WordPress 7.0 is in the second phase of its WordPress 7.0 Release Candidate cycle, and the rules got tighter for anyone tracking core. RC2 landed on March 26, and trunk has moved on to 7.1-alpha. If you have been building against trunk under the impression you were testing 7.0, your local environment is now testing something else.
Trunk versus the 7.0 branch
Once core reaches this stage, trunk belongs to the next major version and stops being a safe place to test against. The WordPress 7.0 Release Candidate lives in its own stable branch, so anything you are checking for production readiness has to follow the 7.0 branch.
I have watched agencies get burned by this. Their pipelines kept pulling trunk through the RC phase and quietly dragged 7.1-alpha behavior into a 7.0 environment. Pin the branch. WP-CLI does it in one line:
# Switch to the 7.0 branch for final testing
wp core update --version=7.0-RC2Backporting and sign-offs
Stability is the only thing on the list now. Production code moving from trunk into the 7.0 branch needs a double sign-off from two core committers, which is there to catch regressions before they ship. Add the dev-feedback keyword in Trac to ask for a review, and the change can only be merged once dev-reviewed comes back. That is what keeps cowboy commits off your client sites on release day.
There is also a hard string freeze. No new translatable strings unless something critical breaks, a bug on the About page for instance. If your plugin leans on core strings, they are staying put until the 7.1 cycle opens. The official backporting docs spell out the process.
What stays on the 7.0 milestone?
The milestone is effectively locked. Two kinds of tickets still get through:
- Regressions: bugs introduced during the 7.0 cycle itself. Something that has been broken since 6.5 will most likely wait for 7.1.
- Test suite expansion: more tests are always welcome, and they do not touch the code freeze. They are how anyone verifies that new work holds up, including the real-time collaboration tools we have been tracking.
When RC1 introduced the big AI features, the interesting question was what they could do. In RC2 the question is whether they break anything.
If the 7.0 cycle is eating your dev hours, I can take it on. I have been wrestling with WordPress since the 4.x days.
Where to put your time
The message from the core team is stop adding, start polishing. Open tickets on the 7.0 milestone that are not regressions will get punted to 7.1, so plan for that. Update your local environments, respect the string freeze, and take anything you consider a must-have change to the #7-0-release-leads Slack channel.
