I have sat through a lot of core cycles, going back to the 4.x days, and “Release Candidate” has never meant clear skies. The WordPress 7.0 Release Candidate phase has started and already hit a technical snag, which is roughly what the phase is for. A bottleneck in the branching process has changed how commits work for the next few days.
The branching bottleneck and #64393
At RC1 the 7.0 branch normally gets carved out and trunk moves on to the next version (7.1-alpha). A technical issue in Trac ticket #64393 pushed that branching back to RC2. The wait is not passive either. It changes how code lands on the WordPress 7.0 Release Candidate milestone until the branch exists.
Every commit to trunk now needs a double sign-off from two core committers, rather than the usual commit and move on. That keeps breaking changes out while the branching logic gets sorted. Contributors will see dev-feedback and dev-reviewed doing a lot of work on tickets this week. WP-CLI will also tell you which version you are actually testing against:
# Check your current WordPress version and update to the RC
wp core update --version=7.0-RC1
wp core version --extraThe string freeze paradox
We are in a hard string freeze, so no new strings unless they are critical, with the “About” page as the usual exception. The catch lands on the Polyglots team: strings are not available for translation until the 7.0 branch physically exists. Developers are frozen, translators are blocked, and that holds until RC2 later this week. It is a messy transition, and it does keep the locales consistent with what ships.
If you are following the cycle, my earlier write-up on the WordPress 7.0 Roadmap covers why some features slipped well before this branching issue turned up.
What stays on the 7.0 milestone
The scope for the rest of this WordPress 7.0 Release Candidate cycle is narrow. Two kinds of change still get through:
- Regressions introduced during the 7.0 cycle itself. If it worked in 6.7 and broke in 7.0, it goes to the front of the queue.
- New tests. The test suite keeps growing right through the freeze, because tests touch neither the strings nor the code that ships.
If the WordPress 7.0 Release Candidate is eating your dev hours, hand it over. I have been building on WordPress since the 4.x days.
What this means for your PRs
Mature projects hit race conditions and technical debt too, and delayed branching is what that looks like from the outside. Once RC2 ships and the branch exists, trunk bumps to WordPress 7.1-alpha and early development goes back to its usual wild west. Until then, keep your PRs to regressions and unit tests, because that is all the milestone will take.
