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:
