The WordPress 7.0 release has been pushed back. The announcement landed this week: the final release waits while the team works through feedback on real-time collaboration. A project returning to beta after it has already entered the Release Candidate phase is something I have almost never seen in a decade of shipping code. It is messy, and it is still the right call for stability.
The WordPress 7.0 release and the RC trap
The obvious move would be to call the next build Beta 7, and the core team cannot do it. Blame the way PHP compares version strings. WordPress leans on version_compare() to decide which build is newer, and a string like 7.0-beta7 sorts below 7.0-RC2. Sites already running RC2 would read the new build as older and refuse to update, and every automated deployment pipeline pointed at that branch would do the same.
I sat through the previous performance delays, and the versioning logic never bends. Here is the comparison that forced the odd RC3 and RC4 numbering:
<?php
// Why we can't just go back to "Beta"
$rc_version = '7.0-RC2';
$beta_version = '7.0-beta7';
if ( version_compare( $beta_version, $rc_version ) === -1 ) {
echo "The update system thinks Beta 7 is OLDER than RC 2. Update failed.";
}
?>What the delay means for your workflow
The pause runs until April 17th, and trunk is closed for 7.1 for the duration. Everything goes into the 7.0 branch instead. If you contribute, know that a backport now needs sign-off from two core committers. That is not paperwork for its own sake. It keeps regressions out of the branch while real-time collaboration gets stabilized.
Two things are exempt from the no-new-features rule in this RC phase: the Connectors admin screen and the collaboration stability fixes. If you maintain custom blocks or integrations, test against the latest nightly builds. The WordPress Beta Tester plugin keeps you on them without pulling from GitHub by hand every morning.
If the WordPress 7.0 release churn is eating the dev hours you meant to spend building, hand it over to me. I have been working on WordPress since the 4.x days.
What RC3 and RC4 will actually contain
A Release Candidate label normally means the code is locked. This cycle, RC3 and RC4 are beta releases wearing an RC number. There is also a string freeze on, so the Polyglots team is not retranslating moving targets. Unless it is a critical fix for the About page or the Connectors screen, no new UI strings are going in.
If you manage complicated client sites, take the delay. A late WordPress 7.0 Release costs you far less than one that ships and wipes database transients or opens race conditions in the new real-time editor. Use the extra weeks to refactor your local development workflow so you can run these RCs in a staged environment instead of on a live site.
The new schedule is due by April 22nd. Until then, leave your test sites on the “Bleeding edge” channel and watch the Trac tickets tagged for real-time collaboration.
