121. Preparing the team for WordPress 7.0

The WordPress 7.0 development phase is beginning, and one of the first steps is assembling the team that will lead this new release.

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Program transcript

Hello, I’m Alicia Ireland, and you’re listening to WPpodcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.

In this episode, you’ll find the information from January 5 to 11, 2026.

WordPress 7.0 has been announced with the start of release planning, with a proposed schedule that sets the final release date for April 9, 2026, a first beta on February 19, and a release candidate on March 19. This timeline is flexible and may be adjusted based on team decisions.

For this release, a Release Squad is being formed with different roles, including coordination, technical leads, triage, testing, and more, encouraging collaboration from contributors at all levels.

One of the technical details already announced is the end of support for PHP 7.2 and 7.3. Starting with this version, the minimum required version will be PHP 7.4, while the recommended version will remain PHP 8.3, aiming to improve project maintainability and encourage the community to use more recent PHP versions.

This decision is based on usage data showing that PHP 7.2 and 7.3 combined are below the 5 percent threshold among monitored WordPress installations. Sites that continue to use those versions will be able to stay on the 6.9 branch and receive security updates, but they will not be able to upgrade to WordPress 7.0 without first upgrading their PHP.

The Plugins team has published a 2025 recap, a year marked by substantial growth in the plugin ecosystem and a clear impact of artificial intelligence on the review workflow. The team proposed changing its name to the Plugins Team to better reflect its expanded responsibilities, which include improvements to internal tools such as Internal Scanner and Plugin Check Plugin, as well as collaboration with the Meta team to resolve tickets and improve the directory.

In terms of numbers, the team reviewed 12,713 plugins, a 40 percent increase compared to 2024, and increased both reviews and approvals, with 5,415 plugins approved, improving the approval rate to 70 percent. While author responsiveness remains a challenge, with nearly 40 percent not responding, reviews became more thorough and detailed, with more than 58,000 reviews conducted and noticeable improvements in submission quality.

And finally, this podcast is distributed under a Creative Commons license as a derivative version of the podcast in Spanish; you can find all the links for more information, and the podcast in other languages, at WPpodcast .org.

Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!