WordPress 7.0 was supposed to land on April 9. Instead, it… didn’t.
This isn’t your usual “one more bug fix” situation. The delay comes down to something much deeper: figuring out how WordPress will handle real-time collaboration without turning your database into mom’s spaghetti.
The current approach stores collaboration data (like who’s editing and where their cursor is) in the postmeta table, with transients handling presence data. It works… but “works” isn’t good enough when you’re talking about multiple users editing the same post at the same time.
Matt Mullenweg pushed back on the approach, suggesting it’s worth doing this properly from day one, even if that means delaying the release. The proposed solution? A dedicated custom database table just for collaboration data.
Which is a big deal. WordPress doesn’t add new core database tables lightly. This is serious, once-in-a-decade, “measure twice, deploy once” business.
The result: WordPress 7.0 has been pushed back and, in a move that almost never happens, dropped from Release Candidate back into beta. For now, staying on WordPress 6.9.4 is still your stable, drama-free option.
This is probably a good thing. Shipping half-baked database architecture to millions of sites is the kind of thing very likely to keep developers up at night… and not in the fun way.