--- title: "WordPress 7.0 Armstrong – This Week in WordPress 374" date: 2026-05-26 author: "Courtney Robertson" featured_image: "https://courtneyr.dev/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/twiw.png" categories: - name: "Speaking" url: "/category/speaking.md" - name: "WordPress" url: "/category/wptips.md" --- # WordPress 7.0 Armstrong – This Week in WordPress 374 Nathan Wrigley pulled me in at the eleventh hour to fill Mark’s seat on This Week in WordPress 374, alongside Michelle Frechette and Mike Johnson. We spent most of the hour on WordPress 7.0 Armstrong. ## WordPress 7.0 Armstrong is here, and the AI client is the headline WordPress 7.0 Armstrong shipped after a real delay. Real-time collaboration got pulled, which pushed the release out by about five weeks, but the rest of the work is impressive: 900+ contributors, 279 first-timers, 419 core Trac tickets, plus 411 Gutenberg enhancements and 486 bug fixes. The piece I keep pointing people at is the new AI client. It is a provider-agnostic API that lets plugins call generative AI models through a consistent interface, without bundling their own SDKs or building custom settings pages. I wrote [my own breakdown of the release](https://www.godaddy.com/resources/news/wordpress-7-0-real-time-collaboration-arrives-in-core) over on courtneyr.dev if you want the full walkthrough. One small correction I made on air: the connectors ship with four providers, not three. Akismet is in there alongside the usual suspects. That reframes what an AI connector is. It is not just “plug in a large language model.” Akismet does AI work on comment moderation, and that counts. There is also a toggle in the settings to see every call every plugin wants to make. Turn it on if you want to understand what is happening on your site. ## The hidden gem nobody is talking about The most interesting thing in WordPress 7.0 Armstrong is quietly sitting in the notes feature. You can ask the AI to leave you notes about a post you are working on. “I am stepping away from this draft, summarize what we did so I can pick it up tomorrow.” It is not real-time collaboration. It is the same notes UI that came out in 6.9, repurposed for human-to-AI handoff. Small feature, real problem solved. ## Hosts showing up for testing changes everything This is the part of the WordPress 7.0 Armstrong story I do not want to get lost. [Kira ](https://profiles.wordpress.org/kirasong/)[Schroder](https://profiles.wordpress.org/kirasong/) and [Jason Cosper](https://profiles.wordpress.org/boogah/) co-founded the WordPress.org hosting team and built a suite of test runners that hosts could use to validate releases. For a number of releases, those tests were not being run. That changed this cycle. When Jonathan Desrosiers on the core team put together the test suite and asked hosts to run it, we did. My colleagues Scott Clark and Jeff at GoDaddy were instrumental in testing how real-time collaboration would perform under load. That feedback is part of why real-time collab got pulled. The performance impact on shared hosting would have been felt. I am sad we delayed a big feature. I am genuinely glad hosts engaged enough to catch it. This kind of engagement has to continue into 7.1 and 7.2. ## Watch the Gutenberg changelog if you want to know what is next Gutenberg ships every other week. Features that land in WordPress core start in the plugin first. If you want to track real-time collaboration (or anything else) as it stabilizes, the plugin changelog is your early-warning system. The relevant Slack channel for collab specifically is `#feature-collaboration` in [Make WordPress Slack](https://make.wordpress.org/chat/). ## A quick aside on Generate Press, BeaverBuilder, and classic themes Mike brought up the [GeneratePress article](https://generatepress.com/) defending their decision to stay with a classic theme. I respect that they put their flag in the sand. They know their customers, they have technical reasons, and they are not chasing the new shiny. Right after that, [BeaverBuilder shipped 2.11 beta 2](https://www.wpbeaverbuilder.com/) with support for the WordPress 7.0 font library. The theme ecosystem is finding real ways to take advantage of what core is offering without becoming full-site editing themes. There is room for both. ## The browser extension I did not know I needed Jake Goldman (now at [Fueled](https://fueled.com/), formerly 10up) shipped an official WordPress browser extension. Chrome and Safari, version 1.0 in testing, jump straight to edit page, log out, or admin areas without clicking through wp-admin. I am happy to see this exist, and I am still running [Turbo Admin](https://turbo-admin.com/). Turbo Admin has more robust functionality (command palette, keyboard shortcuts, fuzzy search across admin and plugins), and it has been part of my daily workflow for a while. I will keep an eye on the official extension as it matures. ## Obsidian came up, and I have a confession Nathan pulled up [the WordPress sync plugin](https://wordpress.org/plugins/search/obsidian/) for [Obsidian](https://obsidian.md/) and asked me about it on air. I already a huge fan and [have created many workflows](https://courtneyr.dev/2026/04/15/llm-wiki-ai-second-brain-obsidian/) around using it as my Second Brain. The software is maintained by three engineers who aspire to stay small. Your files are your files (markdown, on disk, no lock-in), even though the app itself is not open source. Pay for Obsidian Sync and Publish, or use Google Drive, OneDrive, or GitHub for syncing on your own. The problem is organization. The vault is only as good as the user saving the files. Nathan and I agreed to hang out so I can show him the settings. You can write markdown directly in WordPress, and you can use a gooey interface in Obsidian. Pick what fits. ## Get involved with WordPress 7.1 [WordPress 7.1 has a call for volunteers out](https://make.wordpress.org/core/). Beta begins July 15. Final release is targeted for August 19, a couple of weeks before WordCamp US. If you have ever thought about helping with a release cycle, this is the moment. Test the betas. Run them on staging. File the bugs. A hat tip to [Rae Morrey](https://therepository.email/) for her release coverage. Mike proofreads the Repository articles every Friday and walks away amazed at how thorough she is. So do I. Thank you to Nathan for handing me the spare mic, to Michelle for co-hosting, and to Mike for being awake at 6 a.m. The next This Week in WordPress is in two weeks. See you then. Also on:- [ website](https://fed.brid.gy)