WordPress 7.0 Ships May 20 Without Real-Time Collaboration After Matt Mullenweg Pulls the Phase 3 Flagship 12 Days Before Release
WordPress 7.0 arrives May 20 with new blocks, an AI Connectors API, and a redesigned admin, but its headline collaboration feature was cut on May 8 over performance and reliability concerns.
Overview
WordPress 7.0 is scheduled for release on May 20, 2026, according to the WordPress.org roadmap, but it will ship without the feature that had been its defining goal. On May 8, 2026, the WordPress Core team announced that real-time collaboration will not ship in WordPress 7.0, removing the feature 12 days before the planned release. The post, written by contributor annezazu, states that “@matt made the decision to remove real-time collaboration from WordPress 7.0.”
Real-time collaboration was the centerpiece of what the WordPress.org roadmap describes as Phase 3 of the long-running Gutenberg project, which the roadmap defines as “Collaboration — A more intuitive way to co-author content.” The roadmap had positioned WordPress 7.0 as “advancing Phase 3 collaboration features, client-side media handling, responsive styling controls, and expanded block tools.”
What We Know
The decision and its rationale
According to the Make WordPress Core post, the decision rested on doubts about the feature’s robustness: project lead Matt Mullenweg was, in the post’s words, “not confident the current approach is robust enough to include in Core.” The post lists the specific concerns as “surface area, race conditions, server load, memory efficiency, and recurring bugs found through fuzz testing.” The WordPress Developer Blog, in its May 2026 developer update, gave a near-identical account, citing “concerns around surface area, race conditions, server load, and memory efficiency, with recurring bugs surfacing through fuzz testing.”
The removal coincided with the publication of a performance testing analysis, also dated May 8 and written by annezazu, that evaluated four storage strategies for the collaboration sync layer: a post-meta baseline used in release candidate 2, a dedicated custom-table schema, a post-meta-transients approach, and a custom-table-with-transients approach. The analysis measured “per-request REST dispatch time and database query counts during sustained 30-second polling windows” across eight hosting environments. It found that custom-table-with-transients “was first or tied-first on six of seven complete environments” and ran roughly 52 percent faster than the baseline, while one of the alternatives “exhibited a pathological transient code path that pushed dispatch latency past 26 ms” on a no-cache shared host. The post concluded that custom-table-with-transients “is the best option forward as the default for real time collaboration” — a recommendation now aimed at a future release rather than 7.0.
Reporting by Search Engine Journal added that Mullenweg attributed part of the delay to the WP Engine litigation, describing it as a “time DoS for critical people” that kept the team from reaching a robust implementation. Search Engine Journal also reported that WordPress.com had already rolled out controlled access to the feature for VIP and Enterprise users beginning in late 2025.
What still ships in 7.0
Despite the cut, WordPress 7.0 remains a substantial release. As of the Developer Blog’s May 12 update, the release was at “RC3,” with the final build still targeting May 20. The Gutenberg Times “Source of Truth” tracker notes that WordPress 7.0 incorporates features from Gutenberg versions 22.0 through 22.6.
According to Gutenberg Times, the release adds new blocks including a Breadcrumbs block for dynamic navigation trails and an Icon block drawn from a curated collection via a new Icon Registration API. It also ships visual revisions with color-coded changes, customizable navigation overlays for mobile menus, and an admin redesign that makes a new “Modern” color scheme the default in place of the long-standing “Fresh” scheme. On the AI side, Gutenberg Times describes a WP AI Client exposing a wp_ai_client_prompt() function and a Connectors screen for managing integrations with external providers including OpenAI, Claude, and Gemini.
The WordPress Developer Blog highlights additional developer-facing changes: a new @wordpress/grid package providing standardized tools for building grid-based interfaces, and Templates and Template Parts REST API endpoints that now “include a date field” for sorting and filtering by creation or modification date. Gutenberg Times also documents a new client-side Abilities API shipped as the @wordpress/abilities package.
What We Don’t Know
The Make WordPress Core post states that “the release schedule remains as is and further updates will be provided if the schedule needs to change” to accommodate unwinding the feature — leaving open, at least as of May 8, whether the May 20 date holds firm once the removal work is fully scoped. The post says removal is being coordinated in WordPress ticket #65205.
The timeline for real-time collaboration’s eventual return is also unspecified. The post says only that once the removal work concludes, “a plan will be shared for broader testing and continued iteration to help prepare the feature for a future release,” and notes ongoing discussion about whether to move the feature into a standalone plugin for wider community testing. The roadmap lists WordPress 7.1 for August 19, 2026 and 7.2 for December 10, 2026, but neither has been publicly tied to a collaboration relaunch.
Analysis
The removal is notable less for what it delays than for when it happened. WordPress freezes new features roughly a month before a release, per the WordPress.org roadmap, with attention shifting “entirely to the quality and performance of the release.” Pulling a flagship feature during that stabilization window — and after release candidate 2 had already shipped with a working sync provider — signals that the project chose a predictable ship date over its most-anticipated capability. The accompanying performance analysis, which identified a viable default storage strategy only at the eleventh hour, underscores how unsettled the feature’s foundation still was. For the millions of sites that will update to 7.0, the immediate effect is a release defined by incremental block, API, and admin improvements rather than the collaborative editing model the Gutenberg project has been building toward since Phase 3 began.