There are no remaining issues, and we plan to release 3.4 in the coming days. But if you think you’ve found a bug, you can post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums, or file a bug report on WordPress Trac.

To test WordPress 3.4, try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want “bleeding edge nightlies”). Or you can download the release candidate here (zip). Be sure to visit → About for an updated list of features and under-the-hood changes. As a reminder: We’ve published some resources on the development blog to help plugin and theme developers prepare.

The new live preview
Nearing perfection, and yet?
Not yet. RC3

Our goal is to release WordPress 3.4 early next week, so plugin and theme authors, this is likely your last chance to test your plugins and themes to find any compatibility issues before the final release. We’ve published some resources on the development blog to help you prepare.

If you think you’ve found a bug, you can post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. Or, if you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on WordPress Trac. Known issues that crop up will be listed here, but we’re hoping for a quiet few days so we can get some great features into your hands next week!

To test WordPress 3.4, try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want “bleeding edge nightlies”). Or you can download the release candidate here (zip). Be sure to visit → About for an updated list of features and under-the-hood changes.

An RC comes after the beta period and before final release. We think we’re done, but with millions of users and thousands of plugins and themes, it’s possible we’ve missed something. So if you haven’t tested WordPress 3.4 yet, now is the time! Please though, not on your live site unless you’re adventurous.

With more than 500 tickets closed, there are quite a few changes. Plugin and theme authors, please test your plugins and themes now, so that if there is a compatibility issue, we can figure it out before the final release.

If you are testing the release candidate and think you’ve found a bug, please post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. If any known issues crop up, you’ll be able to find them here.

To test WordPress 3.4, try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want “bleeding edge nightlies”). Or you can download the release candidate here (zip).

If you’d like to know which levers to pull in your testing, visit the About page ( → About in the toolbar) and check out the list of features! You’ll definitely want to try the live theme previews.

Bonus: Happy birthday WordPress — nine years old today.

Three external libraries included in WordPress received security updates:

• Plupload (version 1.5.4), which WordPress uses for uploading media.
• SWFUpload, which WordPress previously used for uploading media, and may still be in use by plugins.
• SWFObject, which WordPress previously used to embed Flash content, and may still be in use by plugins and themes.

Thanks to Neal Poole and Nathan Partlan for responsibly disclosing the bugs in Plupload and SWFUpload, and Szymon Gruszecki for a separate bug in SWFUpload.

WordPress 3.3.2 also addresses:

• Limited privilege escalation where a site administrator could deactivate network-wide plugins when running a WordPress network under particular circumstances, disclosed by Jon Cave of our WordPress core security team, and Adam Backstrom.
• Cross-site scripting vulnerability when making URLs clickable, by Jon Cave.
• Cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in redirects after posting comments in older browsers, and when filtering URLs. Thanks to Mauro Gentile for responsibly disclosing these issues to the security team.

These issues were fixed by the WordPress core security team. Five other bugs were also fixed in version 3.3.2. Consult the change log for more details.

Download WordPress 3.3.2 or update now from the Dashboard → Updates menu in your site’s admin area.

WordPress 3.4 Beta 3 also available

Our development of WordPress 3.4 development continues. Today we are proud to release Beta 3 for testing. Nearly 90 changes have been made since Beta 2, released 9 days ago. (We are aiming for a beta every week.)

This is still beta software, so we don’t recommend that you use it on production sites. But if you’re a plugin developer, a theme developer, or a site administrator, you should be running this on your test environments and reporting any bugs you find. (See the known issues here.) If you’re a WordPress user who wants to open your presents early, take advantage of WordPress’s famous 5-minute install and spin up a secondary test site. Let us know what you think!

Version 3.4 Beta 3 includes all of the fixes included in version 3.3.2. Download WordPress 3.4 Beta 3 or use the WordPress Beta Tester plugin.