The WordPress.org developers have issued a third release candidate for version 3.1 of the open source blogging and publishing platform. Discussing the 3rd release candidate, the developers say that, after evaluating the 3.1 features within the previous RC create, they recognised they needed to "make some adjustments", noting that "there are some substantial differences from previous versions of 3.1".

Probably the most notable change is the removal of AJAX list tables, which had been employed in order to move the list-style screens to full AJAX for pagination, searches and column sorts. It had been also meant to consolidate the list-style screens into a single API that could be utilized by plugins.

The reason behind the removal, based on the developers, was the amount of bugs and usability issues found when testing the latest builds. They say that, after working the last week "rolling back probably the most important portions of the feature", users will locate that everything aside from column sorting has returned to its 3.0 state. Other changes consist of fixes for the theme deletion process and pages utilized for posts, along with the author dropdown in Fast Edit and taxonomy query variables.

Further info about the third release candidate can be found in a post on the WordPress blog - a list of known problems can be found on the WordPress Trac. WordPress 3.1 RC3 is offered to download (direct download) from the project's web site. Alternatively, present users can install the WordPress Beta Tester Plugin and hang it to "bleeding edge nightlies". Any bugs or issues discovered during testing may be reported within the forums, mailing lists, over IRC on irc.freenode.net #wordpress-dev or straight into the WordPress Trac.

WordPress is licensed under the GNU Public License (GPL). The newest stable release is version 3.0.4, a decisive safety update from late Dec that addressed a problem in WordPress's KSES library which performs HTML sanitisation inside the publishing platform.