WordPress 3.2 Coming Soon

Since WordPress 3.2 is coming really soon, I though I’d post about it to let you guys know what’s new.

First of all, the plan was to make it faster and lighter. According to the developer’s blog post, they’ll be ditching older technologies in favor of newer, better ones.

This also means they’re making the first version of WordPress to drop support for the PHP and MySQL 4 series, since according to the stats only about 10% of users actually still use the old versions. They recommend moving to a new host if your current one doesn’t update.

Another “feature”, a move I strongly support, is the IE6 End Of Life notification on the dashboard. A nice orange color, to let you know that you need to move on. I personally hoped they would ditch IE altogether, which would bring significant notice to the anti-IE group and kill IE altogether. That was my wish anyway ;)

They have a few developers working on making WordPress 3.2 as fast and as light as possible, making more use of the cache and cutting down on some of the AJAX fat to make that possible.

They are also working on making fullscreen mode as unobtrusive as possible, in a similar way to http://www.quietwrite.com/.

Here’s a screenshot of the new post screen:

When you start typing, everything fades out of view except for your text and the title of the post. Quite neat :cool:

Testing it with the beta testing plugin, I have to say they’ve lived up to their promises about speed. The dashboard is a whole lot smoother and feels lighter than 3.1. As soon as 3.2 is released, I’m updating immediately :)

How about you?