It’s that time again in the release cycle, When All the features are Basically done, and we’re just squashing bugs. To the brave of heart and soul of giving: Will not you help us test the new version of WordPress? As always, this software is still in development and we do not recommend That you live normally run it on your site – set up a test site just to play with the new version. If you break it (find a bug), reports it, and if you’re a developer, try to help us fix it. (Especially you U.S. types who are taking a long weekend for Thanksgiving! 
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If all goes well, we hope to WordPress 3.1 release to the world at large by the end of the year, though That is (as always) subject to change / dependent 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 . Some of the new features to check out include:
- Post Formats ( # 14746 )
- Theme Search ( # 14936 )
- Internal Linking ( # 11420 )
- Admin Bar ( # 14772 )
- Ajaxified Admin ( # 14579 )
- Updated Tiny MCE ( # 12574 )
- Multi-taxonomy Queries ( # 12891 )
- Custom Post Type Index Pages ( # 13818 )
- Admin CSS Cleanup ( # 14770 )
- User Admin ( # 14696 )
- Network Admin ( # 14435 )
- Password Reset Redux ( # 5919 )
There Are Also Some Known Issues: Things That Are not * quite * finished, But That Were not worth holding up the beta release. They will be fixed before 3.1 is released for general use. Notes That as things get fixed, the beta release will update nightly. What You Should Know:
- Fatal error: Call to a member function is_page () on a non-object in / wp-includes/query.php. is_page () May Be Any conditional tag . This issue Occurs When a theme or plugin is doing something wrong. Some code is checking the value of a conditional tag Actually before we set up the Query, Which means-They Do not work yet. In 3.0, they’re always returned false and failed Silently. In 3.1 Beta 1, this is throwing a fatal error. This will be handled in the final release, so use this opportunity to fix your plugins. ( # 14729 )
- All Known issues slated for launch before fixing are listed in Trac . Please check this list to see if a bug is Already on the list before reporting it.
Remember, if you find something you think is a bug, report it! You can bring it up in the alpha / beta forums , 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 Trac Core . (I recommend starting in the forum or on the mailing list.)
Theme and plugin authors, If You Have not Been Following The 3.1, please start now I know 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. Even if You Do not Have time to do testing on the beta version, Could you help us by contributing a fix for one of the many bugs Already we know about.
To Those of you in the U.S., Have a lovely long holiday weekend, and if you’re looking for something to Occupy your post-turkey hours, we hope you’ll take the beta for a spin!