They are releasing it now rather than waiting another week, because they wanted to get people testing it during this weekend. There’s a lot of new stuff going on in WordPress 3.0, so this time they are giving you a list of things to check out, to make sure people are testing all the things that need it.

You Should Know:

_The custom menus system (Appearance > Menus) is not quite finished. In Beta 2, the layout will be different and a bunch of the functionality will be improved. You can play with making custom menus, and report bugs if you find them, but this is not how the final screen will look/work, so don’t get attached to it.

_WordPress and WordPress MU have merged. This does not mean that you can suddenly start adding a bunch of new blogs from within your regular WordPress Dashboard. If you’re interested in testing the Super Admin stuff associated with multiple sites, you’ll need some simple directions to get started.

Happy WordPressing!

When you check a plugin in the directory, select a WordPress version and a plugin version from the drop-down menu. If there has been feedback about this WordPress and plugin version combination, you will see what percentage of responses marked that combination as compatible and how many marked it as incompatible. Then you can decide if you want to upgrade or not.

Also, if you log in in the directory, you will be able to help the community to gather information! Just select a WordPress version and plugin version combination and click the “Works” or the “Broken” button. Please note that this shouldn’t be used to report minor issues with a plugin. You should mark a plugin as “Broken” only if its core functionality is really broken when run on the selected WordPress version.

Right now the feature is in information gathering mode. So get out there and vote! Don’t just vote on broken plugins, but cast a “Works” vote for every plugin that works on the version of WordPress you are using. This can help improve the signal-to-noise ratio in our data and prevent a few mistaken “Broken” votes from weighing too heavily.

For developers, they are now including this data in the API. The plugin_information action now returns a “compatibility” member with the multidimensional array format:

array( {WP version} => array( {plugin version} => array( {% of reporters who say it works}, {# responses} ) ) )

If the API knows which version of WordPress you are using (for example, if you are making this query using the plugins_api() function from with WordPress), the API will only return compatibility information for your version of WordPress.

Eventually, they want to gather this compatibility feedback from within WordPress, allowing you to vote directly from your plugins admin screen. The ultimate goal is to use this information to inform you of plugin incompatibilities with a new version of WordPress during the upgrade process. For that to be useful they need a large set of high quality compatibility data. Start voting now!

More information here.

_Translation of role names has been fixed
_Upload error messages are now correctly reported
_Switched back to curl as the default transport

_SSH2 filesystem requirements updated
_Styling glitch in the plugin editor has been fixed
_Updated the translation library to avoid a problem with mbstring.func_overload
_The autosave error experienced by some Internet Explorer users is fixed

Download it here

Enjoy!