First of all, welcome to the Test release squad! 🎉 It’s so awesome you’ve stepped forward to help spread feature awareness and to support testing efforts for the release!
If you haven’t already, please take some time to read through the release process, team roles, and expectations:
- Release Cycle
- Release Team. Some key sections:
Additionally, now is a good time to bookmark key Make WordPress resources, which grow and evolve as the release unfolds. Look for this release’s “Development Cycle”, “Planning”, and “Roadmap” posts for a good start. Here are some examples from multiple versions:
Be on the lookout for posts about the release, features, etc — consume as much as you can.
And finally, make sure to join the appropriate release leads channel in Make WordPress Slack to coordinate with other release squad teams, and to stay in the 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. on latest developments! 👍
Call for Testing Post
The official release Call for Testing (CfT) post helps align the testing community around the key features and enhancements planned for the release. An example is the CfT for WordPress 6.1, 6.9.
Timing
In recent releases, the CfT has shipped just before the BetaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. 1 release post goes out on wordpress.org/news, where the release post typically includes a link to the CfT. The thought behind this timing is to allow testing to begin right away, and for bugs to be uncovered early in the cycle. However, there isn’t often much urgency at this point, and most testing typically ramps up around RC1.
The CfT is one of the first major tasks for the Test release team. It should be noted that during the beta cycle, there are usually outstanding questions as to what exactly will officially make it into the release 😅 With this timeline and ambiguity, it can feel frantic putting it together!
So to be clear: It’s OKAY for the CfT to be edited/updated during the release cycle, or for follow-up CfTs to be published afterwards. The post’s change log is used to track updates, and major updates may even warrant detailed separate posts in Make/CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.. If you’ve followed past releases, you’ll notice there are always adjustments made because we’re all human, and things fall through the cracks. But most features are typically settled by RC1.
Post Format
The format of the CfT was adapted from the WordPress 5.9 CfT, where some of the post is boilerplate, but the majority of content is specific to new release features.
A great way to start the CfT is to make a copy of the document used by the previous Test Team release squad, which is often co-authored in Google Docs.
Source Information
Info related to features introduced in the release comes from a variety of sources, including:
- “Roadmap” posts, e.g. 6.1, 6.9
- GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ project boards, e.g. WordPress Editor Tasks for 6.2, 6.9.
- TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. release queries, e.g. enhancements and features for the current milestone like 6.9 (Simply change the milestone number in the query to the current future release)
- “Source of Truth” documents (which typically come after beta, but for which drafts are shared quite early).
- Release walkthroughs.
- Guidance from the release coordinators or previous Test release leads.
That’s a LOT of info, and it can be helpful to create a CfT planning document to sort out a curated list of items to include. You might also use a color-coding system to indicate whether the source info is good (🟢), just started (🟡), or needs a lot of work (🔴).
Feature Details
Once key features have been identified, and while building out testing info for each, you should strive for the following:
- Provide a clear/recognizable feature name.
- Briefly describe what the feature/update does, including links that are important for context.
- Provide a screenshot, animated GIF, video, or code snippet demonstrating the feature. (Optional, but can be extremely helpful.)
- Include links to test instructions and documentation for the feature.
In the end, it’s up to the Test Team release leads to decide on the final details for the post.
Useful Tools
Whenever possible, try to include a screenshot, animated GIF, video, or code sample to demonstrate the feature. Here are some tools and services that can be helpful putting together visual assets to support feature details.
- Licecap – animated GIFs; great for micro demonstrations without sound
- HandBrake – video resizing/compression/transcoding
- TinyPNG – image web optimization (WebP, PNG, JPEG)
- WordPress Playground – one-click environments, which can be pre-configured for tests or demos
- WP Playground CLI
Here’s an example workflow (on Mac) you might use to show how a feature works:
- If you need a clean test environment, use Playground to fire up a fresh site (based on the nightly build).
- Use QuickTime on Mac, or Snipping tool on Windows to do a screen recording of the feature in action.
- Resize and compress the video using HandBrake.
- Upload the video asset to the test site to attach and use in the post.
Review
As you go through the list and draft up the copy, some things to consider:
- Does this describe the feature how a UIUI UI is an acronym for User Interface – the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing. user or extender (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 https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party/theme dev) would understand it?
- Do the provided links give required context for using the feature?
- Would a visual example (image, video, etc) help explain this better?
- Are there test instructions provided at any of the links?
For any of these that don’t have test instructions, please drop a note into #core-test, and we can ask contributors to add them.
