Wow, the folks over at wordpress have been really busy lately. I just performed update wordpress services for a client in which I updated their plug-ins, checked compatibility for some older plug-ins and updated their Headway theme from 1.7 to 2.0.8. This was considerably a large update for the client as they have not updated in about 1 year. You can imagine the CSS errors when the upgrade was finally done, especially because this client had some pretty large custom css files. The point of all this was that the update occurred on a Friday, when wordpress 3.1.3 was out and on Monday 3.1.4 was already out. This happened to be the day the client went into their dashboard to make sure the work had been done. Needless to say I had to explain to them that the update had been released that day, or over the weekend some time.
Anyway, all this talk about WordPress got me wondering…why so many updates so soon? So I headed over to the wordpress site to catch up on my reading. It so happens that wordress 3.2 is already out..at least in development phase. You have to be a beta subscriber to get the list of updates. Originally it was thought that the developers of wordpress were going to drop IE7 support. Suffice to say, it’s still supported in WordPress 3.2.
Here are some of the new features that can be found in WordPress 3.2. It was supposed to be released on June 30th to the public.
Have a look at the WordPress 3.2 dasboard looks like…It’s a little different, but not by much.
Here’s some of what’s new:
Performance improvements like you wouldn’t believe. What’s that mean? Things are faster!
Distraction-free Writing. The visual editor’s full-screen composing experience has gotten a major overhaul, and is now available from HTML mode, too. More than ever, WordPress allows you to focus on what matters most — your content.
Admin UI Refresh. The last major redesign of the WordPress admin was in 2008. This isn’t a major redesign, just a little facelift to keep us feeling young. WordPress turns 8 later this month, you know.
New Default Theme. Introducing Twenty Eleven, based on the popular Duster theme. Rotating header images, post format support, and more.
Browse Happy. WordPress is made to work with modern browsers. If you visit your Dashboard using an outdated web browser, we’ll let you know there’s a newer version available.
Admin Bar. We’ve added more links to the admin bar to make it even more useful.
Be Aware:
WordPress has new minimum system requirements: PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0.
Internet Explorer 6 will no longer be supported.
The favorites menu has been removed. If you’ve written any plugins that use this menu, it’s time to switch over to an admin bar placement.
Known Issues:
We haven’t updated the blue admin color scheme yet, so do your testing in the gray zone for best results
