WordPress 3.3 RC 2 has been released. The team feels that WordPress 3.3 is just about ready to be released, so this could very well be the last release candidate before 3.3 is officially released. If you’re a plugin or theme developer, it’s time to test your products against WordPress 3.3 before the rest of the world gets their hands on it. Andrew Nacin has provided an outstanding WordPress 3.3 field guide for developers and Mika Epstein has provided an awesome WordPress 3.3 known issue and FAQ master list. As always, feel free to report any bugs that you find and contact the support forums if you need any help.

ColorWay is a simple, elegant and beautiful theme with easy customization options. jeans is visually rich and interesting. Write is a vintage looking, simple, one-column theme featuring old, foxed paper.

It’s no doubt that the popularity of WordPress has soared as of late, even surpassing giants such as Joomla and Drupal in general usage. A recent article from Smashing Magazine highlights some interesting points along WordPress’s climb to greatness, with some rather spot-on speculation for how WordPress has managed to surpass its assumed competition. Of course, there’s the obvious factor of WordPress’s ease of use and development that have propelled it forward significantly, but its focus on blogging is what has really set it apart. WordPress has certainly grown into a rather capable CMS, but it’s a blogging platform first and foremost, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find a single feature in WordPress that can’t be used by a general blogger. When you focus on a specific direction, you can use all of your creative talent and energy to build a solid product that does exactly what it’s supposed to […]

New plugins Pricing Table comes with very flexible and dynamic options for creating a pricing table just in a few seconds. Quick Notice Bar will help the admin to publish highlighted notices on the site header. Updated plugins Download Manager will help you to manage, track and control file downloads from your site. Posts 2 Posts allows you to create many-to-many connections between posts of all kinds. wpStoreCart is a free, open source, and full featured e-commerce platform.

Mixin’ Styles makes use of advanced CSS 3 features such as rounded corners, text shadow and font embedding, but renders just fine in browsers that do not support CSS 3. You can change several color schemes and backgrounds from the Styling theme options page. WP Eden is a fast-loading CSS-based theme with no images.

The beta phase is over, and the talented folks behind WordPress feel that 3.3 is ready for release. As with the standard process, the first release candidate is available. If no issues are reported with this release, this may very well be what we get for WordPress 3.3, so it’s time to put your testing hats on and hammer away, especially if you’re a plugin or theme developer. If you run into any bugs, don’t forget to report them and contact the support forum if you need help.

New plugins Codepress Admin Columns makes it easy to manage custom columns for your posts, pages, custom post types and user screens. Media File Manager allows you make sub-directories in the upload directory, and move files into them. At the same time, this plugin modifies the URLs/path names in the database. Updated plugins Email Address Encoder is a lightweight plugin to protect email addresses from email-harvesting robots by encoding them into decimal and hexadecimal entities.

Christmas Joy incorporates traditional Christmas symbols including the Christmas tree, stars and garland. SpringBoard is a user-friendly parent theme, featuring 15 custom page templates and multiple widget-ready areas, allowing you to create any type of site you want.