WordPress 3.2 is coming : are you ready?

Following the official announcement on the blog of WordPress almost 8 months ago, we now know what they have stored and probably cooking for us in the coming years. Indeed, the announcement was radical about the next steps in WordPress.

In the near future, evolution and the approach of WordPress will change. Policy since the beginning was to open up to anyone to host a WordPress installation and create rich content with ease. However, this policy will be amended for future major developments. The conditions at a facility have been reassessed and it will now be compulsory for anyone wanting to enjoy the power of content management, hosting a powerful, using new versions of MySQL (5) and PHP (5.2) . This new strategy will take effect upon the development and launch of WordPress 3.2.

However, the development team has told that this version will be available later in the year 2011 and that support for PHP 4 and MySQL 4 will therefore be completely abandoned after the release of WordPress 3.1 . The next update will be the last to support these popular formats, but will allow some to benefit even if the user wants a full installation and rich in features. Other content managers, such as Drupal and Joomla will also use this policy to upgrade technology in their next public versions.

Is your site compatible with WordPress 3.2?

Health Check is an extension , developed for the occasion, telling you if the area of your WordPress installation (server and configuration) will be compatible with future developments. Once activated, a message will be displayed (after advanced diagnostics on your system), to inform you about the compatibility or incompatibility of your hosting infrastructure.

“Excellent: Your server is running PHP version 5.2.13 MySQL version 5.0.81 and are ideal for WordPress 3.2”

In summary

We experienced lot of plugin compatibility issues, at least for few hours with WordPress 3.1. WordPress 3.2, wil require mandatory infrastructure for your hosting PHP 5.2 or higher and MySQL 5.0.15 or higher. An extension is also available allowing you, a glance to see if your infrastructure is compatible with future changes in the content management system.

With the experience with 3.1, we will install WordPress 3.2 on offline test blog before running! We hope coding will remain poetry with 3.2, still…

Faster, lighter

• A faster release cycle
• End of Support for Internet Explorer 6
• Acceleration of the themes and better optimization.
• Technology using PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5
• Possible improvement on the publisher’s end (wow… inspiration )
• Better automatic updates.
• Improved administration via PHP lazy loading and processed via FTP