Good Morning Everyone!
We know that you are all eagerly awaiting the next 7.10.x release and that some of you are already running fixes from Pull Requests (AKA PRs) to overcome some bugs.
A lot has been happening behind the scenes to step up and improve the time it takes to merge a PR but also encouraging the submission of tests to reduce regression issues. If you are active on the github platform you may have already seen the implementation of unit tests and acceptance tests not only from us but from the community members (big shout out to them!).
However with how large the application is and still a full test suite to kit out we don’t feel that we can just spin out a production ready release without a lot of manual testing which takes up resources and time.
So in order to consistently provide the community and partners with stable and frequent production releases whilst incrementally introducing more and more automated testing we felt that an intermediate step was required.
Introducing a nightly demo instance!
https://nightly.suiteondemand.com
e.g. username / password is
will / will or
sally / sally
This instance is built similarly to the live SuiteCRM demo but rather than a clone from the master branch it is using the hotfix branch. This means that all recent Pull Requests can be tested in a full instance without having to dive into git and manage a repo yourself.
Every evening @ 6:15(ish) BST the nightly instance is updated with the previous 24 hours merged PRs and the data is refreshed hourly. The nature of this instance is to encourage testing so we would not recommend this branch for production use and that the nightly instance may produce broken results (but that is the goal we are aiming not to happen with testing frequently!).
There are more tools and processes we want to introduce to provide a more streamlined release process but we believe this is a great step towards that.
And with that goal we would like to invite the community to join us in testing the new nightly instance in preparation for upcoming latest 7.10.x release which we have scheduled for this week (3rd - 7th Sept). We will monitor the issues raised from the nightly instance or hotfix branch testing to assess if it is ready for the next production release so do please jump on board and provide feedback.
We have been busy merging a lot of PRs in past few months so below is a preview of the release notes.
https://deploy-preview-137–suitedocs.netlify.com/admin/releases/#anchor-7.10.8
https://deploy-preview-137–suitedocs.netlify.com/admin/releases/#anchor-7.8.21
(BBcode doesn’t like the docs.suitecrm.com urls… 
)
We have also introduced milestone tags and the 7.10.8 tagged bugs can be viewed here:
7.10.8 Milestone tagged bugs
