WordPress has announced that real-time collaboration functionality will not be available in the upcoming 7.0 release, citing that the current approach is not yet “robust enough” to be included. The response from the WordPress community was a collective sigh of relief.
An article by Matt Mullenweg in the official WordPress Make Slack workspace explains the reasons for removing the feature:
“Hi
I would say I’m not sure RTC is central to the project at this point.I’m fine with the pressure to remove it, but the surface area, race conditions, server load, memory efficiency, and bugs that keep showing up in fuzz tests/etc. don’t give me much confidence on our current approach being the robust one we want to support.
There is also the added burden right now of the law on WP Engine and depositions being a time-based DoS for critical people, maybe without that in the background we could have gotten to a better place now, but I don’t think with the current filing schedule and all the issues around discovery we are able to support this feature.
Real-Time Collaboration (RTC)
WordPress delayed the release of version 7.0 due to the inability to finalize the collaboration feature. The collaboration is Phase 3 of a four-phase development roadmap and Release 7 was supposed to mark the Phase 3 milestone.
Real-time collaboration allows multiple users to edit posts or pages simultaneously. The current default is to lock a web page or post if someone else is working on it. The goal of this collaboration was to improve editorial workflows by eliminating “post-lock” and ensuring that edits appear instantly in all active sessions.
Matt Mullenweg tweeted in April that the real-time collaboration feature could also allow AI to edit in real time. This part of the feature was probably the most popular use of RTC, but other than Matt’s tweet, nothing else was said about it.
Commercial WordPress hosting platform WordPress.com has been rolling out RTC functionality for VIP and Enterprise users in a controlled manner since late 2025.
A support page on WordPress.com explain:
“With real-time collaboration, you and other users on your site can edit the same post or page in the WordPress editor at the same time and see each other’s edits as you type. This guide explains how to turn real-time collaboration on or off and what to expect when editing together.
This feature is available on sites with the WordPress.com Personal, Premium, Business, and Commerce plans. For free sites, upgrade your plan to access this feature.
Response to ad
Many in the WordPress community were not surprised by the delay as it had become clear that finalizing the feature was not moving fast enough to meet the May 20, 2026 release deadline.
The process now begins to remove the feature from version 7.0.
According to the announcement:
“Today, @matt made the decision to remove real-time collaboration from WordPress 7.0 and said he wasn’t sure the current approach was robust enough to be included in Core at this time, citing concerns about surface area, race conditions, server load, memory efficiency, and recurring bugs discovered during fuzz testing.
This is a difficult decision, especially given the amount of work put into this feature, but it is made in an effort to provide a stable and reliable WordPress 7.0 release to our users. Work to remove the feature from the release is being organized in #65205 and the #feature-realtime-collaboration. At this time the release schedule remains as is and further updates will be provided if the schedule needs to be changed to remove this feature.
Optimistic response to the removal of the RTC
The general response to this announcement was one of relief and agreement that it was a good idea. Some disagreed that this feature should ever be part of WordPress Core, as it was not something most users would need. However, one could argue that AI-based collaboration would be very popular.
One of the comments on the official announcement on WordPress.org welcomed the decision.
Kento wrote:
“I honestly welcome this decision. Besides requiring additional work to confidently enter core, it will also give extension developers more time to prepare, experiment, and provide feedback.”
On X, WordPress entrepreneur Katie Keith shared her opinion that the feature is delayed but not canceled and will likely return in the near future.
She common:
“It seems important, but I think it’s a delay rather than a real change in direction or strategy.”
In a completely different discussion on X, Justin Ferriman tweeted:
“This feature always seemed a little tone-deaf. It was the right decision.”
Marc Westguard agreed:
“Good decision. I never understood why that should be at the core.”
Hendrik Luhrsen congratulated WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg for his leadership:
“Good call, @photomatt! It’s good to see brave decisions being made in the project right now. It inspires hope.”
Similar sentiments were echoed on the Dynamic WordPress Facebook community (viewable only by members), where members expressed the opinion that the feature would be best as a plugin and that the feature was not relevant to most users.
My own view is that RTC seemed to have the potential to become a popular way to collaborate in real time with an AI agent. This would also make it easier for teams to collaborate during editing.
Featured image by Shutterstock/TierneyMJ
