WordPress 3.2 Release Candidate
The first release candidate (RC1) for WordPress 3.2 is now available.
An RC comes after the beta period and before final release. We think we’re done, but with tens of millions of users, a variety of configurations, and thousands of plugins, it’s possible we’ve missed something. So if you haven’t tested WordPress 3.2 yet, now is the time! Please though, not on your live site unless you’re extra adventurous.
Things to keep in mind:
- With more than 350 tickets closed, there are plenty of changes. Plugin and theme authors, please test your plugins and themes now, so that if there is a compatibility issue, we can figure it out before the final release.
- Users are also encouraged to test things out. If you find problems, let your plugin/theme authors know so they can figure out the cause.
- Twenty Eleven isn’t quite at the release candidate stage. Contents may settle.
- If any known issues crop up, you’ll be able to find them here.
If you are testing the release candidate and think you’ve found a bug, there are a few ways to let us know:
- Post it to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums or wp-testers
- Join the development IRC channel and tell us live at irc.freenode.net #wordpress-dev
- File a bug ticket on the WordPress Trac
To test WordPress 3.2, try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want “bleeding edge nightlies”). Or you can download the release candidate here (zip).
Happy testing!
If you’d like to know which levers to pull in your testing, check out a list of features in our Beta 1 post.
WordPress 3.0.5 (and 3.1 Release Candidate 4)
WordPress 3.0.5 is now available and is a security hardening update for all previous WordPress versions.
This security release is required if you have any untrusted user accounts, but it also comes with important security enhancements and hardening. All WordPress users are strongly encouraged to update.
Three point oh point five
Enhances security
Three point one comes soon
The release addresses a number of issues and provides two additional enhancements:
Two moderate security issues were fixed that could have allowed a Contributor- or Author-level user to gain further access to the site.
One information disclosure issue was addressed that could have allowed an Author-level user to view contents of posts they should not be able to see, such as draft or private posts.
Two security enhancements were added. One improved the security of any plugins which were not properly leveraging our security API. The other offers additional defense in depth against a vulnerability that was fixed in previous release.
Thanks to Nils Jueneman and Saddy for their private and responsible disclosures to security@wordpress.org for two of the issues. The others were reported or repaired by our security team.
Download 3.0.5 or update automatically from the Dashboard > Updates menu in your site’s admin area. Please update immediately.
WordPress 3.1 Release Candidate 4 is also now available.
The Release Candidate 4 build includes the security fixes and enhancements included in 3.0.5 and addresses about two dozen additional bugs. This includes fixes for:
- Deleting a user and reassigning their posts to another user.
- Marking multiple users or sites as spam in multisite.
- PHP4 compatibility.
As outlined in previous RC posts, if you are testing the release candidate and think you’ve found a bug, there are a few ways to let us know:
- Post it to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums
- Report it to the wp-testers mailing list
- Join the development IRC channel and tell us live at irc.freenode.net #wordpress-dev
- File a bug ticket on the WordPress Trac
To test WordPress 3.1, try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want “bleeding edge nightlies”). Or you can download the release candidate here (zip). If any new issues become known, you’ll be able to find them here.
After nearly five months of development and testing, we think we’re very close to a final release. Users and developers, please test your themes and plugins.
Download WordPress 3.1 RC4 or WordPress 3.0.5 now.
WordPress 3.1 Release Candidate 3
WordPress 3.1 Release Candidate 3 is now available. After careful evaluation of the 3.1 features in RC2, we recognized the need to make some adjustments. There are some significant differences from previous versions of 3.1, so please review the changes if you have been developing against a beta or RC version.
The biggest change is the removal of AJAX list tables, which had been an effort to move all of our list-style screens to full AJAX for pagination, searches, and column sorts, and to consolidate the list-style screens into a single API that plugins could leverage. Unfortunately, with more testing came realizations that there were too many major bugs and usability issues with how the functionality was implemented, so we’ve spent the last week rolling back the most important portions of the feature.
- For users: AJAX has been entirely disabled for the list tables. We hope to bring this back again, in a form that is properly and fully implemented, in a future release. Column sorting remains, but everything else has returned to its 3.0 state.
- For developers: The entire list table API is now marked private. If you attempt to leverage new components of the API, you are pretty much guaranteeing that your plugins will break in a future release, so please don’t do that.
We hope to enable all the fun new goodies for public use in a future release.
This is the only way we could prevent any regressions in functionality and usability from WordPress 3.0 to 3.1. That’s right, users and plugin authors can still do everything you used to be able to do (and a little bit more).
Because of the code churn between RC2 and RC3, this release candidate needs a lot of testing. Every list screen needs testing. In particular, the comment moderation screen needs testing, especially with keyboard shortcuts (if you didn’t know about those, now’s your chance to try them out).
Other fixes in RC3 include:
- Properly display the author dropdown in Quick Edit
- Various important fixes to numerous taxonomy query variables
- Fixes to the theme deletion process
- Fixes to pages used for posts
- IIS and Multisite: Avoid resetting web.config on permalink save
- Properly validate post formats and their rewrite rules
I’m assembling a group of friends in Washington, D.C., this weekend to test WordPress 3.1 and provide feedback. We’d love to see this idea catch on among friends at coffee shops around the world. (We’ll blog our results, and we’re thinking about using the hashtag #wptest on Twitter.) If you are testing the release candidate and think you’ve found a bug, there are a few ways to let us know:
- Post it to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums
- Report it to the wp-testers mailing list
- Join the development IRC channel and tell us live at irc.freenode.net #wordpress-dev
- File a bug ticket on the WordPress Trac
To test WordPress 3.1, try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want “bleeding edge nightlies”). Or you can download the release candidate here (zip).
We’re going to study this release carefully to see where we can improve on our internal processes in the future. With that, our requisite haiku, authored by Jane:
Pulling the AJAX –
sometimes you need to step back
and show some restraint.
Happy testing!
WordPress 3.1 Release Candidate 2
The second release candidate for WordPress 3.1 is now available. The requisite haiku:
Rounding up stragglers
Last few bugs for 3.1
Go test RC2
As I outlined in the announcement post for RC1, release candidates are the last stop before the final release. It means we think we’re done, and we again have no bugs to squash. But with tens of millions of users, many server configurations and setups, and thousands of plugins and themes, it’s still possible we’ve missed something.
Beta 1 came on Thanksgiving, RC1 on Christmas, and RC2 on New Year’s Day. We won’t be waiting for another holiday for the final release, though, so if you haven’t tested WordPress 3.1 yet, now is the time!
Select changes since RC1:
- The security fixes included in WordPress 3.0.4
- Fix issues related to handling a static front page
- Fixes and enhancements for the pagination buttons
- Fix searching for partial usernames
- Properly reactivate plugins after editing them
- Always show the current author in the author dropdown when editing a post
- Fixes for attachment taxonomies
- Fix node removal for the admin bar
- Fix the custom post type show_in_menu argument
- Various fixes for right-to-left languages
- and a few dozen more changes
If you are testing the release candidate and think you’ve found a bug, there are a few ways to let us know:
- Post it to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums
- Report it to the wp-testers mailing list
- Join the development IRC channel and tell us live at irc.freenode.net #wordpress-dev
- File a bug ticket on the WordPress Trac
To test WordPress 3.1, try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want “bleeding edge nightlies”). Or you can download the release candidate here (zip).
If any known issues crop up, you’ll be able to find them here. If you’d like to know which levers to pull in your testing, check out a list of features in our Beta 1 post.
WordPress 3.1 Release Candidate
The first release candidate (RC1) for WordPress 3.1 is now available.
An RC comes after the beta period and before final release. That means we think we’re done. We currently have no known issues or bugs to squash. But with tens of millions of users, a variety of configurations, and thousands of plugins, it’s possible we’ve missed something. So if you haven’t tested WordPress 3.1 yet, now is the time! Please though, not on your live site unless you’re extra adventurous.
Things to keep in mind:
- With nearly 700 tickets closed, there are tons of changes. Plugin and theme authors, please test your plugins and themes now, so that if there is a compatibility issue, we can figure it out before the final release.
- Users are also encouraged to test things out. If you find problems, let your plugin/theme authors know so they can figure out the cause.
- If any known issues crop up, you’ll be able to find them here.
If you are testing the release candidate and think you’ve found a bug, there are a few ways to let us know:
- Post it to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums
- Report it to the wp-testers mailing list
- Join the development IRC channel and tell us live at irc.freenode.net #wordpress-dev
- File a bug ticket on the WordPress Trac
To test WordPress 3.1, try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want “bleeding edge nightlies”). Or you can download the release candidate here (zip).
We released WordPress 3.1 Beta 1 on Thanksgiving, so it’s only fitting that the release candidate comes as a Christmas present. Happy holidays and happy testing!
If you’d like to know which levers to pull in your testing, check out a list of features in our Beta 1 post.
WordPress 3.1 Beta 2
Haikus from Jane on her 39th birthday:
Practice makes perfect
is what they say about things,
but sometimes it’s not.In this case it is
not practice but refinement,
and then more testing.You can help WordPress!
Now: 3.1, beta 2
is here; needs testing.But! Remember this:
Only install on test sites,
as YMMV.
The second beta of WordPress 3.1 is now available!
For things to test, please review our Beta 1 release announcement. A list of known issues can be found on our bug tracker.
Already have a test install that you want to switch over to the beta? Try the beta tester plugin. Please test 3.1 on a test site, not on your live site, as interactions with plugins that haven’t been updated may be unpredictable, and we can’t predict (see how that works?) whether something will break or not… that’s why we’re asking people to help us test everything!
Testers, don’t forget to use the wp-testers mailing list to discuss bugs you encounter. Plugin and theme authors, please test your plugins for compatibility.
WordPress 3.1 Beta 1
It’s that time in the release cycle again, when all the features are basically done, and we’re just squashing bugs. To the brave of heart and giving of soul: Won’t you help us test the new version of WordPress? As always, this is software still in development and we don’t recommend that you run it on your normal live site — set up a test site just to play with the new version. If you break it (find a bug), report it, and if you’re a developer, try to help us fix it. (Especially you U.S. types who are taking a long weekend for Thanksgiving! )
If all goes well, we hope to release WordPress 3.1 to the world at large by the end of the year, though that is (as always) subject to change/dependent on how the beta period goes. The more help we get with testing and fixing bugs, the sooner we will be able to release the final version.
If you want to be a beta tester, you should check out the Codex article on how to report bugs. Some of the new features to check out include:
- Post Formats (#14746)
- Theme Search (#14936)
- Internal Linking (#11420)
- Admin Bar (#14772)
- Ajaxified Admin (#14579)
- Updated Tiny MCE (#12574)
- Multi-taxonomy Queries (#12891)
- Custom Post Type Index Pages (#13818)
- Admin CSS Cleanup (#14770)
- User Admin (#14696)
- Network Admin (#14435)
- Password Reset Redux (#5919)
There are also some known issues: things that aren’t *quite* finished, but that weren’t worth holding up the beta release. They will be fixed before 3.1 is released for general use. Note that as things get fixed, the beta release will update nightly. What you should know:
- Fatal error: Call to a member function is_page() on a non-object in /wp-includes/query.php. is_page() may be any conditional tag. This issue occurs when a theme or plugin is doing something wrong. Some code is checking the value of a conditional tag before we actually set up the Query, which means they don’t work yet. In 3.0, they silently failed and always returned false. In 3.1 Beta 1, this is throwing a fatal error. This will be handled in the final release, so use this opportunity to fix your plugins. (#14729)
- All known issues slated for fixing before launch are listed in Trac. Please check this list to see if a bug is already on the list before reporting it.
Remember, if you find something you think is a bug, report it! You can bring it up in the alpha/beta forum, you can email it to the wp-testers list, or if you’ve confirmed that other people are experiencing the same bug, you can report it on the WordPress Core Trac. (I recommend starting in the forum or on the mailing list.)
Theme and plugin authors, if you haven’t been following the 3.1, please start now so that you can update your themes and plugins to be compatible with the newest version of WordPress.
Note to developers: WordPress is built by the contributions of hundreds of developers. If you’d like to see this release come out on time, I encourage you to pitch in. Even if you don’t have time to do testing on the beta version, you could help us by contributing a fix for one of the many bugs we already know about.
To those of you in the U.S., have a lovely long holiday weekend, and if you’re looking for something to occupy your post-turkey hours, we hope you’ll take the beta for a spin!
