Mikael Korpela

Miguel Lezama

A tool to observe how a page loads in different themes simultaneously. 
Useful for debugging plugins or Gutenberg blocks.
How to Use:
<ol>
<li>Install several themes you’d like to check out.</li>
<li>Create a new page.</li>
<li>Navigate to Tools → Back To The Theme</li>
<li>Choose if you want to demo editor- or view side.</li>
<li>Select the themes you’d like to check out.</li>
<li>Choose the page you just created. This page will be previewed with all the themes you’ve selected.</li>
<li>Click Do it!.</li>
<li>Scroll to see the page rendered with all the themes you selected.</li>
</ol>
You’ll see your page load with different themes in a bunch of iframes for handy preview and debugging.
A nice list of popular themes to test:
<pre><code>`
</code></pre>
wp theme install \ 
 astra \ 
 colormag \ 
 customizr \ 
 generatepress \ 
 hestia \ 
 hueman \ 
 oceanwp \ 
 shapely \ 
 storefront \ 
 sydney \ 
 twentyeleven \ 
 twentyfifteen \ 
 twentyfourteen \ 
 twentynineteen \ 
 twentyseventeen \ 
 twentysixteen \ 
 twentyten \ 
 twentythirteen \ 
 twentytwelve \ 
 vantage 
 `
See docs for <a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/cli/commands/theme/install/" rel="nofollow ugc">wp theme install</a>.
<a href="https://github.com/simison/back-to-the-theme" rel="nofollow ugc">Plugin’s source code on GitHub</a>.

Back To The Theme

See a page with different themes all at once, just like that!

Andy Fragen

Peter Westwood

Colin Stewart

Paul Biron

Maura Teal

This plugin provides an easy way to get involved with beta testing WordPress.
Once installed it will enable you to upgrade your website to the latest Nightly, Beta, or Release Candidate at the click of a button using the built in upgrader.
By default once enabled it switches your website onto the point release update channel.
For the more adventurous there is the option to switch to the bleeding edge (trunk) of development.
Don’t forget to backup before you start!
Please enable auto-updates for this plugin to ensure future changes are properly handled with core updates.
<h3>Extra Settings</h3>
There is a setting to Skip successful autoupdate emails. It functions to disable sending emails to the admin user for successful autoupdates. Only emails indicating failures of the autoupdate process are sent.
There is a setting to Skip bundled plugins and themes. It functions to disable the installation of any plugins or themes that are bundled with the Core update.
PRs are welcome on <a href="https://github.com/afragen/wordpress-beta-tester" rel="nofollow ugc">GitHub</a>.

WordPress Beta Tester

This plugin works great, as advertised.

A lot of people complain that you can't revert the DB changes. I bet (hope) that they are not plugin developers. The plugin warns you about this. You are meant to keep a backup of your site first. If you are testing in a container such as docker or a VM, then it's even easier.

This highlights the issue that user reviews are not always reliable. A lot of users click on plugins and run arbitrary code on their sites without even reading the readme, then they come here and complain. Makes you wonder if there should be a feature on this site for users to rate the usefulness of reviews. Oh well, I'm getting side-tracked!

Anyway, thanks for a great plugin.


Must-have for any theme or plugin developer

When I activated my plugins page returns 503: Server runs out of time. Deactivated this plugin and all back to normal. Not recommended for 4.8.3!

Not recommended for 4.8.3

Great plugin to install beta releases for testing plugins and themes.
It would be helpful to see information about version numbers which will be installed.


Great for testing beta releases but missing information about version numbers


This is just brilliant. It allows anyone to test out the beta and see if everything works - Nice work here! I only found out about this from the WPBUILDS podcast - needs more promotion - its fantastic! 


What a fantastic facility!


As a plugin developer, I need this extension to be able to test my plugin against future versions before the officiale release.


Mandatory for a plugin developer!


Seems to work as expected. Great tool to test plugins before release and ensure they are compatible with the next Wordpress release. So thank you for the plugin. 


Great tool


Perfect for developers to test plugins with new versions of WP. 


Working great

Allows you to easily upgrade for testing the next versions of WordPress.

Back To The Theme vs WordPress Beta Tester