Summary, Dev Chat, January 21, 2026

Welcome!

The WordPress coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. development team builds WordPress! Follow this site for general updates, status reports, and the occasional code debate. There’s lots of ways to contribute:

Found a bugbug A bug is an error or unexpected result. Performance improvements, code optimization, and are considered enhancements, not defects. After feature freeze, only bugs are dealt with, with regressions (adverse changes from the previous version) being the highest priority.? Create a ticket in the bug tracker.

Want to contribute? Get started quickly with tickets marked as good first bugs for new contributors or join a bug scrub. There’s more on the reports page, like patches needing testing, and on feature projects page.

Other questions? Here is a detailed handbook for contributors, complete with tutorials.

Start of the meeting in SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/, facilitated by @desrosj 🔗 Agenda post.

Announcements 📢

Nominations for CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. Team Reps 2026

The nomination process for Core Team Representatives for 2026 is now open. Please submit your nomination here.

Dropping support for PHPPHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 7.4 or higher 7.2 and 7.3

Support for PHP 7.2 and 7.3 will be dropped in WordPress 7.0. More details are available in this post.

7.4 is currently at ~22% of all WP sites. So let’s find ways to work with Hosts and site owners to decrease that number.

WordPress 6.9.1 Release Schedule

The WordPress 6.9.1 maintenance release is planned on February 3, 2026. See the release schedule announcement for more information.

@jorbin shared this update: “Just a general note that here are multiple scrubs being held each week (see the 6.9.1 announcement). If you want to join for one of those or feel free to work on any of the tickets in tracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. or GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged by the repository owner. https://github.com/ in your own time. You may see pings on those tickets, if you are able to help it would be appreciated as we work to resolutions on these. No concerns as of now, we seem to be in good shape for a release on 3 February.”

#6-9-1, #7-0, #core, #dev-chat

Andrew Ozz 11:01 am on January 26, 2026

7.4 is currently at ~22% of all WP sites. So let’s find ways to work with Hosts and site owners to decrease that number.

This is probably going to be quite tough. Considering that PHPPHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 7.4 or higher 8.0 introduced a ton of backwards incompatible changes (~166), it is logical to not want to upgrade if there is old and/or unsupported PHP code still being used. The hesitation about upgrading PHP was expected, see the discussion in “WordPress and PHP 8.0“.

Thinking it would make sense to try to do more here. CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. is compatible with the latest versions of PHP and is being updated/maintained regularly (big props to @sergeybiryukov for that). Most new or “major” plugins and themes seem compatible too. But what to do about the rest?

Seems it would be very good to actively try to help the hosts and site owners to ensure that their sites would continue to work with the latest PHP and MySQLMySQL MySQL is a relational database management system. A database is a structured collection of data where content, configuration and other options are stored. https://www.mysql.com/MariaDB. One very good idea we’ve been talking about with @tellyworth, @dd32, and @zieladam is to utilize the WordPress Playground and run more extensive tests of the plugins and themes in the repositories. Some of these tests can be automatic/scripted, or semi-automatic, but some will still have to be manual, and will require wide participation.

To achieve this perhaps it would be good to organize this effort as a (temporary?) team or sub-team between Themes, Plugins, Test, Playground, and Core. It would also be great if the Core AI team can chip-in and get some AI induced testing going on 🙂

(Uh, I should probably put this in a new post..)
- Dion Hulse 3:01 am on January 27, 2026
  
  I have questions over how many plugins are actually not compatible with PHPPHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 7.4 or higher 8.x, I suspect it’s less than expected, but I also suspect those plugins aren’t overly compatible with modern WP either.
  
  The best approach for PHP 7.4 deprecation would be host outreach, this is something we’ve done in the past. Unfortunately any sites running plugins that aren’t PHP 8.x compatible are unlikely to see those plugins get updates from their authors.
  
  The vast majority of sites that were running old PHP versions in the past, in my experience, were doing so because their hosting account had been locked to that version, and the host saw no reason to attempt to change that.
  Giving hosts a warning that “Hey, your customers are going to start getting a notice in their dashboard and they’ll probably contact you about it” often caused them to priortise this, as they don’t have the ability to deal with so many emails/tickets/phone calls 🙂
  7.4 is currently at ~22% of all WP sites.
  
  It’s also worth noting that when narrowed to WP 6.9, it’s still 19%, and WP 6.8 sites are about 16% (Going back further will show higher percentage of sites running older PHP versions).
  - Andrew Ozz 12:09 pm on January 27, 2026
    how many plugins are actually not compatible with PHPPHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 7.4 or higher 8.x, I suspect it’s less than expected
    
    Yes, same here. Letting the site owners to test and confirm that their sites (actually the plugins and theme) are compatible with newest WP, PHP and MySQLMySQL MySQL is a relational database management system. A database is a structured collection of data where content, configuration and other options are stored. https://www.mysql.com versions would give them confidence to upgrade.
    
    The best approach for PHP 7.4 deprecation would be host outreach, this is something we’ve done in the past.
    
    Right, and it has been working pretty well, although somewhat slow. But the opposite is also true: hosts may hold up upgrading because they know or suspect some sites are not going to be compatible and will break. This may cause even bigger problems that are harder to deal with. Giving many site owners the confidence their sites will be okay may speed this up.
    
    There’s another reason for this testing: failed plugins and themes can be marked in the repositories. This would open the door to display warnings in wp-adminadmin (and super admin) and advise on possible fixes/replacements. This will boost the confidence when upgrading even further. Imagine WordPress telling you:
    
    The "Old PHP example" plugin is not compatible with PHP 8.5 and WordPress 7.0. You may be able to replace it: [search plugins repo by tag].

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Welcome!

Communication

Announcements 📢

Nominations for CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. Team Reps 2026

Dropping support for PHPPHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 7.4 or higher 7.2 and 7.3

WordPress 6.9.1 Release Schedule

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