RC3 is live, real-time collab is out, and Matt’s moves raise eyebrows.
Hello WordPressers!
Welcome to this week’s WP More roundup — WP More newsletter issue 42, where you get curated news about WordPress and the WordPress community all in one place.
WordPress 7.0 is a week away from release, and the lead-up has been anything but quiet. A third release candidate is out, real-time collaboration got pulled at the last minute, Gutenberg 23.1 shipped some genuinely useful editor upgrades, and behind the scenes, Matt Mullenweg is reshaping how WordPress.org operates, while a federal judge is asking hard questions about deleted messages.
A lot to cover, so let’s get into it.
In this Issue:
- WordPress 7.0 RC3 is out, final release set for May 20
- Real-time collaboration has been pulled from WordPress 7.0
- Gutenberg 23.1 lands with faster uploads, new UI primitives, and experimental tools
- Matt Mullenweg forms a trusted group to overhaul WordPress.org and Five for the Future
- A federal judge orders Matt to explain missing messages in the WP Engine dispute
WordPress 7.0 RC3 Is Here, Final Release on May 20
The third release candidate for WordPress 7.0 dropped on May 8, and the team is in the final stretch before the May 20 launch. RC3 addresses 143+ issues since RC2, and this is your last real window to test before the release goes out to the world.
You can test RC3 a few ways: install the WordPress Beta Tester plugin, download the RC3 zip directly, use WP-CLI with wp core update --version=7.0-RC3, or open a browser-based test environment via WordPress Playground — no local setup needed for that last option.
For plugin and theme developers, this is the time to wrap up testing and update your “Tested up to” value to 7.0. If you find bugs, report them in the Alpha/Beta support forum or on WordPress Trac.
- RC3 is the third and likely final release candidate before the May 20 launch
- 143+ issues addressed since RC2
- Plugin and theme authors should update their “Tested up to” version now
Read the full blog on WordPress News here.
One notable item missing from RC3 deserves its own section: real-time collaboration has been cut from the release entirely.
Real-Time Collaboration Will Not Ship in WordPress 7.0
Matt Mullenweg made the call on May 8: real-time collaboration is out of WordPress 7.0. His stated reason is that he’s not confident the current approach is stable enough for core. Specific concerns include race conditions, server load, memory efficiency, surface area risk, and bugs that surfaced through fuzz testing.
The decision is framed as putting a stable 7.0 release ahead of shipping a feature that isn’t ready. Work is underway to unwind RTC from the release, the May 20 date hasn’t moved, and a plan for broader testing and continued iteration will be shared once the immediate work is done, with 7.1 being the most likely next target. In the meantime, you can still test the feature through the Gutenberg plugin.
- Real-time collab won’t be in WordPress 7.0 due to stability concerns
- The May 20 release date is unchanged
- Development continues — expect an update and broader testing during the 7.1 cycle
Read the full blog on Make WordPress Core here.
What did ship this week is worth your time, Gutenberg 23.1 has real improvements for both everyday users and developers.
Gutenberg 23.1: Faster Uploads, New Experiments, and a Cleaner Editor UI
Gutenberg 23.1 landed on May 7 with a solid set of improvements across performance, developer tooling, and experimental features.
The most noticeable change for everyday users: image uploads are faster. Thumbnail generation now runs in parallel rather than one at a time, which makes a real difference on bulk uploads and large images, especially on slower connections. The @wordpress/ui package adds two new primitives — Drawer for slide-in side panels and Autocomplete for combobox-style inputs, along with polish across overlay components to support sticky headers and footers.
On the experimental side, there’s a new Custom Taxonomies management screen that lets you create and manage taxonomies without writing PHP, and an experimental Image Editor modal with a freeform cropper for Image and Site Logo blocks. The Classic block has been quietly hidden from the inserter (existing instances still work). Developers also get an early preview of @wordpress/grid, a new package for dashboard-style drag-and-resize layouts.
- Parallel thumbnail uploads speed up the media library noticeably
- New
DrawerandAutocompleteUI primitives for developers - Experimental custom taxonomies UI and image editor are worth testing if you’re a developer or power user
Read the full blog on Make WordPress Core here.
While the editor keeps moving forward, some significant changes are happening to how WordPress.org itself is run.
Matt Mullenweg’s #meta-janitors: A Trusted Group Overhauling WordPress.org
On April 18, Matt Mullenweg created a new Slack channel called #meta-janitors and handed a small group of handpicked contributors production access to WordPress.org, with a mandate to ship changes without approval from any team, committee, or stakeholder other than himself.
“Spinning up an initial group of people I’m very comfortable with having dotorg sandboxes and making changes without approval or feedback needed from any team, group, stakeholder, commenter, or approval from anyone but me,” Mullenweg wrote in his opening message. The channel launched just days after he spent hours in #core-committers calling WordPress’s culture broken and its output “boring or mediocre crap.” He told the group they could “override anyone in WordPress.org, including each other, except for me.”
The initial group of 12 included Automattic’s Anne McCarthy, WordPress Executive Director Mary Hubbard, WP Engine-sponsored core committer Weston Ruter, Human Made CGO Noel Tock, and longtime lead developers including Mark Jaquith, Andrew Nacin, and Dion Hulse. The channel has since grown to 32 members.
The most ambitious project underway is a full overhaul of Five for the Future, led by ServMask CEO Yani Iliev. Four mockups approved by Mullenweg would introduce a new Team Directory ranking contributors by weighted contributions, redesigned company and individual profile pages, and a “Find a Contributor” page for companies looking to sponsor active contributors. Other changes already shipped include a new WP-CLI landing page at wordpress.org/cli, an updated Requirements page, and LinkedIn-style “open to work” options in WordPress.org’s jobs infrastructure.
The channel is technically public on WordPress Slack, but the initiative hasn’t been formally announced, an unconventional approach for a project that has traditionally operated through team consensus and open discussion.
- A handpicked group now has production access to WordPress.org with authority to ship changes without community approval
- Five for the Future is getting a major structural overhaul, with new contributor ranking and discovery pages
- The initiative is public on Slack but hasn’t been formally announced — worth watching closely
Read the full report on The Repository here.
Other reports from The Repository you might like to read:
- Matt Mullenweg Pulls Real-Time Collaboration From WordPress 7.0, Blames WP Engine Litigation
- WP Engine Accuses Audrey of Failing to Produce Documents in Discovery Fight
- Gutenberg 23.1 Ships Custom Taxonomies UI, Prompting “Why Now?” From the Community
- Contact Form 7 Creator Reveals Contactable.io Will Launch as RESTful API
- Court Rejects Developer’s Contempt Motion Against Automattic and Mullenweg
- New Contributor Onboarding Project Rallies Make Teams Ahead of WordCamp Europe Launch
- WordPress Accessibility Team Overhauls Theme Guidelines for the First Time in 14 Years
- WordPress 7.0 Gets a New May 20 Release Date
- New Presence API Feature Plugin Released as Side Project to Real-Time Collaboration
- WordPress.org Closes Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin After Author Operated Years-Long Backdoor
- WordPress AI 0.8.0 Introduces New Refine From Notes Experiment and Dashboard Widgets
- WordPress Community Team Opens Applications for WordCamp India 2027 Host City
- Woo Ships WooCommerce Subscriptions Health Check Tool Following Disclosure of Four Renewal Bugs
- Austin Ginder Reports Fourth Plugin Backdoor in a Month, Unveils WP Beacon
- Automattic Engineers Reimagine wp-admin as a Desktop OS — and Nick Hamze’s Already Built an App Store for It
- Woo to Notify WooCommerce Subscriptions Customers After Four Bugs Silently Broke Renewals
- WordCamp Europe 2026 Schedule Now Live, With New Extended Workshop Format
- Woo Ships Google for WooCommerce 3.6, Making YouTube Shopping a Direct Sales Channel
Don’t forget to subscribe & support them, they do some amazing, hard-hitting WordPress journalism.
That WordPress.org governance story connects directly to the next one — because Mullenweg’s communication habits are now under legal scrutiny.
A Federal Judge Orders Matt Mullenweg to Explain Missing Messages
The WP Engine lawsuit took a serious turn. A federal magistrate judge has ordered Mullenweg to submit a sworn declaration explaining why so few messages from WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram were produced in discovery, calling WP Engine’s allegations that relevant communications were deleted “concerning.”
The dispute stems from a joint filing on April 10, where WP Engine alleged Mullenweg produced just 40 Telegram messages, one Signal message, and zero WhatsApp messages, despite actively using all three platforms. WP Engine also alleged he deleted posts from the WordCamp Sydney and WordPress.org X accounts, a Post Status Slack channel, and plugin reviews on WordPress.org. Automattic disputed the claims, saying thousands of communications had been produced and that no relevant WhatsApp messages were found after a “reasonable” search.
Magistrate Judge Ajay Krishnan wasn’t satisfied. He found WP Engine “plausibly contends” that Mullenweg deleted relevant documents after a legal preservation obligation was triggered, and said Automattic’s response failed to address the deleted X posts, Slack channel, and plugin reviews — writing that the response appeared to “elide that topic.” One particularly pointed detail: in September 2024, Mullenweg publicly invited people to contact him via “Signal with disappearing messages” at the start of what he called his “nuclear war” against WP Engine. Automattic said disappearing messages weren’t enabled, but Krishnan noted third parties could have toggled that feature when reaching out.
Mullenweg must now submit a sworn account covering his use of these platforms, steps taken to preserve messages, whether auto-delete was active, date ranges for preserved and deleted messages, and what happened to the deleted public content cited in the dispute.
- A federal judge found WP Engine’s spoliation allegations “concerning” and Automattic’s response “unsatisfying”
- Mullenweg must now submit a sworn declaration about his messaging app use and preservation steps
- The case is active and escalating — one of the most consequential developments in the dispute so far
Read the full report on The Repository here.
WordPress Must Read
→ An Open Letter to WooCommerce and the Woo Community (businessbloomer.com)
→ What I’d Build If I Had to Start Over in WordPress Today (devin.org)
→ Legacy software companies are screwed (x.com)
→ AI Can Design a WordPress Site. It Still Doesn’t Know Where the Design Should Live. (chrislema.com)
→ It Turns Out WordPress Was Built for the AI Era (therepository.email)
→ WordPress isn’t dying. It’s disaggregating (alexstandiford.com)
→ 2026 Community Survey Results: What You Told Us, and What’s Coming Next (generatepress.com)
→ Better, Faster, and Yes, Cheaper – Or Be Left Behind (therepository.email)
→ WordPress: The Operating System of the Agentic Web (automattic.com)
On Other WordPress News
→ Woo Design team joins X/Twitter — share your feedback (developer.woocommerce.com)
→ WooCommerce 10.7: 51% fewer queries, a real fulfillment API, one important cache fix (woocommerce.com)
→ Welcome All Languages and Communities to Make WordPress Slack (make.wordpress.org)
→ Proposal: Auto-generate Block Editor Handbook docs from block.json (make.wordpress.org)
→ Uganda Website Projects Competition | 2026 (events.wordpress.org)
→ WordPress Student Clubs Build Momentum (wordpress.org)
→ WP A11y Docs update April 2026 (make.wordpress.org)
→ WordPress Academy for young people in Krakow (make.wordpress.org)
→ Urgent: Testing request to Web hosts for collaborative editing by May 4th (make.wordpress.org) → Presence API Feature Plugin (make.wordpress.org)
→ Roster of design tools per block (WordPress 7.0 edition) (make.wordpress.org)
→ WordPress 7.0 Release Party Updated Schedule (make.wordpress.org)
→ WordPress Documentation Team Closes 200+ Issues — and Needs Your Help (make.wordpress.org)
→ Plugins Team: 20 Apr 2026 (make.wordpress.org)
→ What’s new in AI 0.8.0 (23 APR 2026)? (make.wordpress.org)
→ Meetup Formats That Work: How WordPress Nairobi turned a meetup into a hands-on workshop (make.wordpress.org)
→ Requests for Automation (make.wordpress.org)
From WordPress Community
→ Using Studio Code to travel back in time (pablopostigo.com)
→ A Journey to Remember: My WordCamp Asia 2026 Experience in Mumbai (central.wordcamp.org)
→ Where Automattic Meets Up (automattic.com)
→ Block Format Bridge: A Practical Solution for AI-Generated Content in WordPress (gutenbergtimes.com)
→ WordPress Businesses Are Moving From Products to Services, With Robbie Adair (publishpress.com)
→ Behind the Fiber-Optic Rope: Engineering WordCamp (automattic.com)
→ Keeping #WPLDN free and open (github.com)
→ How to get started contributing to WordPress (thewpminute.com)
→ The Hero of HeroPress and quiet art of walking with people (heropress.com)
→ WPFolks Launches Platform With Community Fund to Support Members to Attend WordPress Events (wp-content.co)
→ From WP Credits to WordCamp: The first university thesis focused on WordCamp participation (wpbakery.com)
→ WordCamp Asia 2026 Contributor Day: Photos Team Recap (make.wordpress.org) → WordCamp Asia 2026 Community Booth: A Retrospective (make.wordpress.org)
→ WordCamp Asia 2026 でインドに行ってきました (miyoshitakayuki.com)
→ From a Small Village to WordCamp Asia: My WordPress Journey (heropress.com) → Back from Burnout (poststatus.com)
That’s a wrap on issue 42. It’s been one of the more eventful weeks in recent WordPress memory: RC3 out, real-time collab cut, governance changes happening quietly in the background, and a federal judge demanding answers. May 20 is close; if you haven’t tested WordPress 7.0 yet, this week is the time.
If this issue was useful, forward it to a WordPress friend or share it in your community. It genuinely helps the newsletter grow.
Nishat, WP More
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