Real-time collaboration — letting multiple users edit the same post simultaneously — has been one of the most anticipated features on WordPress’s roadmap, and it didn’t make the cut for WordPress 7.0. The release shipped on May 20, 2026, after its original April target was pushed back to allow more architectural work, with the team citing race conditions, server load, memory efficiency concerns, and bugs found through fuzz testing. RTC remains a stated priority but has been deferred to a future release.
May’s Gutenberg cycle also introduced a new @wordpress/grid package — a standardized set of tools for building grid-based layouts inside the editor — and opened the first public work on a native Content Types experiment, a long-requested capability for managing content types directly in WordPress Core. The full set of changes from this cycle:
- @wordpress/grid package
- Standardized layout tooling for plugin developers building custom editor interfaces.
- Revisions for templates and template parts
- The revisions panel, previously limited to posts and pages, now covers site-wide structures too, making changes easier to track and roll back.
- Content Types experiment
- Early-stage work in Core toward native content type management.
- Guidelines post type
- Renamed, made type-aware, and given a dedicated REST API route at /content-guidelines.
- Script module translation polyfill
- Lets ESM-based JavaScript modules load translated strings correctly on sites still running WordPress versions below 7.0.
- HEIC-to-JPEG uploads
- Now correctly use the .jpg file extension after client-side conversion.
On the theme and block side, a batch of fixes resolves issues affecting layouts and global styles. Layout classnames are now applied to the inner blocks wrapper rather than its siblings — a source of styling failures for themes targeting those classes. Pseudo selector block style rendering in the editor under Global Styles (the system that controls site-wide typography, colors, and spacing via theme.json) has also been corrected. The Post Template block’s fallback column styles no longer conflict with explicitly defined minimum column widths.
The Tabs block, available via the Gutenberg Experiments setting, got significant fixes this cycle. Active tab styling has been simplified, sequential numbering has been removed from default tab labels, tab duplication now works correctly, and the block’s top-level structure has been locked to prevent users from accidentally breaking its required markup. Classic theme styles were also added to prevent inherited button styles from bleeding into tab controls.
The Cover block resolves an embed video background error (Error 153) that had been affecting editor previews. Image blocks now preserve aspect ratio and scale settings when switching to wide or full alignment — previously those values were silently dropped. The Search block now correctly applies color settings to the input field when the button is disabled, and a conflict between global styles and local inspector controls for borders and colors has been resolved.
A capability enforcement fix closes a gap in multi-user setups: users without the edit_css capability will no longer have per-block custom CSS preserved on save. This prevents contributor-level users from retaining custom CSS that bypassed capability checks. Sites running contributor or author roles with restricted CSS access should verify this behavior aligns with their workflow after updating.
The full developer changelog is on the WordPress Developer Blog. The WordPress 7.0 “Armstrong” release post covers the full launch.
