WordPress 3.1 RC3 Is Here, Loses AJAX List Tables

The third release candidate for the upcoming WordPress 3.1 is now available. Despite being very late in the development process, there are some rather big changes in WordPress 3.1 RC3 from the previous build. AJAX-based list tables have now been removed after the feature was deemed too buggy to go into production. Changes related to this have been reverted to the way they were in WordPress 3.0.

"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," WordPress.org announced.

"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," the blog post announcement explained.

"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," it added.

For the users, the changes mean that all AJAX-based functionality for list tables has been removed. Everything except column sorting is now the same as it was in the previous stable releases.

The list table API has been set to private, meaning that there are no guarantees that there won't be changes that break functionality. In fact, it's likely that anything built on top of the API now will not work in future updates, so WordPress encourages developers to not use this API unless they have a very good reason.

There are good news as well, the latest RC comes with a number of fixes. The author is now properly displayed in the Quick Edit dropdown. Some fixes for theme deletion have been implemented as well as some for pages used for posts.

WordPress 3.1 RC3 is available for download here.