Michael Feder’s Post

I'm fascinated with the WordPress 7.0 release (or lack thereof), and while I figure a lot of my facination is because I've never actually cared about a WordPress release before, I'm still having a good amount of fun watching the situation and I keep going back and forth on whether the most recent delay is bad news or the best thing that could've happened. I'll explain: WordPress 7.0 was supposed to ship during WordCamp Asia in April. Instead, the real-time collaboration feature needs what the core team is calling "a deeper architectural fix, not a late-cycle patch." New target is mid-to-late May. Updated schedule by April 22. And so for all the hype around AI, the AI features — the AI Client, the Abilities API, the MCP Adapter — all seem to be stable. They're not the problem. The delay is about collaboration infrastructure, not AI. And I'm getting the sense that this is a distinction that matters. And it creates a window. Agencies seem to be in one of two modes right now. Either they're ignoring 7.0 entirely because "we'll deal with it when it ships," or they're anxious about the delay and using that anxiety as an excuse to do nothing. But, as far as I can tell, both of these modes miss the window: now's the time to audit one's plugin stacks, set up staging environments, brief clients before clients Google it themselves. This is my recommendation for anyone with WordPress clients. Take advantage of the window. The ones who wait are going to be scrambling in late May wondering why half their sites broke. I'm not saying this because I have some master plan for it. I'm saying it because I've watched this exact pattern play out with releases all the time, major or minor. The preparation window is always obvious in retrospect and always wasted in the moment. I came across this piece that lays out a pretty solid 5-step checklist for agencies and anyone with WordPress clients — plugin audits, staging, client comms, AI feature evaluation, search infrastructure. Worth a read if you're managing WordPress sites and haven't started preparing yet. #WordPress #WordPress7 #AIStrategy #DigitalTransformation #WebDevelopment

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