WordPress
Version 7.0 "Armstrong" shipped May 20, laying an AI foundation across the platform with a modernized admin dashboard and 24 accessibility fixes.
Real-time collaboration was pulled before release. After beta and five release candidates, project lead Matt Mullenweg removed the feature from 7.0, citing race conditions, server load, memory efficiency, and bugs found through fuzz testing. Performance testing across eight hosting environments settled on custom-table-with-transients as the storage strategy for continued iteration toward a future release. A dedicated outreach effort opened for 7.1, recruiting testers via a new #collaborative-editing-outreach Slack channel through the August 18 target date.1
Client-side image processing graduated to testing. When a user uploads an image in the block editor, their browser now decodes, resizes, and encodes all sub-sizes locally using the VIPS image processing library running in WebAssembly, then sends the results to the server.2 Sites on hosts without modern server-side imaging support can deliver AVIF, WebP, HEIC, and JPEG XL output with consistent quality.
Gutenberg 23.3 made the modal media editor the default. Freeform and aspect-ratio cropping, flip, rotation, and metadata editing now open in a dedicated modal workflow, replacing the third-party inline crop library.3 Responsive styles extended to individual block instances, and Notes blocks gained support for multiple discussion threads per block.
React 19 landed and then rolled back. Gutenberg 23.3.0 shipped the React 18-to-19 upgrade, but incompatible plugin runtimes caused crashes.4 A point release reverted the change; the upgrade is now retargeted for WordPress 7.1.
PHP 8.x support shed its "beta" label. The qualifier was retired and removed retroactively across all versions — 7.0 and 6.9 fully support PHP 8.5, and 6.8 and later fully support PHP 8.4.5