WordPress Helps You Help Them with Beta Tester Plugin

Considering their track record, WordPress (news, site) has been sort of lacking in the tiny iterations department. It's not without good reason, of course; the team behind the popular Web platform has been hard at work on version 2.9. Just yesterday they announced an opportunity for those who can't wait to get their hands on it.

Being a part of the testing process this time around is just like every other time, save for one cool detail. In addition to the usual (the wp-testers mailing list, or the Trac ticketing system) WordPress is offering the help of a handy little plugin. The WordPress Beta Tester converts a test install of the latest release version of WordPress into a beta test install of the up and coming release.

"During the beta phase we are going to focus on the stabilization of the new features and the removal of existing bugs which are well-understood and have easily testable solutions," wrote Peter Westwood of WordPress on the team's development blog. "During this process we will not be adding any more enhancements so as to ensure that the focus is on making the 2.9 release as bug-free as possible."

You can read more about the the new plugin here, or get it directly from WordPress Extend.

Westwood says the team is aiming to release WordPress 2.9 beta 1 around the end of this month and hopefully a final release in either late November or December. This probably means that in no time we'll be back back to covering those tiny iterations we missed so much. Keep up with us as we keep up with WordPress.