One of the most anticipated features in WordPress development — the ability for multiple users to edit content simultaneously — has been pulled from the WordPress 7.0 release. The core development team confirmed the decision, citing the need for more development time before the feature is ready for a core release.

Real Time Collaboration, sometimes compared to the co-editing experience in Google Docs, would allow two or more users to work on the same post or page at the same time, with changes appearing live for all participants. It has been an active area of development within the Gutenberg project — the block editor that underpins modern WordPress — but the feature hasn’t reached the stability and completeness required for a core release.

A wall calendar with a circled and crossed-out date hangs on a corkboard beside a sticky note, with a coffee cup nearby.

Real Time Collaboration Will Not Ship in WordPress 7.0

The WordPress 7.0 milestone had represented a realistic target for the feature. The core team hasn’t announced a revised target version, leaving the timeline open. For site owners and agencies managing multi-author publishing workflows, the delay means continuing to rely on third-party workarounds or simply avoiding simultaneous editing for now. Features of this complexity typically face several hurdles, based on the kinds of challenges commonly cited in core development discussions:

  • Conflict resolution between simultaneous edits is technically difficult to get right without data loss
  • Performance under real-world network conditions requires extensive testing across varied hosting environments
  • Accessibility standards must be met for live-updating interfaces, adding significant design and engineering work
  • Integration with existing post locking mechanisms needs to be carefully unwound or replaced

WordPress currently uses a basic post locking system that warns users when someone else is editing a document, but it doesn’t allow simultaneous access. That system dates back years and was never designed with collaborative editing in mind, which is part of what makes retrofitting real-time collaboration into core a significant engineering challenge.

For agencies and developers who need collaborative editing now, third-party collaborative editing and editorial workflow plugins built on top of the REST API offer partial solutions, though none replicate what native core support would provide.

No revised ship date for real-time collaboration has been announced.