WordPress 3.4 RC 2 has been released with a few changes since the first release candidate. The core developer team is planning for the final release of WordPress 3.4 to debut early next week, so it’s time to give this a good solid test, especially if you are a plugin or theme developer. As you test out WordPress 3.4 RC 2, there are a few important things to watch out for, and this guide covers them in detail, or rather links to the appropriate guides. If you find any bugs, please report them, and contact the support forums if you need any help.

New plugins Post Copyright Plugin adds a copyright notice to the bottom of every post. WP Video Posts allows you to upload videos to create custom video posts. Updated plugins Before And After allows scheduling of text within posts and pages. StatComm provides realtime statistics on your blog, collecting information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers, OS and more.

Eclipse includes a responsive design and drag and drop elements. Simple Catch is a simple and easily customizable theme. Themolio is a responsive theme with a grid layout.

New plugins Knews Multilingual Newsletters allows you to build professional looking newsletters, segment subscribers in different mailing lists, and segment them by language all in a matter of minutes. WP-SendSMS allows users to send SMS messages using a SMS Gateway. Updated plugins CloudFlare ensures your WordPress blog is running optimally on the CloudFlare platform. Contextual Related Posts helps you increase reader retention and reduce bounce rates by displaying a set of related posts on your website or in your feed. FoxyPress is a custom plugin made to integrate FoxyCart e-commerce functionality into your WordPress website. WP Github Gist provides the ability to embed gist and files from Github in your blog posts or pages.

Just a few days ago, Matt Mullenweg had a fascinating fireside chat with Sarah Lacy of PandoDaily. The chat covered such interesting things as the state of the WordPress community, the future of WordPress, working with distributed workforces, and Facebook and Tumblr. At almost two hours in length, it’s certainly a long watch, but well worth it, especially with a nice cold drink this weekend.

Denim features various shades of denim blue and gray with white accents. Figero is very simplistic yet modern in design and very easy to built your website upon. Polaroids is a polaroid based theme ideal for both personal blogs and showcasing your portfolio.

New plugins Adfloat displays ads in a fixed position on the left side of your website. Cookie Warning asks users’ consent for using cookies or redirects them out of your site. Updated plugins Tweets As Posts imports all tweets tagged with specified hashtags from your twitter account into WordPress as posts. WordPress HTTPS (SSL) is intended to be an all-in-one solution to using SSL on WordPress sites.

WordPress 3.4 RC 1 has been released. Well over 500 tickets have been closed, so there’s plenty to look out for as you take out your testing sticks and knock it about. As before, this is not yet meant for live sites, though the adventurous amongst you may feel free to tempt fate, especially if you are a plugin or theme developer. If you find any bugs, please report them, and contact the support forums if you need any help. Also, I’d like to wish an extra special Happy Birthday to WordPress, which was released yesterday nine years ago!