WordPress 6.6 Beta 3 is here! Please download and test it.

This beta version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites—you risk unexpected results if you do.

Instead, test Beta 3 on a local site or a testing environment in any of these four ways:

Plugin	Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin on a WordPress install. (Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream).
Direct Download	Download the Beta 3 version (zip) and install it on a WordPress website.
Command Line	Use this WP-CLI command: wp core update --version=6.6-beta3
WordPress Playground	Use a 6.6 Beta 3 WordPress Playground instance to test the software directly in your browser. This might be the easiest way ever—no separate sites, no setup. Just click and go!

The target release date for WordPress 6.6 is July 16, 2024. Your help testing Beta and RC versions over the next four weeks is vital to making sure the final release is everything it should be: stable, powerful, and intuitive.

If you find an issue

If you run into an issue, please share it in the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums. If you are comfortable submitting a reproducible bug report, you can do so via WordPress Trac. You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs.

The bug bounty doubles in the beta period

The WordPress community sponsors a financial reward for reporting new, unreleased security vulnerabilities. That reward doubles between Beta 1, which landed June 4, and the final Release Candidate (RC), which will happen July 9. Please follow the project’s responsible-disclosure practices detailed on this HackerOne page and in this security white paper.

The work continues

Catch up with what’s new in 6.6: check out the Beta 1 announcement for the highlights.

Beta 3 packs in more than 50 updates to the Editor since the Beta 2 release, including 39 tickets for WordPress core:

• GitHub commits for 6.6 since June 11
• Closed Trac tickets since June 11

The beta cycle is all about fixing the bugs you find in testing.

Do you build themes? Feedback from testing has already prompted a change in the way you offer style variations to your users.

In Beta 1, if you made preset style variations for your theme, it automatically generated a full set of color-only and type-only options your users could mix and match across the different variations.

In Beta 3, your theme no longer generates those options automatically—you do. So you can present a simpler set of choices, curated to guide users’ efforts to more pleasing results. For more insight into the rationale, see this discussion.

Thanks again for this all-important contribution to WordPress!

Props to @meher, @rmartinezduque, @atachibana, and @mobarak for collaboration and review.

A Beta 3 haiku

Beta ends at 3
One more week, then comes RC
When we freeze the strings!