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You are here: Home / Programming / Increase “Tested up to” Value for WordPress Plugin

Increase “Tested up to” Value for WordPress Plugin

Last updated on January 28, 2022 by Sal Ferrarello

For the purpose of this exercise, I’m going to update the Tested up to value for my Stop Emails plugin, without creating a new release.

Get Your Subversion Repository URL

This URL is available on the Developers tab of your plugin on wordpress.org in the Subversion Repository link. In my case, the url is http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/stop-emails/.

Checkout a Local Copy of the Subversion Repo

svn co http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/stop-emails/

Navigate into your plugin directory with something like

cd stop-emails

Update Your “Tested up to” Value

You should updated your “Tested up to” value in your latest tagged release. Look in tags/ and find the latest version, in my case 1.2.1. If you want to edit this from the command line, you can use

nano tags/1.2.1/readme.txt

You can review the change by using svn diff

Push the changes back to wordpress.org

You then check-in your changes and include a message of the change.

svn ci -m "Tested up to bumped to 5.9 in tagged release 1.2.1"

Why I Wrote this Post

The only time I ever use subversion is for managing my plugin on wordpress.org. Every time I use it, I have to look up how.

For tagged releases (e.g. version 1.2.1) I use a deploy script written by others smarter than I and more well versed in subversion. Creating a tagged release for a bump in the Tested up to value would be overkill.

Photo Credit: WikiMedia Commons
Sal Ferrarello
Sal Ferrarello (@salcode)
Sal is a PHP developer with a focus on the WordPress platform. He is a conference speaker with a background including Piano Player, Radio DJ, Magician/Juggler, Beach Photographer, and High School Math Teacher. Sal can be found professionally at WebDevStudios, where he works as a senior backend engineer.

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Filed Under: Programming Tagged With: svn, WordPress, WordPress Plugin

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Comments

  1. Sophia Phillips says

    December 1, 2015 at 11:43 pm

    Hi,

    Thanks for sharing this “Tested up to” value with us. It will be a great help for me.

    Regards,

    Reply
  2. Mitchell Miller says

    January 31, 2016 at 7:52 pm

    Hello Sal:
    Wordfence security plugin displayed a “changed file warning” after I tried this once with my Quick Mail plugin.

    I waited two days for warning to be resolved, before I added a feature and bumped version.

    Best wishes,
    Mitchell

    Reply
    • Sal Ferrarello says

      January 31, 2016 at 10:40 pm

      Thanks for sharing this, Mitchell. It appears you’re not the first to have this experience, Wordfence False Positive Modified File Warning for Akismet.

      According to Wordfence

      Note that some developers do not follow the official guidelines that WordPress provides for plugin developers and will modify a “tag” or a version of their plugin that has already been released by adding new code to an existing release.

      Taken from Wordfence Docs Scan plugin files against repository versions for changes

      While I agree that you should never modify your code without increasing your version number, my understanding is the best practice for the WordPress plugin repository is to update the “Tested up to” value while maintaining the same version number. I’d love to see Wordfence whitelist this type of change when scanning plugins (or work with the WordPress plugin repository to update their best practices).

      Reply
      • Mitchell says

        February 1, 2016 at 6:26 pm

        Hello Sal:
        Authoritative source agreed with your article:

        you don’t need to release a new version — just change the stable version’s readme value.

        See: https://make.wordpress.org/plugins/2015/04/21/reminder-please-test-your-plugins-with-4-2/

        Unfortunately, clients with admin access see unexpected security warnings.

        Best wishes,
        Mitchell

        Reply
  3. Emily Johns says

    March 2, 2016 at 6:42 am

    Interesting discussion. As a plugin developer, I didn’t realize that changing the readme file without updating the whole plugin would cause an issue.
    There are a lot of things to remember before updating a plugin and the first few times I did this I would forget about one of the changes. Now I have a list: update the version in the plugin file header, plus the version number that’s saved in a variable, and then the readme file needs the stable tag updated, plus the changelog and the upgrade notice.

    Reply
    • Sal Ferrarello says

      March 2, 2016 at 10:33 am

      I agree with you Emily, it is always a good idea to have a checklist.

      Mark Jaquith had a nice presentation at WordCamp Miami 2016 called Grunt and the Art of Plugin Maintenance that discussed automating this process. As of my writing this comment, it isn’t on WordPress.tv yet but when it is, I recommend checking it out.

      Reply
      • Jsmith Kely says

        September 18, 2019 at 5:52 am

        Thank you for your support.(:)

        Reply
  4. Ahmad Awais says

    December 7, 2016 at 1:48 am

    I have a small script that automates all this. I should probably open source it.

    Reply
    • Sal Ferrarello says

      December 7, 2016 at 5:38 am

      That sounds really cool. If you do publish it, please let me know.

      Reply
  5. Phil Hilton says

    January 23, 2017 at 1:26 pm

    Thanks for this.

    A caveat I experienced was that the change was not reflected in the plugin repository until I also updated the trunk directory.

    I almost think that it would make more sense to update trunk and then, since this isn’t a new release, copy that to the tagged version to keep them in sync. But I am not in any way an expert on svn update processes so I’ll let others who are judge such suggestions accordingly.

    Peace,
    Phil

    Reply
    • Sal Ferrarello says

      January 23, 2017 at 2:42 pm

      Hi Phil,

      This is the process I’ve used in the past and I’ve always seen the update on my plugin page. Two possibilities come to mind:

      1. The value was cached and after a certain amount of time the new value would be displayed. In this scenario, it also seems reasonable the update of the trunk directory cleared the cache.

      2. The behind the scenes code of the plugin repository has changed making the trunk directory update necessary.

      In either case, I appreciate your comment and I’ll be watching closely the next time I try to update this value. Thanks.

      Reply
  6. Gary says

    February 2, 2022 at 6:41 pm

    I can see you’ve recently updated the article, and I wanted to say thank you for publishing it – it’s just allowed me to easily bump the tested version number on a plugin that I had access to, whilst the original author was fixing a crashed laptop!

    Reply

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