Joomla! Documentation™

What is the Joomla! Release Life Cycle

Comment by zero24: What about adding the nightly Builds to this list too? Answer by Sandra: agree.

There are four milestones in the Joomla! Release Life Cycle:

• Alpha
• Beta
• Release candidate
• General availability.

See full information in this article: Joomla! Development Strategy

An Alpha, Beta or Release Candidate versions (pre-release versions) help providing quality assurance for the next stable release and are useful to correct bugs.

They should only be used on test sites. Production sites should never update to a pre-release version and new sites should never be started with a pre-release version as they are are ONLY intended for testing and there is no upgrade path from any pre-release as The Joomla! Project has elected to not support any upgrade path except for an upgrade from a stable release package to the package to be tested. It does not offer support for upgrades between nightly builds or pre-stable release packages to newer packages.

How can you help?

Extension and template developers are encouraged to work with this release in order to prepare extensions for the stable release of Joomla! CMS 3.7, though there shouldn't be any backward compatibility issues. Users are encouraged to test the package for issues and to report them in the Joomla! CMS Issue Tracker.

TO ADD - Information for beginners: link to test issues pages+com_patchtester / test a pre-release / roadmap / github...)