Downloading Nightly Builds
WordPress development moves pretty fast. Often, changes in the WordPress software's development cycle occur daily. While the developers are working on alpha and beta versions and release candidates, they will commit the latest core changes to the repository and make those changes available to the public to download, install, and test on their own sites. The changes are released in a full WordPress software package called a nightly build — which contains the latest core changes submitted to the project, changes that have not yet released as a full and final version, yet.
Using nightly builds is not a safe practice for a live site. We strongly recommend creating a test environment to test the nightly builds. Many times, especially during alpha and beta phases, the core code may break and cause problems with your existing installation, so use nightly builds in a test environment only and leave your live site intact until the final release is available.
Hundreds of members of the WordPress community help in the development phases, even though they aren't developers or programmers. They help by downloading the nightly builds, testing them in various server environments, and reporting to the WordPress development team by way of Trac tickets (shown in Figure 3-3; check out http://core.trac.wordpress.org/report) any bugs and problems they find with that version of the software.
Figure 3-3: WordPress Trac tickets.
You can download the latest nightly build from the WordPress repository at http://wordpress.org/download/nightly. For information about installing WordPress, see Book II, Chapter 4.
WP Beta Tester (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-beta-tester) is a super plugin that allows you to use the automatic upgrade tool in your WordPress Dashboard to download the latest nightly build. For information about installing and using WordPress plugins, check out Book VII, Chapter 1.
Running the latest nightly build on your Web site is referred to as using bleeding-edge software because it's an untested version requiring you to take risks just to run it on your Web site.