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The Annual WordPress Conference: WordCamp SF 2011

Posted January 24, 2011 by Jen. Filed under WordCamp.

Mark your calendars: WordCamp San Francisco, the official annual WordPress conference, will be August 12-14, 2011. This year will mark the 5th anniversary of WordCamp, and as always will feature Matt Mullenweg’s “State of the Word” address as well as a variety of amazing speakers that you’d normally only get to see at expensive industry conferences. This year the program will be expanded to three days, with programming for publishers, bloggers, and developers. There will also be related activities, like core team summits, workshops  for contributors, designers, and local organizers, and various professional and networking events. The planning is just beginning, so save the date on your calendar and keep an eye on the WordCamp SF 2011 site (and/or follow the @wordcampsf twitter account) for updates as details become available.

*For people who attended WordCamp SF last year who thought the annual event this year would be called WordCon, with WordCamp SF becoming a more locally-oriented event, you can read my long-winded explanation of why we didn’t go that route over the on the WordCamp Central blog.

WordPress 3.1 Release Candidate 3

Posted January 22, 2011 by Andrew Nacin. Filed under Development, Releases, Testing.

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:

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

Posted January 1, 2011 by Andrew Nacin. Filed under Development, Releases, Testing.

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:

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.

Download WordPress 3.1 RC 2

See Also:

Want to follow the code? There’s a development P2 blog and you can track active development in the Trac timeline that often has 20–30 updates per day.

Want to find an event near you? Check out the WordCamp schedule and find your local Meetup group!

For more WordPress news, check out the WordPress Planet or subscribe to the WP Briefing podcast.

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