The Path Forward for WordPress 7.0

WordPress 7.0 has been delayed beyond the Release Candidate phase to address real-time collaboration stability issues, an unprecedented step in the project's release history. The post outlines commit policies during the pause: trunk is closed for 7.1 work, backports to the 7.0 branch require double sign-off from two core committers, and only bug fixes for current-cycle regressions are allowed. Pre-release builds are paused until April 17th, with a new schedule to be published by April 22nd. A technical challenge around version numbering means releases will continue as RC3, RC4, etc., even though they function as betas, due to PHP's version_compare() limitations. String freeze remains in effect with limited exceptions for critical strings.