WordPress.org

The annual WordPress conference, WordCamp San Francisco (home of the very first WordCamp), is now accepting speaker applications. Past speakers have included core WordPress developers, people building successful businesses on WordPress, popular bloggers, people from related projects and businesses…you name it. In addition to Matt Mullenweg’s annual “State of the Word” address, WCSF has played host to talks by people like Mark Jaquith, Matt Cutts, Richard Stallman, Scott Berkun, Karl Fogel, Tim Ferriss, Tara Hunt, Chris Pirillo, and John Lilly. With 3 days of content this year instead of just one, the list of speakers should be even more impressive. If you think you’d make a good addition to this year’s roster, check out the WCSF Call for Speakers.

WordPress 3.1.3 is available now and is a security update for all previous versions. It contains the following security fixes and enhancements:

• Various security hardening by Alexander Concha.
• Taxonomy query hardening by John Lamansky.
• Prevent sniffing out user names of non-authors by using canonical redirects. Props Verónica Valeros.
• Media security fixes by Richard Lundeen of Microsoft, Jesse Ou of Microsoft, and Microsoft Vulnerability Research.
• Improves file upload security on hosts with dangerous security settings.
• Cleans up old WordPress import files if the import does not finish.
• Introduce “clickjacking” protection in modern browsers on admin and login pages.

Consult the change log for more details.

Download WordPress 3.1.3 or update automatically from the Dashboard → Updates menu in your site’s admin area.

WordPress 3.2 Beta 2 also available

In other news, our development of WordPress 3.2 development continues right on schedule. We released Beta 1 thirteen days ago, and today we’re putting out Beta 2 for your testing pleasure.

This is still beta software, so we don’t recommend that you use it on production sites. But if you’re a plugin developer, a theme developer, or a site administrator, you should be running this on your test environments and reporting any bugs you find. If you’re a WordPress user who wants to open your presents early, take advantage of WordPress’ famous 5-minute install and spin up a secondary test site. Let us know what you think!

The plan is to start putting out release candidates in early June, and to release WordPress 3.2 by the end of the month. The more you help us iron out issues during the beta period, the more likely we are to hit those dates. To misappropriate and mangle a quote from Mahatma Gandhi: “Be the punctuality you want to see in the WordPress.” In other words, test now!

Here are some of the things that changed since Beta 1:

• Google Chrome Frame is now supported in the admin, if you have it installed. This is especially useful for IE 6 users (remember, IE 6 is otherwise deprecated for the admin).
• The admin is less ugly in IE 7.
• The blue admin color scheme has caught up to the grey one, and is ready for testing.
• We are now bundling jQuery 1.6.1. You should test any JS that uses jQuery. WordPress JavaScript guru Andrew Ozz has a post with more info.

Download WordPress 3.2 Beta 2

It seems like just yesterday that we released WordPress 3.1, but it’s actually been almost three months. We’ve spent that time putting together a new release focused on performance improvements, and are ready for our first beta testers!

As always, this is software still in development and we don’t recommend that you run it on a production site — set up a test site just to play with the new version. If you break it (find a bug), please report it, and if you’re a developer, try to help us fix it.

If all goes well, we hope to release WordPress 3.2 by the end of June, though that is (again, as always) subject to change depending 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.

Here’s some of what’s new:

• Performance improvements like you wouldn’t believe. What’s that mean? Things are faster!
• Distraction-free Writing. The visual editor’s full-screen composing experience has gotten a major overhaul, and is now available from HTML mode, too. More than ever, WordPress allows you to focus on what matters most — your content.
• Admin UI Refresh. The last major redesign of the WordPress admin was in 2008. This isn’t a major redesign, just a little facelift to keep us feeling young. WordPress turns 8 later this month, you know.
• New Default Theme. Introducing Twenty Eleven, based on the popular Duster theme. Rotating header images, post format support, and more.
• Browse Happy. WordPress is made to work with modern browsers. If you visit your Dashboard using an outdated web browser, we’ll let you know there’s a newer version available.
• Admin Bar. We’ve added more links to the admin bar to make it even more useful.

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 3.2 development cycle, 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.

Download WordPress 3.2 Beta 1