WordPress 3.4 is Coming!

WordPress has announced the first release candidate for WordPress Version 3.4.

A “release candidate” is the final test version before mainstream public release. In other words, the current release candidate is pretty much what the final version will look like. Unless some major surprises pop up, there is only the crossing of T’s and dotting of I’s at this stage.

In order to get the current release candidate, you can download the WordPress Beta Tester plugin or download the release candidate (zip file).

Here are some goodies of what you can expect (from the WordPress Codex):

Highlights

Enhanced theme control
- Customize theme options before activating a new theme using Theme Customizer
- Use Theme Previewer to customize current theme without changing the front-end design

Custom Headers
- Improved Custom Headers with flexible sizes
- Selecting Custom Header Images and Custom Background Images from Media Library Screen

Media improvements
- HTML support has been added to image caption field

User Features

General

Support HTML in image captions
Properly reflect the language on RSS feeds
Update license.txt to include ‘How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs’

Dashboard

Dashboard Widgets are available for translation
Help Tabs improvements
Remove Recently Updated from Plugins widget
Add a link to the Customizer from the Admin Bar appearance menu
Improve the Recent Comments dashboard widget performance on sites with large amounts of comments

Posts

Add new comment from post edit screen
Display menu_order value in Quick Edit for non-hierarchical post types
Change ‘Post Format’ bulk/quick edit label to ‘Format’

Media

Add Twitter.com as an oEmbed providers.

Comments

Remove “Approve” bulk action when viewing spam comments as it isn’t shown in the row actions

Appearance

Update the header and background Theme Features in Twenty Ten and Twenty Eleven themes
Faster theme searching
Add Sort by, and Number of Links to show, to the Links widget
Introduce new registration methods for custom headers and custom backgrounds
Default to keyword searches for the theme installer
Contextual help updates

Plugins

Clean up the Plugin installer screenshots page; adds CSS resize support to the images to prevent them requiring scrolling and falling below the FYI box
Default to keyword searches for the plugin installer

Settings

Update color scheme definition for gray admin theme
Use blue arrows for blue admin’s screen options and help tabs; adjust baseline to be more compatible with Firefox
Timezone and start of week can now be specify through translated strings (rather than PHP)

Install Process

Don’t allow empty database prefix for multisite
Issue an error during the WordPress install process if wp-config.php is configured with an empty database table prefix, which is not supported

You can see the full list of new features and functionality here.