Beta testing is vital to ensuring our releases are as bug free as possible, and to ensure we hear user feedback before putting changes live. Anyone can beta test; shop owners, plugin developers, theme developers, translators, any and all help is welcome.
We do understand however that the process of testing can be a little bit of a hassle since you need to download a tagged release and then upload it to your testing site manually. Sometimes this can also cause issues with plugin directory naming as well, because tagged releases won’t have a directory named ‘woocommerce’. This can break extensions.
To make this process easier, we’ve released a beta testing plugin to help install the WooCommerce beta versions, and to ensure the directory names are kept correct.
Please ensure you test responsibly, its not a good idea to run beta versions on a production site unless you know what you’re doing!
Installing the Beta Tester Plugin
To get started, go to Plugins > Add New > Upload plugin, and install the beta tester plugin which you can download from:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/woocommerce-beta-tester/
This plugin will give you access to all of the WooCommerce versions uploaded to WordPress.org. This includes beta releases and release candidates.
Giving Feedback
During testing, if you come across a bug or want to propose or contribute an enhancement, submit an issue on Github. Ensure you read our guidelines on contributing and note which version you’re using specifically. It is also possible to easily submit a new GitHub issue through the beta tester plugin.
Sometimes we may also ask for feedback via other means, such as the survey for 2.4. We’d appreciate if you fill this in too as it will help us judge how well received our releases and betas are and help us shape future versions.
Thanks for testing WooCommerce!
Leave a Reply