With the Presence API, a column of active editors appears in the post list, an indicator in the admin bar shows avatars of who is on that same screen, and a pair of dashboard widgets rounds out the feature.
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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 27 to May 3, 2026.
The Core team has published an experimental plugin called Presence API, intended as a starting point for potential integration into WordPress core. The idea is straightforward: add a presence layer to the administration dashboard to know who is logged in, which screen each user is on, and which posts they are currently editing.
Today, if two people are editing the same post simultaneously, WordPress gives no warning until a lock collision has already occurred — by which point work may have already overlapped. With the Presence API, a column of active editors appears in the post list, an indicator in the admin bar shows avatars of who is on that same screen, and a pair of dashboard widgets provides an at-a-glance overview. All of this is restricted to users with the capability to edit posts.
On the technical side, the plugin uses its own dedicated table for ephemeral data with a 60-second time-to-live, which avoids the performance problem identified during WordPress 7.0 development, where storing high-frequency data in shared tables causes massive cache invalidation. Data moves through the Heartbeat API.
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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