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How to Beta Test Auto Load Next Post

Beta testing is vital to ensuring my releases are as bug-free as possible, and to ensure I hear users feedback before putting changes live. Anyone can beta test; bloggers, theme developers, translators.. any and all help is welcome.

I do understand however that the process of testing can be a little bit of a hassle since you need to download a tagged release and then upload it to your testing site manually. Sometimes this can also cause issues with plugin directory naming as well because tagged releases won’t have a directory named ‘auto-load-next-post’.

To make this process easier, I’ve released a plugin to help install beta versions of Auto Load Next Post, and to ensure the directory names are kept correct.

Please ensure you test responsibly, its not a good idea to run beta versions on a production site unless you know what you’re doing!

Installing the Beta Tester Plugin

To get started, go to Plugins > Add New > Upload plugin, and install the beta tester plugin which you can download from: https://github.com/AutoLoadNextPost/alnp-beta-tester

This plugin will stop updates coming in from WordPress.org and instead pull the latest tagged version on the Github repository. This includes beta releases and release candidates.

Giving Feedback

During testing, if you come across a bug or want to propose or contribute an enhancement, submit an issue on Github. Ensure you read my guidelines on contributing and note which version you’re using specifically.

Thanks for testing Auto Load Next Post!

Auto Load Next Post v1.5.0-beta.1

A new beta, a new version. This release starts the next version in development providing better support for users and clearer context. If you already read what’s coming to Auto Load Next Post v1.5.0 then you will already know that the theme customizer will now bring the plugin settings in view as you set up your theme.

Theme Selectors for Auto Load Next Post in the Theme CustomizerThis is just the first step in providing a better UI for users and is very useful for when you need to find the theme selectors for the theme you are setting up.

Limited validation has also been applied so far and will improve over time. What I would like to do further with the validation is for themes that have not defined support for Auto Load Next Post, to check if the theme selectors can be found and display a warning notice for that particular selector. That way the user will know if all are set.

Going back in my last post, I mentioned if you changed themes and that theme supports Auto Load Next Post, the theme selectors will be set automatically for you. For the customizer, I think it is a different process as you are only previewing the theme until you have pressed the published button so the theme selectors are not changing or the customizer does not reload to refresh the settings.

As this is a beta release you can report feedback on that.

It’s still early for the customizer in terms of the theme selectors but I think it’s a good start and a step in the right direction.

Notice that the section is not called General but Theme Selectors instead. It’s important that I make things clear for what the user is looking for so they spend less time setting up the plugin. I have also made the same change for the settings page under the WordPress dashboard.

I have also adjusted some additional context throughout the plugin to make it much clearer as to what the setting is or why this setting is required so the language POT file is also updated and ready for translation.

One minor improvement was also made to make sure once the theme selectors are set and you view a single post while still in the customizer that it still loaded the posts as it would publically.

When using the theme customizer, all links have a unique argument applied. This argument prevented the posts from loading using the repeater template and instead loaded the whole page for that post.

This has now been fixed as part of this release by removing the arguments before Auto Load Next Post gets the next post.

What developers need to know

If you had to create a custom repeater template of your own everything will remain working. The only thing you need to do is change the filename of the repeater template. For now, it would be best to just clone the file and rename it so it is ready to support version 1.5.0.

Previous filename used: content-partial.php

New filename: content-alnp.php

That is all for now.

How do I test?

To test Auto Load Next Post 1.5.0 beta 1, you can use my Auto Load Next Post Beta Tester plugin or you can download the beta release here (zip).

If you think you’ve found a bug? Please post in detail to Github.

The final version of 1.5.0 is set for release June 12th 2018.

Thanks for reading and happy testing!

Auto Load Next Post v1.4.12 fixes post content

This release is a minor fix but one that should not have been needed if I checked more properly in the first place. As I am preparing the release for Auto Load Next Post Pro in version 1.4.10 I added support for post types but I forgot one thing that was overlooked on my part.

For single posts the post type is returned as post. However, the template structure for content is content-single.php. If content-single.php does not exists then content.php would load as a fallback.

Now due to the post format returned was post. The repeater template is trying to find content-post.php instead of content-single.php which will abviously fail and fallback to loading content.php instead.

Today I had a user telling me Auto Load Next Post was acting like the archives page which is not what Auto Load Next Post is suppose to do and this is the reason why so I strongly recommend updating to this version if you have been experiencing the same or a similar issue.

The repeater template file has also been updated to accomdate this fix so if you have recently copied it to your own theme for customisation, please compare the change here and apply accordingly.

I will review my work more closley from now. Your help is also appreciated in reporting issues you find or testing out beta releases that I put out.

Speaking of beta releases. I am close to another and it will bring some considerable improvements specially for theme support.

More details on that soon. As a small preview in this release I removed a condition that checks if the theme has declared support so the Javascript can load even if the theme has not provided support. This will allow for a better setup for those who don’t know how to code and only need to set the theme selectors if they are different.

The declaration notice will be removed in the up coming version.