the ones that would otherwise land on your own sites. Use the reports, join Slack, and 7.0 can ship without the usual launch-day headaches. If you want to lead a session, ping the release leads on Slack to get on the official schedule. You get the props in Dev Chat too.
