While continuous integration is a common practice for most development teams, the stateful nature of WordPress makes it difficult, but not impossible, to setup. For our open source WordPress plugin, we wanted to integrate our standard build and test process for every pull request using CircleCI. While it might be easier to setup a permanent staging environment, we wanted every build to be isolated for dependable testing.

Many websites and even applications online are built on top of a CMS. According to recent survey data, WordPress has a 60% market share, making it the most popular CMS by far. The next closest competitor, Joomla, has only 5.2%! But unlike bespoke software, many people don’t test their WordPress website. While the core of WordPress is fairly well tested by it’s creators, users, and the open source community, the same cannot be said for every plugin and theme.

Ghost Inspector is an automated browser testing tool for continuously monitoring websites. We recently released our WordPress plugin to show test results inside your WordPress admin dashboard. In this tutorial, you will learn how to build your own plugin using React, Webpack, and the Ghost Inspector API. You can view the final source code on GitHub.