Getting ready for WordPress 7.0 — three things to check now: PHP requirements, FSE migration, and editor extensions

Five failure patterns from past WordPress major upgrades ended with the observation that "the same structures will recur in some form in the next major (7.0 or 8.0)." This post applies that pattern knowledge to WordPress 7.0 specifically — not as a list of things that will happen, but as a preparatory checklist for what you can verify now. This sits alongside the seven-item pre-flight checklist from W1 rather than replacing it. Think of it as the 7.0-specific supplement. Item 1 — PHP minimum requirement increase (W3 pattern 3 again) W3’s pattern 3 was "older plugins break with parse errors when the PHP minimum requirement is raised." This pattern repeats on every major upgrade cycle. WordPress 7.0 is expected to follow the same trajectory. Background: PHP 7.4 reached end-of-life from the PHP project in November 2022 (security support ended November 2023) WordPress 6.6 requires PHP 7.2 minimum WordPress 7.0 is expected to raise the minimum to PHP 8.0 or later When this happens, sites running PHP 7.x will encounter plugins and themes that "worked fine before" but break with syntax or fatal errors after the upgrade. The mechanism is the same as past cycles — the plugin hasn’t updated its code to handle PHP 8.x stricter type handling, and the errors surface only at runtime. What you can check now: # Confirm the server’s PHP version php -v # List all plugins with their current version and update status wp plugin list --fields = name,version,update,update_version --format = table # Run a JSON output check — noisy output here means PHP warnings already leaking wp plugin list --format = json The pattern to watch for: plugins with an old "Tested up to" value and no updates in the past year. These are the highest risk candidates for PHP compatibility issues when the minimum requirement moves. The post on PHP 8.2 Deprecated warnings leaking into WP-CLI JSON output covers a related symptom — even when PHP compatibility doesn’t cause a hard break, it can silently corrupt o