WordPress.org

The third (and maybe last) beta of WordPress 3.9 is now available for download.

Beta 3 includes more than 200 changes, including:

• New features like live widget previews and the new theme installer are now more ready for prime time, so check ’em out.
• UI refinements when editing images and when working with media in the editor. We’ve also brought back some of the advanced display settings for images.
• If you want to test out audio and video playlists, the links will appear in the media manager once you’ve uploaded an audio or video file.
• For theme developers, we’ve added HTML5 caption support (#26642) to match the new gallery support (#26697).
• The formatting function that turns straight quotes into smart quotes (among other things) underwent some changes to drastically speed it up, so let us know if you see anything weird.

We need your help. We’re still aiming for an April release, which means the next week will be critical for identifying and squashing bugs. If you’re just joining us, please see the Beta 1 announcement post for what to look out for.

If you think you’ve found a bug, you can post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums, where friendly moderators are standing by. Plugin developers, if you haven’t tested WordPress 3.9 yet, now is the time — and be sure to update the “tested up to” version for your plugins so they’re listed as compatible with 3.9.

This software is still in development, so we don’t recommend you run it on a production site. Consider setting up a test site just to play with the new version. To test WordPress 3.9, try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want “bleeding edge nightlies”). Or you can download the beta here (zip).

WordPress 3.9
Let’s make the date official
It’s April 16

WordPress 3.9 Beta 2 is now available for testing!

We’ve made more than a hundred changes since Beta 1, but we still need your help if we’re going to hit our goal of an April release. For what to look out for, please head on over to the Beta 1 announcement post. Some of the changes in Beta 2 include:

• Rendering of embedded audio and video players directly in the visual editor.
• Visual and functional improvements to the editor, the media manager, and theme installer.
• Various bug fixes to TinyMCE, the software behind the visual editor.
• Lots of fixes to widget management in the theme customizer.

As always, if you think you’ve found a bug, you can post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. Or, if you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on the WordPress Trac. There, you can also find a list of known bugs and everything we’ve fixed so far.

This software is still in development, so we don’t recommend you run it on a production site. Consider setting up a test site just to play with the new version. To test WordPress 3.9, try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want “bleeding edge nightlies”). Or you can download the beta here (zip).

I’m excited to announce that the first beta of WordPress 3.9 is now available for testing.

WordPress 3.9 is due out next month — but in order to hit that goal, we need your help testing all of the goodies we’ve added:

• We updated TinyMCE, the software powering the visual editor, to the latest version. Be on the lookout for cleaner markup. Also try the new paste handling — if you paste in a block of text from Microsoft Word, for example, it will no longer come out terrible. (The “Paste from Word” button you probably never noticed has been removed.) It’s possible some plugins that added stuff to the visual editor (like a new toolbar button) no longer work, so we’d like to hear about them (#24067). (And be sure to open a support thread for the plugin author.)
• We’ve added widget management to live previews (the customizer). Please test editing, adding, and rearranging widgets! (#27112) We’ve also added the ability to upload, crop, and manage header images, without needing to leave the preview. (#21785)
• We brought 3.8’s beautiful new theme browsing experience to the theme installer. Check it out! (#27055)
• Galleries now receive a live preview in the editor. Upload some photos and insert a gallery to see this in action. (#26959)
• You can now drag-and-drop images directly onto the editor to upload them. It can be a bit finicky, so try it and help us work out the kinks. (#19845)
• Some things got improved around editing images. It’s a lot easier to make changes to an image after you insert it into a post (#24409) and you no longer get kicked to a new window when you need to crop or rotate an image (#21811).
• New audio/video playlists. Upload a few audio or video files to test these. (#26631)

If you think you’ve found a bug, you can post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. We’d love to hear from you! If you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on the WordPress Trac. There, you can also find a list of known bugs and everything we’ve fixed so far.

This software is still in development, so we don’t recommend you run it on a production site. Consider setting up a test site just to play with the new version. To test WordPress 3.9, try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want “bleeding edge nightlies”). Or you can download the beta here (zip).

DEVELOPERS! Hello! There’s lots for you, too.

Please test your plugins and themes! There’s a lot of great stuff under the hood in 3.9 and we hope to blog a bit about them in the coming days. If you haven’t been reading the awesome weekly summaries on the main core development blog, that’s a great place to start. (You should definitely follow that blog.) For now, here are some things to watch out for when testing:

• The load process in multisite got rewritten. If you notice any issues with your network, see #27003.
• We now use the MySQL Improved (mysqli) database extension if you’re running a recent version of PHP (#21663). Please test your plugins and see that everything works well, and please make sure you’re not calling mysql_* functions directly.
• Autosave was refactored, so if you see any issues related to autosaving, heartbeat, etc., let us know (#25272).
• Library updates, in particular Backbone 1.1 and Underscore 1.6 (#26799). Also Masonry 3 (#25351), PHPMailer (#25560), Plupload (#25663), and TinyMCE (#24067).
• TinyMCE 4.0 is a major update. Please see TinyMCE’s upgrade guide and our implementation ticket for more. If you have any questions or problems, please open a thread in the support forums.

Happy testing!

Lots of improvements
Little things go a long way
Please test beta one