WordPress 7.0 has a release date again — with a 4-week cushion past the deadline when an update had been promised. If everything stays on track, we’ll have this new major version on May 20.
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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 April 20 to 26, 2026.
WordPress 7.0 now has a release date: May 20, 2026 — six weeks after the originally planned April 9.
The new schedule published this week confirms what was already apparent: the cycle is effectively restarting, just not in name. RC3, planned for May 8, behaves like a new Beta 1, and RC4 will function as the real Release Candidate 1.
On April 24, ahead of all this, a call went out to hosting providers to test compatibility, with a dedicated tool that stress-tests multi-user connections in the editor’s collaborative screens.
The interesting detail is that the team has kept the RC numbering rather than reverting to betas — something we already explained: if WordPress published a “Beta 7” after an RC2, PHP’s version_compare function would not recognize it as newer, and automatic updates would break. So RC3 and RC4 are, in practice, a new beta and a new release candidate in disguise. What we don’t know yet is whether these six extra weeks will be enough to close out the custom real-time collaboration table — the actual reason for the delay — or whether May 20 will slip again. For now, there’s a calendar.
The new Gutenberg 23.0 arrives with three main lines of work.
The first: the revisions panel for templates, template parts, and patterns — previously only available for posts and pages. It is experimental and part of the DataForm project, so it must be enabled from the experiments screen.
The second: the Site Editor’s Identity panel is now complete with Site Title and Site Tagline fields, joining Site Logo and Site Icon. All four site identity settings are now in a single panel, editable without navigating to general settings, and changes are reflected in real time on the canvas because they write to the same entity that the corresponding blocks read from.
The third: Real-time Collaboration takes an important step with compatibility for legacy meta boxes — plugins can now flag individual meta boxes as RTC-compatible, improving overall reliability.
The Core team has published the WordPress 7.0 edition of the design tools roster per block, which lists what design supports each editor block has. This edition accumulates changes since 6.1 and brings notable updates: the Verse block is being renamed Poetry, and nine new blocks are added — Accordion, Breadcrumbs, Icon, Math, Post Time to Read, and Term Query — all with full design tool support. Several existing blocks also gain new capabilities: Paragraph now supports alignment, Cover adds layout and background image, Navigation gains alignment support, and Details receives layout, among others.
The AI plugin is maintaining a high development pace: in two weeks it went from 0.7.0 to 0.8.0, with 234 commits between the two.
Version 0.7.0 brought three new experiments: Content Classification for suggesting existing categories and tags, Meta Description Generation for SEO without leaving the editor, and bulk Alt Text generation from the Media Library, plus an Abilities Explorer with filters and extensibility hooks for developers.
Version 0.8.0 raises the bar: Image Generation and Editing becomes the plugin’s first stable feature — the first to graduate from the lab. Refine from Notes arrives, letting AI review, annotate, and automatically correct based on its own notes. Dashboard widgets now show AI status and the capabilities of the configured connector. Abilities also now respect Gutenberg style guides: if the site has editorial standards defined, the AI uses them when generating content.
The most significant aspect of these releases isn’t just what they add — it’s what they fix: title and excerpt generation no longer includes conversational preambles, extra quotes, or markdown artifacts when using smaller models, a common problem with smaller LLMs that tend to return conversational text instead of just the result. And having abilities respect editorial guidelines is no minor detail: the AI works within the site’s editorial rules, not the other way around. The plugin is transitioning from “AI experiment” to an opinionated tool.
Version 0.9.0 is already preparing Content Resizing, comment moderation, request logging, and content provenance via C2PA — meaning AI-generated text and images could carry embedded traceability: information about whether they were generated by AI, with which model, and on what date. A step toward transparency in automatically generated content.
The Hosting team has published a direct notice: over 70 hosting providers participate in the distributed testing program, but several have stopped sending results. The message is clear: “Hosts: check your test runners — they are not working properly.”
The request is not cosmetic: core tests are being updated to collect specific data on Real-Time Collaboration, the flagship feature of WordPress 7.0, which remains in active development and will likely undergo significant architectural changes in the coming weeks as more RCs and betas arrive.
What’s at stake is the real-world compatibility of real-time collaboration in production environments. The more hosts running tests, the more data will be available on performance and issues before the May 20 launch. Hosts that need help can reach out in the hosting Slack channel or open an issue in the PHPUnit Test Runner repository.
The Community team brought back the Community Booth at WordCamp Asia 2026 — a booth that had disappeared from recent flagship events: neither WordCamp US 2025 nor previous WordCamp Asia editions had one.
The retrospective they published tells a mixed story. On one hand, it worked: mentors were signed up, meetups were launched in Tanzania, Indore, and Delhi, people were connected with Campus Connect and Polyglots. On the other hand, conditions were not helpful. The booth was a counter with a single chair, tucked in a corner, with no schedule sign, no swag, no printed materials, and gaps with no staff. People approached out of curiosity and had no idea what to do there.
At WordCamp Europe 2025 they had already shown the format works with a different setup: shared table, central location, booth-exclusive swag. The lesson is clear: the Community Booth is worth doing, but it needs intentionality — an open space, at least two people per shift, a sign showing topics and schedule, and at minimum a handful of Wapuu stickers.
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!
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