Web Hosts and Database Admins: your testing and feedback on the WordPress 7.0 Real Time Collaboration (“RTC”) feature is requested, to help ensure that 7.0 performs as expected on all hosting infrastructure.
While at least two additional Release Candidates will be made available, your testing is needed on or before end of day on May 4th in order to understand the best direction for the underlying architecture of the RTC feature. While thorough testing has been done, it’s been done in a limited set of environments, and it’s crucial to have data covering as wide a spread as possible of WordPress environments to set the feature up for success.
This feature isn’t just for large sites with multiple privileged users creating content. It’s a big step forward in the phase 3 roadmap that opens the door to many new possibilities, some of which aren’t known. Participating in setting a strong foundation now helps set all of WordPress up for success in what comes next. Part of these new opportunities includes agentic collaborators and future phase 3 features, like suggestion mode.
Your help testing now should assure compatibility on your systems, lower support volumes upon the release of 7.0, and make sure your customers are ready for the next phase of WordPress. This is a critical time to get involved in the future of the platform. Your participation ensures that WordPress can make decisions that are informed by hosts representing the wide range of sites that WordPress powers.
Thank you to all hosts who are helping to test!
How to test?
A test suite has been created by Core for testing RTC. These scripts have been designed in a way that only requires a few environment variables to be present with only 4 dependencies; bash, cURL, WP-CLI, and patch.
The ENVIRONMENT_NAME environment variable in particular is critical. This is a freeform text field that allows you to specify a short yet detailed description of the hosting configuration to help group results from similar types of hosting. Some examples:
- Shared basic
- Shared performance
- VPS
- Managed eCommerce
- Shared Ultra
Note: Please do not include details like PHP or MariaDB/MySQL versions in the environment name. These are sent over separately and independently of the environment name.
The most useful data you can contribute is data that represents your actual user base, not your new-install setup. If most of your customers are on PHP 7.4 with no object cache on shared infrastructure, that’s the configuration needed to see results from.
For detailed instructions, please read the repository’s README.md file.
Submitting test results and feedback
The simplest and best way to participate is by using the test runner to submit test results to WordPress.org (specifically make.wordpress.org/hosting), which the script will attempt automatically when the necessary environment variables are configured correctly.
Reporting results to WordPress.org requires a testing bot account. If you have participated in the PHPUnit host tests in the past, you are encouraged to use the same bot account. This is a great opportunity to check in on your bot as some have not reported results in some time. If you need assistance with your bot, please visit the #hosting channel in slack.
You are free to use the same application password, or to login and create a new one. Otherwise, please follow the steps detailed in the README file.
Data Sharing
Unlike the PHPUnit Hosting Tests, the results submitted through this repository will not be shown publicly on a per report basis. This route was chosen because of the ephemeral nature of the need for this data (to make an informed decision leading up to 7.0), and because of the very short timeframe to publish this (building a front end interface would have added time).
All submitted results will be aggregated, analyzed, and shared without indicating which metrics belong to each reporter. As much as possible, they will also be analyzed by hosting type and server information.If you happen to notice anything that’s particularly concerning or surprising, please investigate and feel free to share a summary in the #feature-realtime-collaboration channel in Slack.
Summary
Hosting is a piece of the WordPress puzzle for every user of the software. Participating in the testing phase of this release is a critical part to ensuring that the release of WordPress 7.0 and the user experience of real-time collaboration is built to the best of WordPress Core’s ability. Thank you for taking the time to collaborate and contribute to making the WordPress software better for users.
Props to @kirasong, @desrosj, @jorbin, @maxschmeling, @alecgeatches, @jmdodd, @mmtr86, @professor44, @annezazu, @griffbrad for collaboration, testing, reviewing, and performing outreach to hosting companies.