WordPress 7.0 Core updates just took a sharp turn. If you were planning to live-edit pages like a Google Doc later this month, here is the news: real-time collaboration (RTC) has been pulled from the 7.0 milestone. I am relieved. After 14 years of debugging database race conditions and server-side memory leaks, I always thought shipping Yjs-based syncing at this scale was a big gamble for the average hosting setup.
On May 8th the core team decided to remove the feature, citing concerns over attack surface and memory use. The WordPress 7.0 Core updates will now focus on stability and a “provider-agnostic” AI client rather than experimental syncing logic that was not ready for the “low-resource” reality of many shared hosts.
Why real-time collaboration was a performance problem
The “war story” here is one a lot of us have lived: you add a “shiny” feature that runs fine in a local Docker environment, then it hits a client’s budget server and takes down the MySQL thread pool. According to the official Core announcement, fuzz testing turned up recurring bugs and race conditions that could have caused data loss.
The RTC implementation also disabled the standard post query cache whenever the editor was open. On a high-traffic site with a large editorial team, that is basically a self-inflicted DDoS. For more detail, see my earlier look at why WordPress 7.0 RTC was pulled for stability.
WordPress 7.0 Core updates and RC3
With RTC out of the way, the WordPress 7.0 Core updates are moving quickly toward the May 20th final release. Release Candidate 3 (RC3) dropped on May 8th, and it is surprisingly solid, resolving over 140 issues found in the earlier RCs. If you are a developer, your job right now is testing your custom hooks and filters against this build.
Update your staging sites now. Don’t lean on the “Update Now” button in the dashboard; use WP-CLI so you don’t hit timeout issues during the file migration.
# Safely update to the latest RC3 for testing
wp core update --version=7.0-RC3
# Verify your database is in sync
wp core update-db
# Check if any plugins are throwing legacy notices
wp plugin list --status=active --fields=name,version,updateWhat remains in the 7.0 milestone?
We lost the “live cursors” for now, but the WordPress 7.0 Core updates still bring a lot. There is a redesigned admin interface, visual revisions (much better than the old text-only diffs), and Gutenberg 23.1 enhancements. There are also smaller technical shifts, like removing author link title attributes to improve accessibility and clean up legacy markup.
If this WordPress 7.0 Core updates work is eating up your dev hours, I can take it off your plate. I’ve been wrestling with WordPress since the 4.x days.
The bottom line
Pulling RTC shows the core team would rather ship a stable site than a new toy. For agencies, that is a win. We don’t have to explain to clients why their site suddenly needs a $200/mo Redis server just to edit a blog post. Put your testing on the new AI client and the visual revisions, since those are the features landing on May 20th. Get your staging environments ready and start breaking things now while it is still in RC.
