WordPress 3.6 RC 1 Has Arrived

Earlier this week, WordPress 3.6 lead developer Mark Jaquith gave us an update on progress and notified us that the goal was to have an RC release by Friday. With just 30 minutes to go before it becomes Saturday on the East coast, 3.6 RC 1 has arrived. This gets us one big step closer to getting 3.6 out in the wild. There is no link yet to the Post Formats UI plugin. I know many are hoping to see that come soon after 3.6 is released. In the mean time, the revisions area of WordPress has seen a major refactoring that has created a substantial increase in performance when dealing with hundreds of revisions.

We hope to ship WordPress 3.6 in a couple weeks. But to do that, we really need your help! If you haven’t tested 3.6 yet, there’s no time like the present. (But please: not on a live production site, unless you’re feeling especially adventurous.)

Think you’ve found a bug? Please post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. If any known issues come up, you’ll be able to find them here. Developers, please test your plugins and themes, so that if there is a compatibility issue, we can sort it out before the final release.

To test WordPress 3.6, try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want “bleeding edge nightlies”). Or you can download the release candidate here (zip).

Just a little more testing and polishing until we can grab 3.6. Once it’s released, many of us will be waiting to read the postmortem by Mark Jaquith which will detail the reasons behind why the Post Formats UI had to be removed and the side effects it caused.