WordPress 3.2 gets a dose of Zen

From the ‘Freshly Pressed Open Source Goodness’ Files:

WordPress 3.2 is now out (officially announced on July 4th), a little it more than four months after 3.1 came out.

The big deal this time around is the new zen approach to a minimalist user interface when writing content. It’s a great idea.

After all, when you’re in the system trying to post something why do you want to be distracted by other ‘stuff’?

Sure, when you’re doing site administration you want all the buttons, but when you’re job to get content out the door, you don’t really want any distractions.

Beyond the minimalist writing interface, this release is all about optimizations. WordPress 3.2 offers the promise of faster page loads and overall optimizations to to the WordPress filesystem. No I personally won’t be uninstalling WP-Cache (or W3) anytime soon, but having the core system faster is always a feature that users want. Who wants a slow site?

Since at least the WordPress 2 release, updating WordPress installs has really been a simple point and click exercise (most of the time…). Now devs are providing support for incremental upgrades which hold the promise of even faster and easier updates.

Now with all this power there is a catch.

WordPress 3.2 is the first WordPress release EVER to not support PHP4. While this may not sound like a big deal to those of us who upgraded our servers four plus years ago, there are still plenty of shared hosts that run WordPress on PHP4.

Yes it’s long since past the time that PHP4 should have been put to bed, but hey maybe by having WordPress finally stop supporting it, those old servers will start to disappear.

And oh yeah, this release won’t run on IE6 either. Another nail in the creaky coffin that is IE6.

The other great thing that WordPress has been doing well for a long time is actually explain their features and new releases in a way that anyone can understand. Rather than paraphrase their message, check out their video below.