14 DAY TRIAL // WordPress 3.1 RC4 has been made available. The fourth release candidate includes several security patches along with plenty of other bug fixes from the previous build. This latest release should be the final step before the stable version comes out. WordPress 3.1 has been in release candidate phase for about a month and a half now.
"The Release Candidate 4 build includes the security fixes and enhancements included in 3.0.5 and addresses about two dozen additional bugs," WordPress.org announced.
"This includes fixes for: Deleting a user and reassigning their posts to another user; Marking multiple users or sites as spam in multisite; PHP4 compatibility," the announcement explained.
At this stage in the development process, the changes are minimal and the team is focused almost exclusively on bug fixes. Stability and security is the name of the game and WordPress 3.1 RC4 is the cleanest build yet.
While no new features are usually added in the release candidate phase, some may be removed if they prove unreliable and unstable enough. This is exactly what happened in the previous release candidate when the decision was made to postpone the integration of AJAX list tables in WordPress 3.1
The feature was buggy and there were several big issues with it which would not have gotten fixed in time for the stable release. As such, all progress was rolled back and AJAX list tables were removed from WordPress 3.1.
WordPress 3.1 has been a long time coming. After the major WordPress 3.0 release, the team took some time off to focus on related projects, everything close to WordPress but not strictly a new version. With that sorted, work on WordPress 3.1 eventually started with the first RC build landing in the last days of 2010.
WordPress 3.1 RC4 is available for download here on Softpedia.