There seems to be a bit of confusion in our community about how and when you should test your extensions against a new version of WooCommerce. There is no right or wrong way to test extensions so I’ll tell you what we do here at WooThemes.
- Subscribe to this blog and pay attention to the big changes as they come out. Ex. in 2.3 the coupon system was refactored. If you have an extension that deals with coupons then it’s advisable to test right then and make any updates you have to make.
- When the first beta is announced on the develop blog it’s time to test your extension. Betas are usually very similar to the final release. In rare exceptions features are added or deleted here but usually after the first beta there are only bug fixes.
- When the first release candidate is announced do another quick test to make sure your extension works. If something did make it into the beta to affect your plugin this is where you catch it. The release candidate is strictly bug fixes. If it works during the release candidate phase it should work when the new version of WooCommerce is released.
We do all of our development on the master branch so whenever you want to test WooCommerce it’s best to use the master branch.
There are a couple of our extensions that are quite large and extra testing goes into these plugins. Plugins like Subscriptions for example usually has several weeks or months of testing to make sure that everything will work against the newest version of WooCommerce. If you have a very large or complex extension then it’s worth testing as we add features into WooCommerce before we release the first beta.
I hope this clears up how we do our own testing and hopefully it should help you do yours. 🙂
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