Speed improvements
Many of the lead developers for the WordPress project have described their desire for WordPress itself to fade into the background. The goal is to achieve the ideal writing and publishing environment, without even needing to know it’s WordPress that’s powering it.
In pursuit of that goal, the theme for this release was “faster and lighter”. This release included a multitude of under the hood improvements to remove unneeded code, rewrite queries for speed, and in general make WordPress much lighter on its feet.
Did it work? Try it out and see for yourself.
User interface design update
WordPress saw its last major interface design update in version 2.7, which was released in December of 2008. That version saw the big changeover from the blue Dashboard first introduced in version 2.5 to the one we’re much more familiar with today.
Enhancements to the upgrade process
The automatic upgrade process has been improved as well. Previously when WordPress updated itself it would download the entire WordPress install and replace every old file. With 3.2 the upgrade process will be able to only replace modified files since the last release.
This will mean faster upgrades for everyone, which is awesome.
Of course, this new upgrade process will work the next time WordPress is automatically upgraded, not this time around.
Now requires PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5
This one has been coming for quite some time. With WordPress 3.2 the minimum requirements have been bumped to require PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5. What does that mean, exactly? Well, it doesn’t mean that any features have been added that require PHP 5—that was made clear in the initial plans for 3.2. No, this is just the version where support for previous versions of PHP and MySQL are dropped.
If you’re not sure whether your server supports those, then you should probably check. Like, now. There’s a handy plugin called WordPress Requirements Check that will let you know if you’re ready for WordPress 3.2 or not.
The move away from PHP 4 dependency is also a message to hosts that it’s time to update. Well, the time for hosts to update was probably 2004 when PHP 5 was released. But hey, progress is progress.
