
WordPress › WordPress 3.2 now available - sahillavingia
http://wordpress.org/news/2011/07/gershwin/
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aberkowitz
Zen Mode in WordPress 3.2 deals a huge blow to Artsy Editor[0].

[0] <http://artsyeditor.com>

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ck2
I completely do not understand the mysql upgrade requirement.

They are not using any queries that are not supported on mysql 4.1 and for
myisam use, 4.1 is faster than all later versions of mysql until version 5.5
(which is not available yet on many control panel based servers like cpanel).

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dd32
The idea was to bump the requirements at the same time, to reduce the number
of times a host would need to update their older systems.

The decision not to change any queries was made early on, 3.3 will bring a few
query changes, There are queries which have been wanting MySQL 5 optimizations
for awhile now, ultimately, this is going to bring performance improvements to
(currently) 98%+ of users, with the remaining 2% likely to never update to
3.2+ or (based on your statement that 5 is slower than 4.1) slightly slower
performance than previously,

Also, The WordPress stats[1] indicate that 2.7% of installs were on MySQL 4.1
(with 0.2% on 4.0, which was last supported on WordPress 2.8) - MySQL 4.1.2
has been required since WordPress 2.9.

[1]: <http://wordpress.org/about/stats/>

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beseku
Kudos for making a sensible decision. It's much better idea to force your
users to go through the pain of upgrading once rather than hitting them again
with a MySQL upgrade in a version's time.

Genuinely glad to hear that WP has this foresight in their roadmap.

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Andrex
Zen Mode is amazing. I still don't like the blue theme (too light IMO), but
the new dashboard is pretty great too. Haven't used it enough to tell the
speed differences yet, but this seems like a very stable release. Good job WP
team and all you contributors.

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shii
I've been using QuietWrite[1] for awhile which already has the awesome quiet
writing mode as default. Really polished UI. Par excellence webapp, that. One
of the best things about it is its ability to publish to your Wordpress blog
as well. I recommend anyone who has a Wordpress blog or just wants a no-
clutter, awesome, developing writing environment to check it out.

[1]: <http://www.quietwrite.com/>

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sucuri2
The only issue now is their PHP 5.2.4 requirement which will keep from 15-20%
of the users unable to update it:

[http://blog.sucuri.net/2011/07/wordpress-3-2-and-php-
support...](http://blog.sucuri.net/2011/07/wordpress-3-2-and-php-support-
security-effect.html)

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devicenull
The only way to get people to bug their hosts about upgrading PHP is to
release popular software that requires it.. Without the demand to upgrade to
higher versions, no host is going to bother.

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zapman449
My grief with this requirement is CentOS 5 only comes with php 5.1.6 without
some hackery of special repos or self-compile... That affects a TON of hosting
companies... especially with CentOS 6 still a few days away (which is a
different challenge).

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robryan
It was released in 2006, sure some hosting companies want to stay of the
bleeding edge for fear of causing problems with the apps customers are running
but if they haven't upgraded from that it's just laziness on their part.

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arkitaip
I can't update my site (shared hosting) from 3.1.4 to 2.3 because it requires
PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0. Hope the Wordpress team keeps releasing updates for
the 3.1.x branch.

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dd32
Please contact your host and get them to upgrade to something released in the
last... 5 years or so?

However, 3.1.x is not going to be "officially supported" as a legacy branch
AFAIK, If any security issues arrise in the coming months and the fix can be
applied to both the 3.2 and 3.1 branches, you'll see those patches be applied
to the 3.1 branch as well <em>most likely</em> \- So when 3.2.1 comes out, or
3.2.2, etc take a closer read of the announcement post and/or ask the question
if a update is available for 3.1. Chances are, the SVN branch will already
have the fixes applied: <http://core.svn.wordpress.org/branches/3.1/>

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robtoo
_Please contact your host and get them to upgrade to something released in the
last... 5 years or so?_

As noted above: CentOS 5.6 was released less than 3 months ago, and CentOS 6
isn't even out yet.

Similarly for Red Hat. RHEL 5.6 was released less than 6 months ago, will
continue to be fully-supported for another 3 years, and Red Hat can provide
"critical impact security fixes" for another 3 years _after that_.

 _3.1.x is not going to be "officially supported" as a legacy branch_

WordPress.org have just screwed a lot of people.

Every RHEL 5 shop is now stuck between Scylla and Charybdis, trying to
evaluate whether it is better to run with a web app that is unsupported, or an
operating system with key, network-accessible components that are unsupported.
And RHEL 6 shops are wondering which path they'll take in a couple of years
time when PHP 6 become a requirement.

Any CentOS shop with seperate dev and ops teams is going to hate jumping onto
the "now and forever you will have to recompile and reinstall PHP every month"
bandwagon. There's a reason these folks are running a binary distribution, and
they really don't have secret Gentoo-envy.

Also remember that installing a new PHP release is incredibly risky from an
ops perspective. PHP has an awful track record of backwards compatibility,
regularly changing APIs between _point releases_ , and every upgrade has a
very real chance of breaking custom code which may not even have a development
team any more.

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dd32
Just because a Linux Distribution releases a release with an old version of
PHP, it doesnt make it a current-generation PHP release.

Yes, It might have extra security patches applied to it[PHP], but Security is
not the reason behind applications increasing their PHP version requirements.

Looking at the centos site, it seems that CentOs currently ships with PHP
5.1.6 (The latest in the 5.1 branch). 5.1.6 was released in August 2006,
that's 6 years ago. _CentOs currently ships with 6 year old software?_

Ultimately, only 3.3% of all current WordPress installs are on 5.1.6, and i'd
be willing to bet that most of those are sysadmins who are not willing to put
the time into testing the PHP 5.2 packages that are available. WordPress has
to do what's best in the communities interest, and if that's supporting
somethin which 95%+ of hosts use, and the rest _have available to them in some
form_ , then WordPress needs to move forward and that few percent will have to
do something about it.

The same can be said about IE6, The WordPress Admin does NOT work in IE6
anymore (Well it does, but it looks even worse than 3.1 did). Many
corporations run IE6 due to not wanting to update,

 _People need to bite the bullet and invest in their infrastructure and
software environments_.

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buremba
the concept is very good.

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heyimfromreddit
<http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_3.2>

> ...the write page now loads XYZ% faster and paging through comments is ZYX%
> faster

Wow, what an improvement!

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spicyj
If X and Z are both non-zero, that is actually pretty good.

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clobber
I hope the Onswipe theme got killed off in this release.

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dd32
WordPress.com != WordPress.org Project.

