WordPress CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Team builds WordPress. is expanding testing efforts for Real Time Collaboration ahead of WordPress 7.1 to gather feedback and data from active collaborative editors.

Because testing is needed from a wide range of environments, web hosts are being asked to reach out to your customer base to invite them to participate, however you see fit. Professional teams are the ideal user base for this testing, such as small businesses, newsrooms, non-profits, marketers and designers.

Including testers that host on your infra will help ensure the feature is fully optimized for your hostingHosting A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website accessible via the World Wide Web. platform, while showing a healthy collaborative relationship with their software provider can positively influence customer perception of your org. This also will create an active feedback loopLoop The Loop is PHP code used by WordPress to display posts. Using The Loop, WordPress processes each post to be displayed on the current page, and formats it according to how it matches specified criteria within The Loop tags. Any HTML or PHP code in the Loop will be processed on each post. https://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop with developers that can speedrun fixes and improvements to the benefit of your users and platform.

Instructions, updates, feedback and general communication will be in the #collaborative-editing-outreach channel in SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/, and folks only need to join the channel to get started.

Collaborative editing updates will be shared through a pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party., allowing participants to enable and start using it with ease, and share feedback as they go in the Slack channel alongside feature developers. Participants should:

• Want to use collaborative editing on a regular basis
• Enjoy being an early adopter
• Feel comfortable using the latest version of the GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ plugin
• Have the ability to participate through the 7.1 cycle (at least until 8/18/26) 

As an organization – your team is invited to participate!

As a host – comment below with your company name if you plan to help with outreach, and make sure to hop into #collaborative-editing-outreach to share that you and your customers are participating. This is also where you can give feedback, and see the most current changes and updates.

Feedback from testers will help inform development throughout the 7.1 cycle, influence the direction of the feature, and help ensure compatibility across hosting platforms. Test badges and credits will be given to those who participate at the end of the cycle.

The program starts now, with the hope to gather meaningful feedback and data, and make iterations, prior to the 7.1 BetaBeta Beta is the software development phase following alpha. A Beta phase generally begins when the software is feature complete but likely to contain a number of known or unknown bugs. Software in the beta phase will generally have many more bugs in it than completed software, speed or performance issues, and may still cause crashes or data loss. The focus of beta testing is reducing impacts to users, often incorporating usability testing. 1 release on July 15th. 

Thank you in advance for your help! You all are heroes!

Props to @annezazu and @kirasong for reviewing this post.

#testing