I have been around since WordPress 4.x, and I have seen enough “major” releases to tell a fresh coat of paint from a change in the plumbing. WordPress 7.0 RC1 is the plumbing kind. Most of the work sits under the block editor, in the layer that will carry AI and multi-user collaboration for the next decade.
The first release candidate landed recently, and the urge to hit Update on everything is worth resisting. There are over 134 changes since Beta 5, some of them heavy APIs that will happily break a site held together by assumptions. If you run mission-critical WooCommerce stores or high-traffic blogs, read this before you touch the server.
The AI Connectors screen
The AI Connectors screen is the headline of WordPress 7.0 RC1. For years the only route to OpenAI or Anthropic was a third-party plugin gluing API calls together, each with its own settings page. Core now has a standard way to register a provider, and what that mainly buys you is portability: swapping one LLM provider for another stops meaning a refactor of every block and function that touches AI.
Non-AI providers can register through the same interface. If you maintain plugins, the official Connectors API documentation is where the hook points are written up. RC1 is where the AI Client merger I wrote about earlier actually lands.
Real-time collaboration and the RTC constant
Real-Time Collaboration is finally opt-in by default in this release candidate. On a custom stack it will not simply work, though. There is a constant you set in wp-config.php to control it, and if your server polling intervals are not tuned, you have a race condition waiting to happen.
/**
* Enable or Disable Real-Time Collaboration in WordPress 7.0
*/
define( 'WP_ALLOW_COLLABORATION', true );
// Senior Tip: Watch your server resources.
// RTC uses increased polling intervals which can spike CPU on low-end shared hosting.I have watched plenty of sites crawl because of aggressive admin-ajax polling. RC1 lets you toggle session notifications and raises the default polling intervals, which keeps that in check. For the rest of what is landing, see my rundown of the top WordPress 7.0 features for developers.
Testing RC1 without wrecking anything
If you still log into SFTP to upload zip files, we should talk. WP-CLI is the quickest way to put WordPress 7.0 RC1 on a site, and it is repeatable. Do it on staging. Never run a release candidate on a live production site unless you enjoy emergency midnight debugging.
# Update to the latest Release Candidate via WP-CLI
wp core update --version=7.0-RC1If you only want to poke at the new Command Palette (⌘K or Ctrl+K from the admin bar), WordPress Playground saves you the local server setup. It is also a fast way to see how the new Client Side Media behaves when it is restricted to plugin-only mode.
If this WordPress 7.0 RC1 testing is eating your dev hours, hand it over to me. I have been wrestling with WordPress since the 4.x days.
What to do before April
The jump to 7.0 cleans up as many old bottlenecks as it adds features. OPCache stats showing up in Site Health > Info > Server is a small thing, and I have wanted it for years. The final release is set for April 9, 2026, so the next few weeks are for refactoring themes, testing activation hooks and checking that nothing falls over when the hard freeze hits. Test first, then ship.
