Checklists for a successful Matomo release

Release Beta 1

• Beta release cycle has started with the first beta release - covered in DEV-16407
• Keep track of releases notes/ any important changes in the changelog page we created: https://matomo.org/?post_type=changelog&p=64260&preview=true

Prepare RC1

FYI: Copied into DEV-16799

Now that the beta is released, then:

• Make a new release of PHP SDK Tracker (Q: Is it actually needed?)
• Check this list of Pull requests all Matomo repositories, where the milestone is set to Current sprint
• Then also check all other opened PR in this project to ensure that all the important ones are merged. Ideally, politely close the other PRs to clean up the list.
• Check with the PG team that all 4.x changes have been merged into 5.x branches across all plugins & projects
• Check each plugin has a release for the most recent changes in 5.x-dev
• Tag a new release for matomo-org/referrer-spam-blacklist and matomo-org/searchengine-and-social-list
• Fetch our latest and greatest home-made libraries with composer update matomo-org/referrer-spam-blacklist matomo-org/searchengine-and-social-list matomo-org/matomo-php-tracker matomo-org/component-network,matomo-org/component-ini,matomo-org/component-decompress,matomo-org/component-cache
• Fetch the latest composer libraries for all with composer update
• Up to date submodules
• Work with PG team to ensure CI builds of our official plugins matomo-org/plugin-* are green
• Tag the RC candidate
• Check that the build is green
• Package & release the Release Candidate
• Post sticky thread in forum about RC
• Let translators know about the new RC by posting an announcement here
• inform RC release on social media
• update tag manager submodule

Look for issues:

• Forum support: regularly check all posts in Support & Bugs forum
• Forum General questions: look for bugs & regressions in General questions forum
• Backlog grooming (Matomo core): check issues without milestone and PRs if any one should be fixed in this release
• Check this list of issues across all Matomo repositories, where the milestone is set to Current sprint

The final checks before the stable release:

• 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 Weblate
• Submodules are up to date
• triple check changes from the latest 4.x are in 5.x
• Announce Long Term Support version refs Announce LTS for Matomo 3 #15920

Prepare the Changelog entry:

• Mark that the release has a major DB upgrade
• Ensure that all PRs merged into the 4.x-dev base branch but that don't have a 4.x milestone set yet will be set with a 4.0.0 milestone
• Use our github changelog generator to generate the changelog using this config.js. Set milestones to ignore to 4.*and look at all closed issues since YYYY-MM-DD (the first commit to 5.x-dev).
• 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
• Make it clear/visible that it's important to take a DB backup before the upgrade

Check the developer changelog is complete, by looking over each issue:

• 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)

Add any new features to the features page

• Identify new features and list them on the Matomo features page.

Merge 4.x-dev branch into master:

• In https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo/settings get an admin to enable "Merge buttons > Allow merge commits"
• Create a Pull request to merge 4.x-dev into master, by clicking on "Merge Pull request > Create a merge commit" (not "Squash & merge") - eg. at URL master...5.x-dev
• In https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo/settings get an admin to disable "Merge buttons > Allow merge commits"

💥 Release 🚀

• Close milestone on Github
• Release publicly the new stable version by running ./scripts/build-package.sh 4.x.y from here and waiting 5 minutes
• In Github release we write

## [Matomo 4.0.0 Changelog](https://matomo.org/changelog/matomo-4-0-0/)

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://matomo.org/download/ ([learn more](https://matomo.org/docs/installation/)) (recommended)
 * Beta and Release Candidates releases can be found at https://builds.matomo.org/ ([learn more](http://matomo.org/faq/how-to-update/faq_159/))

## List of XXX tickets closed
<ul>

.... paste here the list of tickets fixed, each line starts with <li><a href='......

• Add the list of tickets closed from the changelog into the Github release notes
• Take screenshots of new features + draft a blog post showcasing what's new
• Create this 'Release Matomo 4.*' issue in the next release milestone

from #14601