After collaborative editing was pulled from WordPress 7.0 earlier this year, the team behind the feature is taking a more structured approach to testing before the 7.1 release. A new outreach program — modeled on the earlier FSE Outreach Program, a structured community testing initiative that ran during WordPress’s transition to block-based full-site editing — connects real-world users directly with the developers building real-time collaboration into WordPress.
The effort centers on a dedicated Slack channel, #collaborative-editing-outreach, which is open to anyone willing to run the latest version of the Gutenberg plugin. Participants are asked to share ongoing feedback through at least August 18, 2026, which marks the minimum commitment window tied to the 7.1 release cycle.
Previous testing for collaborative editing focused on developer-level review, enterprise environments, and host-specific compatibility checks. This program deliberately widens the pool to nonprofits, small businesses, newsrooms, and individual site owners. To participate, contributors need to enable Real Time Collaboration under Settings > Writing in the WordPress dashboard with the Gutenberg plugin active.
The aim is to engage passionate real-world early adopters across a spread of hosting environments in a dedicated Slack channel throughout the release process to ensure a tight feedback loop for both bugs and feature requests.
Unlike the FSE Outreach Program, there will be no recurring themed testing calls — the team concluded those would become repetitive given how focused the feature is. Instead, updates will be posted to the Slack channel as fixes and improvements ship through Gutenberg plugin releases. The team has ruled out shipping collaborative editing as a standalone featured plugin.
Outreach to hosting companies is also planned to recruit participants across as many different server environments as possible, since environment-specific behavior has been a recurring issue in earlier testing rounds. Core contributors @amykamala and @greenshady, along with the post’s author, will coordinate the channel alongside the developers and designers working on the feature. Test team badges will be awarded to participants at the end of the cycle.
Anyone interested can join #collaborative-editing-outreach on WordPress Slack — sign-up instructions are available at make.wordpress.org/chat.
