Haikus from Jane on her 39th birthday:

Practice makes perfect
is what they say about things,
but sometimes it’s not.

In this case it is
not practice but refinement,
and then more testing.

You can help WordPress!
Now: 3.1, beta 2
is here; needs testing.

But! Remember this:
Only install on test sites,
as YMMV.

The second beta of WordPress 3.1 is now available!

For things to test, please review our Beta 1 release announcement. A list of known issues can be found on our bug tracker.

Already have a test install that you want to switch over to the beta? Try the beta tester plugin. Please test 3.1 on a test site, not on your live site, as interactions with plugins that haven’t been updated may be unpredictable, and we can’t predict (see how that works?) whether something will break or not… that’s why we’re asking people to help us test everything!

Testers, don’t forget to use the wp-testers mailing list to discuss bugs you encounter. Plugin and theme authors, please test your plugins for compatibility.

Download the WordPress 3.1 Beta 2 now.

“Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads.”

—Dr. Emmett Brown

The streets of the future probably won’t be filled with flying cars and hover boards but the Web will be filled with more semantic content thanks to new markup elements introduced in HTML5. Today’s new theme will let you take advantage of that future right now, right here, on WordPress.com. It’s called Toolbox.

Much like the Sandbox theme, Toolbox provides all the markup you need to build your very own theme with CSS alone–with one difference. Toolbox uses some really exciting new HTML5 elements–like <article>, <header>, and <nav>–that better describe what your content is all about.

What can you do with it? Anything you want. Since HTML and CSS go together like peanut butter and jelly we’ve put together a small demonstration. Clicking the image below will take you to a demo site where you can see—and download!—some really cool Custom CSS working in concert with the Toolbox markup.

The Toolbox Theme markup together with Custom CSS

If you need some more inspiration, take a look at a small sample of the infinite themes styles available with Custom CSS. All you need to get started is the Custom CSS upgrade and some experience with CSS.

If you’re building a WordPress theme for a self-hosted site, you can use Toolbox too! It’s available right now in the WordPress Themes Directory.

When we originally released P2 our mission was to create an awesome feature-packed group blog theme. We have stayed true to that mission with new improvements to P2 functionality that will make collaborating with others much easier.

P2 now sports a site member autocomplete tool that takes the guesswork out of tagging people in your posts. P2 will also now display the most popular tags for a blog as well as the number of times a tag has been used. These new features allow you to better identify and organize your posts.

Site Member Autocomplete

When you write posts it is now possible to bring up a list of members posting on your blog. From the front page of P2, type the @ character with part of a username and the a list of username suggestions will appear based on username and display name. You can choose the correct member name to insert and the name should be added to your post content. After tagging a member in your post, the post will be filed under a special URL (for example: http://p2demo.wordpress.com/mentions/justin/).

Tagging Improvements

We have also made some great improvements to the tag-it box. The tags that appear when you begin typing will now be ordered by popularity. P2 will also display the number of times a tag has been used. This will allow you to better decide what tags to use. To use the feature just begin typing some characters and a list of available tags should display.

Using P2

Just like other themes, you can find P2 under Appearance > Themes on your dashboard. Those who are into the self-hosted version of WordPress can keep an eye out for the updated version of P2 in the coming weeks.

WordPress 3.0.3 is available and is a security update for all previous WordPress versions.

This release fixes issues in the remote publishing interface, which under certain circumstances allowed Author- and Contributor-level users to improperly edit, publish, or delete posts.

These issues only affect sites that have remote publishing enabled.

Remote publishing is disabled by default, but you may have enabled it to use a remote publishing client such as one of the WordPress mobile apps. You can check these settings on the “Settings → Writing” screen.

Download 3.0.3 or update automatically from the “Dashboard → Updates” screen in your site’s admin area.

The first fall of snow is not only an event, it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of a world and wake up in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment then where is it to be found?
J. B. Priestley

December 1st makes a lot of us think of the holidays. It’s hard not to think about snow even if your climate doesn’t bring it. Once again, we’d like to spread snow around the world through WordPress.com.

To make it snow on your site:

1. Go to your site’s dashboard.
2. Navigate to Appearance -> Extras.
3. Check the box next to “Show falling snow on this blog.”
4. Click the Update Extras button.

If you used snow last year it is automatically turned back on. If you want to turn it off, follow the steps above but uncheck the box.

Here’s a latin jazz version of Let it Snow to listen to while activating the feature:

Older computers may run slow or stop responding due to snow. Use the following links if you run into a problem (the options below only affect your user account):

Prevent Snow
Allow Snow