4 ms·

WordPress › WordPress 3.2 now available

52 points by sahillavingia 15y ago

arkitaip 15y ago
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.
- demetris 15y ago
  Usually you get fixes for a WordPress release up until the first beta of the +2 release is out. That is, for 3.1, up until 3.3 Beta 1 is out. I don’t know if 3.1, the last release that works with PHP4, will receive special treatment.
  - jacques_chester 15y ago
    The Wordpress team typically only release bug fixes for the current version. It's one of my pet peeves as an administrator.
- dd32 15y ago
  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/ http://core.svn.wordpress.org/branches/3.1/
  - robtoo 15y ago
    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.
    - jacques_chester 15y ago
      Wordpress hasn't exactly got an amazing track record of introducing stable changes between releases. I've seen posts deleted during an upgrade that hanged halfway through. That was fun. I've most recently seen image uploading and TinyMCE simply break during a recent bug fix. If you think PHP is a poor ops citizen, Wordpress is even worse.
    - dd32 15y ago
      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.
    - robtoo 15y ago
      Aaand I forgot about the php53 package, an optional supported alternative to the default php package.
buremba 15y ago
the concept is very good.
sucuri2 15y ago
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-security-effect.html http://blog.sucuri.net/2011/07/wordpress-3-2-and-php-support...
- devicenull 15y ago
  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.
  - zapman449 15y ago
    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).
    - robryan 15y ago
      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.
    - johnny22 15y ago
      i thought most hosting companies who still use centos do so because of cpanel or other control panel software that handles handles php very well itself. Which ones don't?
    - RyanKearney 15y ago
      Considering most hosting companies use cPanel and PHP/Apache updates aren't taken from the operating systems repository, this doesn't matter.
    - epo 15y ago
iphoneedbot 15y ago
I suspect this will break alot of blogs because wordpress got a lot of users very use to the update button starting from 2.8 with their frequent update releases. There's a lot of webhost that's barely on php5 -- plus there's alot of VPS users that don't really manage their VPS and keep their php properly update.
heyimfromreddit 15y ago
http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_3.2 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!
- spicyj 15y ago
  If X and Z are both non-zero, that is actually pretty good.
- heyimfromreddit 15y ago
  Looks like they've edited it.
aberkowitz 15y ago
Zen Mode in WordPress 3.2 deals a huge blow to Artsy Editor[0]. [0] http://artsyeditor.com http://artsyeditor.com
clobber 15y ago
I hope the Onswipe theme got killed off in this release.
- dd32 15y ago
  WordPress.com != WordPress.org Project.
Andrex 15y ago
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.
ck2 15y ago
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).
- dazzer 15y ago
  Seems to me like an obsolescence strategy. By declaring right out that it is no longer going to be supported, people will be encouraged to write for the newer databases. Eventually when the standard MySQL version moves up, it won't be stuck in 4.1. Plugins authors will also appreciate that they have been given enough heads-up to update their plugins. This will also give people time to upgrade their databases if they're managing their own.
- duskwuff 15y ago
  > [...] and for myisam use [...] And there's your problem.
  - robtoo 15y ago
    MyISAM does have some uses. It is a much better choice in a memory-restricted environment (such as a low-end virtual machine), for example. Of course, if someone is using WordPress at all in a low-end virtual machine, then you could also point at that and go "And there's your problem." With some justification.
- dd32 15y ago
  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/ http://wordpress.org/about/stats/
shii 15y ago
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/ http://www.quietwrite.com/

52 points by sahillavingia 15y ago

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.

demetris 15y ago
Usually you get fixes for a WordPress release up until the first beta of the +2 release is out. That is, for 3.1, up until 3.3 Beta 1 is out. I don’t know if 3.1, the last release that works with PHP4, will receive special treatment.
- jacques_chester 15y ago
  The Wordpress team typically only release bug fixes for the current version. It's one of my pet peeves as an administrator.
dd32 15y ago
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/ http://core.svn.wordpress.org/branches/3.1/
- robtoo 15y ago
  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.
  - jacques_chester 15y ago
    Wordpress hasn't exactly got an amazing track record of introducing stable changes between releases. I've seen posts deleted during an upgrade that hanged halfway through. That was fun. I've most recently seen image uploading and TinyMCE simply break during a recent bug fix. If you think PHP is a poor ops citizen, Wordpress is even worse.
  - dd32 15y ago
    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.
  - robtoo 15y ago
    Aaand I forgot about the php53 package, an optional supported alternative to the default php package.

buremba 15y ago

the concept is very good.

sucuri2 15y ago

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

devicenull 15y ago
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.
- zapman449 15y ago
  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).
  - robryan 15y ago
    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.
  - johnny22 15y ago
    i thought most hosting companies who still use centos do so because of cpanel or other control panel software that handles handles php very well itself. Which ones don't?
  - RyanKearney 15y ago
    Considering most hosting companies use cPanel and PHP/Apache updates aren't taken from the operating systems repository, this doesn't matter.
  - epo 15y ago

iphoneedbot 15y ago

I suspect this will break alot of blogs because wordpress got a lot of users very use to the update button starting from 2.8 with their frequent update releases. There's a lot of webhost that's barely on php5 -- plus there's alot of VPS users that don't really manage their VPS and keep their php properly update.

heyimfromreddit 15y ago

http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_3.2 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!

spicyj 15y ago
If X and Z are both non-zero, that is actually pretty good.
heyimfromreddit 15y ago
Looks like they've edited it.

aberkowitz 15y ago

Zen Mode in WordPress 3.2 deals a huge blow to Artsy Editor[0]. [0] http://artsyeditor.com http://artsyeditor.com

clobber 15y ago

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

dd32 15y ago
WordPress.com != WordPress.org Project.

Andrex 15y ago

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.

ck2 15y ago

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).

dazzer 15y ago
Seems to me like an obsolescence strategy. By declaring right out that it is no longer going to be supported, people will be encouraged to write for the newer databases. Eventually when the standard MySQL version moves up, it won't be stuck in 4.1. Plugins authors will also appreciate that they have been given enough heads-up to update their plugins. This will also give people time to upgrade their databases if they're managing their own.
duskwuff 15y ago
> [...] and for myisam use [...] And there's your problem.
- robtoo 15y ago
  MyISAM does have some uses. It is a much better choice in a memory-restricted environment (such as a low-end virtual machine), for example. Of course, if someone is using WordPress at all in a low-end virtual machine, then you could also point at that and go "And there's your problem." With some justification.
dd32 15y ago
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/ http://wordpress.org/about/stats/

shii 15y ago

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/ http://www.quietwrite.com/