Over the last few months we’ve been working hard on improving how we build and test our plugins. We’re writing more and more unit tests and are trying to prevent issues from popping up. There’s one recurring issue though: we can’t test everything. Hosting environments vary so much that we have decided to do more public betas for our plugins. As a direct result of that decision, this post announces two public betas as well as reminds you of our beta mailing list.
For both plugins we’re aiming for a beta period of about a week but if too many bugs come out of a beta we’ll of course postpone release.
WordPress SEO by Yoast 1.8-beta
We’ve refactored large parts of the frontend code of our WordPress SEO plugin and heavily optimized how the plugin loads its modules in both front- and backend. The execution of code of our plugins code on the frontend is now approximately 30 – 40% faster, which of course is awesome. But… This almost has to lead to bugs and while we’ve fixed a fair few and our unit tests all succeed, we’d like you to test.
Most important here is testing whether there are any major differences in meta data between your pages with the current WordPress SEO plugin and this beta. This beta introduces a few new features around Twitter cards (Twitter cards on every page, support for the Twitter Gallery card) but all the other meta data should be the same.
Another thing that should work better in this release is everything to do with characters with accents, umlauts etc in the focus keyword and all the tests around that.
Download WordPress SEO by Yoast 1.8 beta here »
(or check it out from GitHub but in that case make sure to update Git sub-modules too)
Note: this is beta software. Do not use on production environments.
Google Analytics by Yoast 5.3-beta
The release of the dashboards for our Google Analytics plugin has been a bit of a bumpy ride. We’ve made some mistakes and have had to scramble to fix those. Brian Krogsgard actually wrote a nice post over on Post Status about it, if you’re interested in the background. We think this beta release fixes some of the last remaining issues but we’re having a hard time confirming those, so we decided to ask a wider audience to test.
This beta has the option to completely disable the dashboards functionality, should you want to. It should also no longer show any notices about re-authentication or at least show them way less frequently than it did for some people.
Download Google Analytics by Yoast 5.3-beta here »
(or check it out from GitHub but in that case make sure to update Git sub-modules too)
Note: this is beta software. Do not use on production environments.
How to give feedback
So you want to test and give feedback? Awesome, thank you! We’d prefer your feedback in the form of new issues on GitHub (make sure to mention the beta) or as emails to beta at yoast.com.
The beta mailing list
We have a mailing list for beta testers that we’ll be using more often, you can sign up for that here. We’ll send new versions of the betas out to that mailing list too so make sure to subscribe if you’re testing.
This post first appeared as Public betas for our plugins on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!