WordPress announced that the real-time collaboration feature will not ship 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.
A post by Matt Mullenweg in the official WordPress Make Slack workspace explained the reasons for removing the feature:
“Hi
I would say I’m not confident with RTC being in core at this point.I’m fine taking the heat for pulling it out, but the surface area, race conditions, server load, memory efficiency, and the bugs that keep popping up in fuzz tests / etc don’t give me a lot of confidence on our current approach being the robust one we want to support.
There’s also the added burden right now of the WP Engine lawfare and depositions being a time DoS for critical people, perhaps without that in the background we could have gotten to a better place by now, but I don’t think with the current deposition schedule and all the faff around discovery we’re 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. Collaboration is Phase 3 of a four phase development road map and version 7 was meant to mark the phase 3 milestone.
Real-time collaboration enables 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 purpose of collaboration was to bring better editorial workflows by eliminating “post locking” and ensuring changes appear instantly across all active sessions.
Matt Mullenweg tweeted in April that the real-time collaboration feature could also enable AI to edit in real-time, too. That part of the feature was likely to be the most popular use of RTC but aside from Matt’s tweet nothing else was actually said about that.
The commercial WordPress hosting platform WordPress.com has had a controlled roll-out of the RTC feature for VIP and Enterprise users since late 2025.
A support page on WordPress.com explains:
“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 changes as you type. This guide covers how to turn real-time collaboration on or off and what to expect while 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 Announcement
Many folks in the WordPress community were not surprised by the delay because it had become evident that finalizing the feature was not progressing fast enough to make the release deadline of May 20, 2026.
Now the process begins to remove the feature from the 7.0 release.
According to the announcement:
“Today, @matt made the decision to remove real-time collaboration from WordPress 7.0 and shared that he is not confident the current approach is robust enough to include in Core at this time, citing concerns around surface area, race conditions, server load, memory efficiency, and recurring bugs found through fuzz testing.
This is a difficult decision, especially given the amount of work that has gone into the feature, but it is being made in service of shipping a stable and reliable WordPress 7.0 release for our users. Work to remove the feature from the release is being organized in #65205 and in the #feature-realtime-collaboration. At this time, the release schedule remains as is and further updates will be provided if the schedule needs to change to unwind this feature.”
Upbeat Response To Removal Of RTC
The general response to the announcement was relief and agreement that it was a good idea. Some disagreed that the feature should ever become a part the WordPress Core because it wasn’t something that most users would need. Although an argument could be made that AI-powered collaboration would be highly popular.
One of the comments to the official announcement on WordPress.org welcomed the decision.
Kento wrote:
“I honestly welcome this decision, besides the fact that this needs further work to confidently get into core, it will also give extension developers more time to prepare, experiment and provide feedback.”
Over on X, WordPress entrepreneur Katie Keith shared her opinion that the feature is delayed but not written off and will likely be returning in the near future.
She shared:
“This looks significant, but I think it’s a delay rather than an actual change of direction or strategy.”
In a completely different discussion on X, Justin Ferriman tweeted:
“That feature always came across as a bit tone deaf. This was the right decision.”
Mark Wesguard agreed:
“Good move. I never understood why this should be in core.”
Hendrik Luehrsen praised WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg for his leadership:
“Good call, @photomatt! It’s good to see brave decisions being made in the project at the moment. Inspires hope.”
Similar sentiments were echoed on the Dynamic WordPress Facebook Community (visible to members only), where members expressed the opinion that the feature would be best as a plugin and that the feature was irrelevant for most users.
My own view is that RTC seemed like it had the potential to become a popular way to collaborate in real time with an AI agent. It would also make it easier for teams to collaborate on editing.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/TierneyMJ
