Last week I sat on the “Inside WordPress 7.0” panel at WordCamp Europe 2026, alongside Sarah Norris, Adam Silverstein, and Benjamin Zekavica, with Milana Cap moderating the panel.

Here’s a summary of some of the ideas I shared during the panel.

“AI is in core now” means WordPress provides the AI infrastructure

No, you won’t open 7.0 and find ChatGPT sitting in your dashboard. What actually shipped is infrastructure for developers to build on, not a feature you switch on. The AI Experiments plugin is a great way to check what can be done with this AI infrastructure now in WP 7.0.

Three things are worth knowing about:

• A new Connectors settings page where users add their own API keys (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or local models via a plugin).
• A core SDK to connect WordPress with external models, so plugin developers don’t have to keep rebuilding the same key handling and model selection themselves.
• The Abilities API (introduced in 6.9) can now be called from JavaScript, not just PHP.

As Adam said on the panel, the barrier to entry for using AI in WordPress is now almost zero. Core doesn’t use AI itself yet; what it gives you is a standard way to build with it.

The piece I’d keep if I could keep only one

Milana asked us to pick a single feature and throw the rest away. I went with connecting WordPress to external models.

An ability can now trigger a model call and return the result, and that same ability can be exposed as a tool to an AI agent. So you can call it from a button in the editor, or from an agent that never touches the UI at all. That’s the part I’m most excited about, and I suspect it’s where a lot of the interesting plugins next year will come from.

Why dropping real-time collaboration was the right call IMO

Real-Time Collaboration (RTC) was the most talked-about feature of the whole cycle, and then it didn’t ship. Honestly, I don’t think that’s going to upset many people.

It was brand-new functionality rather than a fix for something people relied on, so adoption was always going to be gradual. And when your software runs close to half the web, you can really only ship things that are genuinely solid. To me, holding it back is a sign of a healthy project. Collaboration doesn’t begin and end with real-time editing, either. The Notes feature keeps getting better, and I can imagine a near future where AI agents leave notes on your posts, so you’re collaborating with them and not only with other people.

My role this cycle: triage

I co-led the triage focus for WordPress 7.0 with Jean-Baptiste, running bug scrubs twice a week, pinging the right people, and keeping issues moving toward the release. If there’s one thing I’d want you to take from that, it’s this: you don’t have to be picked for a release squad, or even write code, to help ship WordPress. Pick an area you care about, show up in Slack, and watch how a project this size actually runs. It’s one of the best ways to learn that I know of.

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And here’s us right before the show:

Thanks to Milana for the questions, and to Sarah, Adam, and Benjamin for the company on stage. If you have a question I didn’t get to, come find me. I’m always happy to talk.