Living on the Edge: After the Dev-Meetup last week, the announcements, all the fuzz about core plugins and the discussions in the forum it was a must for me to give the alpha of the new Health-Check Plugin a testdrive.
Westi did ask me to provide some contributions last week but currently there are too many ends open in development so all I could do so far was to provide some feedback. And now a run on the alpha. Here we go:
Getting the thing to run is quite easy if you have a dev environment running. Just add another svn:external to your plugins and svn-up afterwards:
health-check http://svn.wp-plugins.org/health-check/branches/alpha/
Then browse the backend as admin and select the new menu-entry. All left is a press on the button to run the tests. The Plugin already ships with quite a nice amount of tests. And so I did press the button: All tests did run fine and revealed a lot of usefull information I want to do some picks:
Safe Mode: I had activated that for a test with a ticket (#11499). Great to get a reminder!
Then I stumbled over register_long_arrays, gosh, out with it! It’s a testserver only, but hey, once set up you tend to not care about things any longer.
And then learned something new about collations. A how to fix was given directly with the recommendation and worked like a charm. Infact it pointed me to a much more important problem I had on that setup. Testing rocks.
So my first bottom line is: heads up! Every plugin dev sparing a test-system should give this a testdrive. I needed to debug a selected test with more detail and was able to seperate it from the others by specifying a constant:
define('HEALTH_CHECK_DEBUG', 'HealthCheck_MySQL_Charset');
Good luck for the health-check plugin team, I provided my feedback to Denis De Bernardy which I could catch in #wordpress-dev over in freenode. Westi and some other devs are on that team as well, just ask around. UPDATE: Better fitting and new chatroom: #wordpress-core-plugins
Link: Health-Check Plugin
hakre on wordpress 
Thanks for testing! 😉
Its great to get feedback on the tests we have so far.
Hopefully we will be able to have a downloadable public alpha soon once we have improved the UI and finished writing al the initial tests.
Yeah UI was not very shiny but it actually did the job for the testdrive. One additional thing: My test-host was not very responsive and the 10 seconds timeout setting did not work well on the check-http-requests. Unfortunately that is hardcoded. And to tell you the truth, I do not want to have another constant in there so I lifted that to 20 secs and all was fine.
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