WordPress can now see who's in the building
WordPress can now see who's in the building
Picture this. You log into your WordPress admin. Right there in the top bar, three little avatars. One teammate is on the dashboard. Another is editing the product page you were about to open. A third is somewhere in the comments.
You knew none of this before. You’d open the post, hit a “this post is locked” warning, and sort it out from there.
WordPress is working on a fix. It’s called the Presence API.
“You log in and you can kind of see the neighborhood of like who else is also there.” Matt Mullenweg, WordPress 7.0 planning session
What it actually does
A “Who’s Online” widget on your dashboard
An avatar stack in the admin bar showing users currently on the same screen
An “Editors” column in your post list, so you see active editors before you click
An “Online” filter on your Users list
Runs through the existing Heartbeat API, nothing fancy needed
The post list column is the one I’d use every day. Right now you have no idea a post is being edited until you try to open it yourself. By then, two people have been writing the same thing for 10 minutes.
The technical bit (quick version)
During WordPress 7.0 development the team ran into a real problem. Storing “who is online right now” in shared cache tables was invalidating cache site-wide on every heartbeat ping.
The fix: a dedicated table just for presence data, with a 60-second TTL. Data appears fast, disappears fast, and doesn’t touch anything else. Clean.
Should you install it?
It’s experimental, not in core yet. Don’t put it on a live site before testing. But there’s a Playground demo with 5 fake editors already logged in. You can see exactly how the UI looks without touching your own install.
The plugin hit the WordPress.org directory on April 6. Core dev discussion is happening in #feature-presence-api on WordPress Slack.
I don’t know if this lands in 7.0 or later. But WordPress has always felt like a solo tool even when a whole team is using it. This changes that.