WordPress 3.2 Released. What’s new?
This week, the WordPress team released WordPress 3.2, (codenamed Gershwin) available directly from within the updates screen in the dashboard of your WordPress install. Before upgrading (which you should do), make sure you download a working backup of your database.
Given that WordPress 3.2 is a major upgrade, the risk that it breaks certain themes and plugins is more present than smaller upgrades. Be extra careful if you are using plugins that are mission-critical to your website. Check that the plugins that you use are set as compatible with the new version, or try the upgrade on a test installation before upgrading your production website.
What’s new in 3.2?
It is always nice to see what new features are included in a new WordPress version and this one has quite a few news.
New Dashboard Design
New Dashboard Theme in WordPress 3.2
The Dashboard has been tweaked in terms of design to make it faster and easier to use. Unfortunately the entire dashboard redesign feels a little undone and not near as tidy as the design was in 3.1, where they had fully nailed it.
It is however very nice to see that some wording has been cleaned up, mainly in the menu, to decrease confusion of what a certain selection does.
Distraction Free Writing
New Distraction Free Writing Mode
Maybe the most great new feature in WordPress 3.2, distraction free writing lets you take the post editing full screen. You will end up with the title of the post as well as the post content and a small formatting bar up top. For everyone writing post directly in WordPress, before moving on to formatting after they are written, this new mode should prove to be extremely useful. My one wish is that I could get easy formatting support here with paragraph and heading support.
New Default Theme: Twenty Eleven
The New Twenty Eleven Theme
It is wonderful to see that the WordPress team is keeping its promise to release a new theme every year. With WordPress 3.2 comes Twenty Eleven, a much more modern approach to the Twenty Ten theme featuring some beautiful interface enhancements.
The theme comes with full theme options which by default lets you select a color theme (dark or light) but will offer theme authors a much quicker start to building theme option pages for their themes, if they start with Twenty Eleven as a base.
Updates Only Touch Changed Files
The WordPress auto-update system has been wonderful to work with over the past few years. With WordPress 3.2, the team is taking it a step further to make it better and much faster. From now on, the updater will only modify and replace files that have been changes, leaving unchanged files as they are.
Since this has been a common practice for software developers for many years, it is certainly about time that this came to WordPress as well.
More…
Naturally there are a bunch of speed and performance enhancements included in this release as well as many bug fixes and other neat additions. One extra thing to note is that the requirements for WordPress has been increased to PHP 5.2.4+ and MySQL 5 (which we at XLD Studios fully support).
