feat: publish pre-release versions on GitHub without deploying to WP SVN

[kasparsd]

What?

Fixes #822

Why?

• Don't deploy pre-release GitHub releases to WP SVN.

How?

Use of AI Tools

Testing Instructions

Screenshots or screencast

Before	After

Changelog Entry

Development Update - Support for publishing pre-release versions of plugin to GitHub for testing.

[github-actions]

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Co-authored-by: kasparsd <kasparsd@git.wordpress.org>
Co-authored-by: masteradhoc <masteradhoc@git.wordpress.org>
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[masteradhoc]

@kasparsd can we just fix this and replace it with 'master' or you'd like to seperate this into a different PR?

[kasparsd]

if we enable this on master then whatever is merged to master gets deployed to SVN trunk, marking it the "stable" release version. Secondly, the release workflow currently merges to master first and then creates a tag so the stable release would be marked before the tag release is actually deployed.

All that to say -- I believe we don't want to enable it now.

[masteradhoc]

Looks great, thank you for the work on this! If you feel we can do the "FIXME" comment as part of this PR fine for me - else we can do it on a seperate one.

[Copilot]

Copilot review overview

🟢 Approval recommended

The remaining documentation nit is minor and does not block approval.

Review effort: Lite
Findings: None

What changed in this PR

Updates release automation to publish pre-release plugin ZIPs on GitHub without deploying them to WordPress.org.

Changes:

• Documents beta and release-candidate procedures.
• Uses dry-run deployment for pre-releases.
• Uploads generated ZIPs as GitHub release assets.

File	Description
RELEASING.md	Adds pre-release publishing guidance.
.github/​workflows/​deploy.yml	Skips WordPress.org deployment while generating and uploading ZIPs.

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