In our previous post, we talked about the requirements for upgrading to WordPress 3.2 and how to check if your blog is ready to be updated to WordPress 3.2 using a WordPress health plugin. Now its time to upgrade your blogs to WordPress 3.2 as the final version is released by Automattic.
Some of the major highlights of this new WordPress are refreshed Administrative bar, New default theme “Twenty Eleven”, Full screen editor and loads of other feature additions along with bug fixes. It also drops support for outdated browser Internet explorer 6 and need PHP 5.2.4 , Mysql 5.0.15 or greater.
Highlights
- Refreshed Administrative UI – Admin redesign
- New Default Theme “Twenty Eleven” – Uses the latest Theme Features
- Full Screen Editor – Distraction free writing experience
- Extended Admin Bar – More useful links to control the site
- Requirements Changes-
- PHP 5.2.4 or greater (old requirement – since WordPress 2.5 was PHP 4.3 or greater)
- MySQL 5.0.15 or greater (old requirement – since WordPress 2.9 was MySQL 4.1.2 or greater)
- Enhanced Browser Compatibility-
- Drop Internet Explorer 6 support
- Start End-of-life (EOL) cycle for Internet Explorer 7
- Browse Happy notify users of out-of-date browser
- WordPress is Faster and Lighter-
- Faster page loads — We’ve gone through the most commonly loaded pages in WP and done improvements to their load time
- Faster Upgrades — The update system now support incremental upgrades so after 3.2 you’ll find upgrading faster than ever
- Optimizations to WP_Filesystem — Updates over FTP are now much quicker and less error prone
- Stream downloads to the filesystem — Improves update times and lowers the memory footprint
- Performance improvements for wptexturize()
- Remove PHP4 compatibility including timezone support
- More efficient term intersection queries
- Some optimizations in the HTML sanitizer (kses)
- Speed optimizations for is_serialized_string()
- Cache the Dashboard RSS Widgets HTML output to reduce unnecessary Ajax requests as well as the memory footprint
- And many other improvements and tweaks
Full list of change log can be read at WordPress codec page.
You should update to this as soon as possible as we experienced faster page load after we upgraded our blogs. Just use the automatic upgrade option inside your WordPress Admin Panel.
