Checklist for a successful release:

• Beta release cycle has started with the first beta release!
• Forum support: regularly check all posts in Support & Bugs forum
• Forum General questions: look for bugs & regressions in General questions forum
• Backlog grooming: check issues without milestone if any one should be fixed in this release
• Check this list of issues across all Piwik repositories, where the milestone is set to Current sprint
• Make CI builds of our official plugins piwik/plugin-* all green
• Tag a new release for piwik/referrer-spam-blacklist and piwik/searchengine-and-social-list
• Fetch our latest and greatest home-made libraries with composer update piwik/referrer-spam-blacklist piwik/searchengine-and-social-list piwik/piwik-php-tracker piwik/component-network,piwik/component-ini,piwik/component-decompress,piwik/component-cache
• Fetch the latest composer libraries for all with composer update
• Up to date submodules
• Tag the RC candidate
• Check that the build is green
• Package & release the Release Candidate
• Post sticky thread in forum about RC,
• inform RC release on social media
• Release candidate cycle (at least 1 week cycle)
• Fix all remaining issues in the milestone
• All open source plugins builds are green on master with latest RC
• Plugins that needed a version bump are now released on the marketplace.
• Synchronise translations from transifex
• Up to date submodules
• Prepare the Changelog entry for the new release:
  • Mark that the release has a major DB upgrade
  • Use our github changelog generator to generate the changelog using this config.js
  • Add to changelog any new issues or FAQ added since first RC
  • Add to changelog the security issues fixed, if any
  • Do not publish publicly the changelog yet. This also ensures security issues are not publicly visible until the stable release.
  • Change changelog published date to the release day
• For each issue in the changelog:
  • is this issue relevant to developers? let's mention it in the Developer changelog
  • is this issue's title descriptive and useful to people scanning our changelog?
  • are the right labels applied to the issue? (issues tagged with labels such as Bug, Enhancement, Major are grouped together in the changelog)
  • if this issue was sponsored, we note the sponsor organisation in the changelog.
• Close milestone on Github
• Release publicly the new stable version!
• In Github release write

## [Piwik XYZ Changelog](https://piwik.org/changelog/piwik-XYZ/)

This Github download (below) is only meant for developers and it will require extra work to install it. 
 * Latest stable production release can be found at https://piwik.org/download/ ([learn more](https://piwik.org/docs/installation/)) (recommended)
 * Beta and Release Candidates releases can be found at https://builds.piwik.org/ ([learn more](http://piwik.org/faq/how-to-update/faq_159/))

• Take screenshots of new features + draft a blog post showcasing what's new
• Create this 'Release Piwik 3.*' issue in the next release milestone

follows up #11431