WordPress 7.0 Was Supposed to Ship Today

WordPress 7.0 was scheduled to release today, April 9th. It didn't.

Matt Mullenweg called for a delay. The reason: real-time collaboration, the flagship feature, requires database architecture changes that are too risky to ship on schedule. Pre-release builds are paused through April 17th. A revised timeline is expected by April 22nd.

Nine hundred contributors. The most widely used CMS on the planet. And the release is held up because adding Google Docs-style collaboration to a twenty-year-old content management system turns out to be really, really hard.

I can't say I'm surprised.

What's in the box

WordPress 7.0 is Phase 3 of the Gutenberg project. The headline feature is real-time collaboration: multiple people editing the same page simultaneously, with visible cursors and live changes. Think Google Docs, but inside WordPress.

Beyond that: a new AI API for developers to build AI features into WordPress (not AI features themselves, just the plumbing), a modernized admin interface replacing the list tables that haven't changed since 2005, and a PHP 7.4 minimum requirement that will break sites still running older versions.

Each of these is reasonable in isolation. Together, they tell a story about where WordPress is heading. And who it's heading toward.

Who is this for?

Real-time collaboration is a team feature. It solves a team problem: two editors working on the same page, stepping on each other's changes. For newsrooms with ten writers and content teams with editorial workflows, this matters.

Here's what I keep thinking about: most WordPress sites have one person.

One person who installed WordPress because someone told them it was the best way to build a website. One person who spent the first hour adding plugins for basic functionality. One person who doesn't have a content team, doesn't need editorial workflows, and will never see another cursor on their screen.

WordPress 7.0's biggest feature is invisible to this person. Not just unnecessary. Invisible. They'll absorb the additional complexity into a system that was already too complex, and they won't get anything back for it.

Meanwhile, that person still needs five plugins before their site does what a website should do out of the box.

The weight

WordPress has been building upward for years. More features for power users, more infrastructure for developers, more complexity in the core. The block editor was Phase 1. Full Site Editing was Phase 2. Real-time collaboration is Phase 3.

Each phase makes WordPress more capable. Each phase also makes it heavier, harder to ship, and further from the person who just wants a website.

The delay is the proof. The database changes required for real-time collaboration are so significant that the core team couldn't get them stable in time. That's not a failure of execution. That's a system buckling under its own ambition.

And while WordPress builds for the 10% who need enterprise features, the 90% who just want a working website keep paying the complexity tax. More code to load. More potential conflicts on update day. More things that can quietly break.

Meanwhile

I've been building the opposite. A WordPress theme that ships SEO, analytics, two-factor authentication, cookie consent, multilingual support, and an AI page builder. Total frontend payload: 94 kilobytes. CSS, JavaScript, and fonts combined.

WordPress 7.0 adds an AI API so developers can build AI tools. SailWP already has a working AI page builder. Not an API. A page builder. Describe what you want in plain language, get a page. It's been live for months.

The difference is who you're building for. If you're building for developers who want to integrate AI into custom workflows, you build an API. If you're building for the person who wants a website, you build the thing that makes the website.

WordPress 7.0 will ship eventually. Real-time collaboration will land. The admin will look nicer. And the person who just wants a website will still need to install five plugins before their site does what it should.

Some of us got tired of waiting.

SailWP is free and open source. Source on GitHub.