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WordPress 3.3 Beta 4 Available Now

Posted November 24, 2011 by Jen. Filed under Development, Releases.

The march toward 3.3 continues!

With all our major tickets closed, we are very close to a release candidate. In Beta 4 we’ve fixed a bunch of bugs, cleaned up the UI, added real text in some of the screens that still had placeholder text in Beta 3 (post-update screen, the Dashboard welcome area, new feature pointers), and generally tightened things up. We updated to jQuery 1.7.1 and addressed a LOT of bugs.

If you are a plugin or theme developer (or distributor), please test against Beta 4 to ensure there are no issues.

If you find any problems, please report them as usual. Many thanks!

Thought 3 was the last?
Ha ha! Beta 4 is here —
Better get testing!

Download WordPress 3.3 Beta 4

Wherefore Art Thou, Widgets?

Posted November 20, 2011 by Jen. Filed under Development.

We need your opinion! One of the features we’re adding to WordPress 3.3 (currently in beta 3) is intended to reduce widget pain. Say you’re using Theme A and you have a handful of widgets set up. You switch to Theme B, and it has different widget areas, so you add/remove/edit your widgets. Then you realize that you hate Theme B. “This theme doesn’t represent my innermost soul!” you cry to the heavens. You switch back to Theme A, but because it had different widget areas, now your widgets are messed up. Argh, right? Not for long!

Imagine being able to change themes and modify widgets as needed, and if you decided to go back to your old theme, it would return your widgets to how they were the last time you had that theme activated.  Sounds good, yeah? The problem we’re facing is deciding how long to save the old widget configuration, since there are so many potential workflows. If you changed From Theme A to Theme B and added more widgets over the next few weeks, if you switched back to Theme A after a month, would you still expect it to go back to the widgets from a month ago? At what point does it go from handy timesaver to unexpected widget mangler?  What do you think?

Taking WordPress to War

Posted November 11, 2011 by Jen. Filed under Community, WordCamp.

Today is the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the (20)eleventh year, and in several parts of the world, it is a holiday related to war. In the U.S., where I live, it is Veterans Day, which honors military veterans. In much of Europe, today is Armistice Day or Remembrance Day, commemorating the armistice signed at the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” of 1918 that ended the fighting on the Western Front in World War I.

Whether serving in the military, living in an area of unrest or attack, having friends or family in the fray, or just being human enough to think war sucks (there’s really no gentler way to say that, is there?), war impacts most people in the world today.

The mission of WordPress is to democratize publishing. Sometimes we’re fortunate enough for that to mean providing a platform for communication that helps people work toward peace in their communities and around the world. Sometimes it means providing a platform for keeping people informed and aware of the other things that are happening around the world, including the horror of wars and revolutions.

At WordCamp San Francisco in August, one of the most popular and well-respected sessions was led by Teru Kuwayama of Basetrack.org. On this day of remembrance, I thought it would be good to share the video of his presentation. Not only is it a very cool example of how WordPress can be used in unexpected ways (this is not your father’s Oldsmobile usual blog), it’s a reminder of how much work still needs to be done to move from war to peace. So here is Taking WordPress to War: Basetrack.org. Peace out, yo.

WordPress 3.3 Beta 3 Available

Posted November 8, 2011 by Jen. Filed under Development, Releases.

Testers, Beta 3 is now available! You know the drill: use a test install, see what you can break, and report any bugs you find. There have been 200 commits since Beta 2, but at this point, betas are not adding new features — it’s all about fixing bugs, making things a little prettier, and editing text strings.

As always, plugin and theme authors, PLEASE test your code against the beta so you can catch any incompatibilities now rather than after your users update their WordPress installation and find bugs for you. This time we really mean it, especially if your plugin uses jQuery. We’ve now updated to jQuery 1.7 in core, so please please pretty please check your plugins and themes against beta 3.

These silly haikus —
With so many releases,
I run out of words.

Download WordPress 3.3 Beta 3 now.

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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