By Derek AshauerWith 4th of July also came a new release of WordPress, version 3.2. For our clients, the most important aspects of this release are the speed improvements and a change to the administration page layout. Also included in the release is a new default theme which obviously has no significance for AshWebStudio or our clients since we do custom web design from scratch. Lastly, a “zen mode” or fullscreen writing/editing option was added which allows you to hide all the page options and focus just on writing. This last feature is geared more towards the frequent bloggers to help them stay focused on the task of writing a blog post without being distracted.
The key feature we’re excited about is the dedication to improving the speed and stability of WordPress. Although most of the sites we build with WordPress are fast already, it’s nice knowing they were able to speed it up even more. They did this by dropping support for IE6, PHP 4 and older versions of MySQL. By ignoring older technologies, the code base can become smaller, lighter and thus faster and any decent web host should already be up-to-date with the minimum requirements of WordPress. Clients hosted with us don’t need to worry as the servers we have were way ahead of these requirements ages ago.