WordPress 3.1 RC3 tuned for testing

The WordPress.org developers have issued a third release candidate for version 3.1 of their open source blogging and publishing platform. Discussing the third release candidate, the developers say that, after evaluating the 3.1 features in the previous RC build, they recognised that they needed to "make some adjustments", noting that "there are some significant differences from previous versions of 3.1".

The most notable change is the removal of AJAX list tables, which had been used in an effort to move the list-style screens to full AJAX for pagination, searches and column sorts. It was also intended to consolidate the list-style screens into a single API that could be used by plugins.

The reason for the removal, according to the developers, was the number of bugs and usability issues found when testing the latest builds. They say that, after spending the last week "rolling back the most important portions of the feature", users will find that everything apart from column sorting has returned to its 3.0 state. Other changes include fixes for the theme deletion process and pages used for posts, as well as the author dropdown in Quick Edit and taxonomy query variables.

Further information about the third release candidate can be found in a post on the WordPress blog – a list of known issues can be found on the WordPress Trac. WordPress 3.1 RC3 is available to download (direct download) from the project's site. Alternatively, existing users can install the WordPress Beta Tester Plugin and set it to "bleeding edge nightlies". Any bugs or issues found during testing can be reported in the forums, mailing lists, over IRC on irc.freenode.net #wordpress-dev or directly into the WordPress Trac.

WordPress is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The latest stable release is version 3.0.4, a critical security update from late December that addressed a problem in WordPress's KSES library which performs HTML sanitisation within the publishing platform.

See also:

• WordPress for Android adds post status option, a report from The H.

(crve)