The third WordPress 3.1 Release Candidate has been released. There have been a few significant changes made since the second Release Candidate, including the removal of AJAX list tables, which introduced too many bugs and usability issues to be considered stable for 3.1 Because of the major changes, the developers are asking for as many beta testers as they can get. If you run into any problems, please feel free to discuss them in the Alpha/Beta section of the Support Forums or contact the wp-testers mailing list. If you run into any bugs, please follow this guide to report them. Have you tried WordPress 3.1 RC3 yet? If you have, what do you think so far? Are you ready for the final release of WordPress 3.1?

New plugins Content Parts allows you to split your editable content into multiple parts and display each part using template tags within your theme, allowing you to create complex content layouts. Recent Posts Slider displays your blog’s recent posts either with excerpt or thumbnail image of the first image of the post using a slider. Updated plugins PhotoSmash Galleries is a flexible, customizable photo gallery plugin for the awesomeness that is WordPress! It is one of the few photo gallery plugins for WordPress with a built-in rating system. WordPress.com Stats provides simple, concise stats with no additional load on your server by plugging into WordPress.com’s stat system.

Almost two months ago, we found out what your favorite themes were, and with so much discussion lately on finding WordPress themes, theme malware, and plans to protect against it, there’s one discussion-worthy question that we’ve managed to miss. What do you look for in a theme? What makes you say, “I have to have that,” above all other choices? Is is simply the colors, the functionality, or perhaps something more specific?

The highly anticipated, multi-authored book entitled Professional WordPress Plugin Development is now available for pre-order from Amazon. The book which is written by Brad Williams, Justin Tadlock and Ozh Richard covers everything you’d need to know to build an awesome plugin. Here is just a sampling as to what is covered: Plugin Foundation: Starting off on the right foot. Hooks: The backbone of the plugin system. WP Integration: Widgets, meta boxes, etc. Internationalization: Readying your plugin for translation. Security: Lock down your plugin from attacks and hacks. Settings: How to create and use plugin settings. Users: Working with users, roles, and capabilities. HTTP API: Doing cool stuff like Google Maps integration. Shortcodes: Making users’ lives easier with simple-to-use shortcodes. Rewrite API: Bending rewrite rules to your will. Debugging: How to debug and optimize your code. The book weighs in at over 500 pages with over 80 example plugins to learn […]

254 is a clean and minimal WordPress and DukaPress e-commerce theme. Adventure Journal allows you to select header art, backgrounds, and a one or two column layout from the comfort of your Dashboard. Ghostwriter is a minimal theme focused on typography. my base is a white theme that includes several features: custom menu, custom background, custom templates, custom headers and more.

WordPress is continuing its climb to CMS fame, according to some impressive stats by Water & Stone. Of note in the report, “The Big Three — WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal — remain ?rmly in command of the market,” and “WordPress has taken the lead in brand strength after a strong growth year.” The report itself is quite detailed, and well worth an evening or weekend read.

When Akismet 2.5.2 was released, Joseph Scott mentioned that the team was working on something special that had not been changed since 2008. Yesterday, the Akismet team announced that the previous method of using Flash to generate the charts has disappeared. Instead, the graphs are now generated by something called flot.js which is an open source chart library built on jQuery. Using Flot.js gives the team more flexibility in determining how stats are displayed. The stats page also loads faster but the biggest improvement this new approach has is that any device that supports Javascript will be able to view the graphs.

New plugins Affiliate Easel for Amazon can add single items or a full web store to your site. You can easily include affiliate links, images, text, prices and other data within a post or create entire multi-page categories on their own pages. Cool Video Gallery is a a video gallery plugin to manage video galleries, with a feature to upload videos and group them into galleries, and option to playback videos in a Shadowbox popup. myRepono WordPress Backup automates your WordPress, website & database backups using the myRepono remote website backup service. Updated plugins CleanCodeNZ Exclude Pages hides pages from navigation or other purposes using custom fields. CleanCodeNZ Geo Posts creates custom post types with geo locations for back end data entering. jQuery Slider automatically creates a jQuery slideshow that features 4 recent posts. Theme-Check is an easy way to test your theme and make sure it’s up to spec […]