The current development version of glFusion can be found here. If you are interested in helping with the testing, you can follow the steps below to get going.
If you are interested in helping us test the development code of glFusion, contact us at support@glfusion.org. A few things to keep in mind:
If you are still interested, we'll get you setup with access to a pre-release section of the download manager. Here you can find pre-release versions of many plugins. We'll also open a development testing forum where you can post any issues you run into or design problems.
Why don't we just open all this up to the public? It is not our intent to hide anything, instead we want to make sure everything is ready to be released before it goes public. For example, we are currently developing the ability to upload plugins and have them auto installed. This requires some changes to the plugins to use this feature. If we made these available to the public, we would end up with lots of support questions as to why they don't work with the current production release of glFusion. By limiting the availability to those that want to help test, we will hopefully reduce our support issues and end up with a much better and stable final release.
The source code for glFusion is stored in a Subversion (SVN) source code repository hosted by SourceForge. You will need a SVN client to check out the source code. Most Linux/FreeBSD system have the Subversion client installed or available to install as a package. For Windows users, grab the TortoiseSVN client.
The URL to use for checking out the latest glFusion source code is:
glFusion v1.1.9 - Next Stable Release
https://glfusion.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/glfusion/glfusion/stable/
glFusion v2.0.0 - Next major milestone release
https://glfusion.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/glfusion/glfusion/trunk/
I also recommend you subscribe to the glFusion SVN Announce mailing list so you will be notified each time we check in a revised source file.
I could write a book on the various methods to create a test environment, so this will be a quick and terse overview.
Windows user, I recommend you grab a copy of WAMP, it makes setting up a test system very simple.
For Linux/FreeBSD/Mac OSX users, you'll need to have Apache, PHP, and MySQL, installed.
If you have the ability to setup an additional site on your hosting account, that is always a good option too.
You can also use virtual machines to test, I recommend Sun's VirtualBox, it is free and allows you to easily setup virtual machines.
As we develop glFusion, we fall into a trap of testing in our 'clean' environment. I know my development system has all the proper permissions, latest version of software, etc. The more folks we can have running the development code in other environments, the better.
Test everything, not just one feature that was changed. For example, I may tweak the upload code so it handles uploading user photos, this change could impact Media Gallery, FileMgmt, Forum, and any other plugin that uses the upload code. We want to test stuff that we didn't touch just to make sure it still works as it should when a core feature is changed.
Part of the testing process should be to see how glFusion reacts to problems; What happens when all the permissions are changed so the web server can no longer write to the log files? What happens when the database server dies, etc. Change your PHP environment to run in Safe Mode, add some open_basedir restrictions, drop the memory_limit setting, etc. We want to make sure we properly handle adverse conditions as much as we want to make sure everything works properly when the environment is correct.
We also want to make sure upgrades work as they should. Test upgrading from glFusion v1.0.0 or another older release of glFusion.
Having more hands helping with the testing will make for a much more stable product. We appreciate all the help we can get with the testing effort.
When you find an issue (and we hope you do), please report it using the methods described here.