Are You Ready for WordPress 3.2?

WordPress News

Posted July 3, 2011 by Jane Wells. Filed under Hosting.

WordPress 3.2 is going to be released very soon, and we want you to be ready! Take note: the minimum requirements are changing.

PHP and MySQL

As of 3.2, you’ll need to be running PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0. As we mentioned almost a year ago when we announced that this change was coming, the percentage of people running older versions of PHP and MySQL is relatively low. With more than 45 million people using WordPress, though, even a small percentage can mean a lot of people! Don’t caught with your pants dashboard down — make sure you’re running compatible versions of PHP and MySQL before you update tomorrow when WordPress 3.2 is released.

Log in to your hosting account, and check to make sure you have at least PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0. Most of the major hosts already default to these or newer versions, but there are some exceptions. Check to see which versions you are running, and if you’re still on an older version, it should be as simple as changing a dropdown menu and clicking Save to get up to date.

If you don’t know how to find this information in your hosting account or you don’t even know how to access your hosting control panel because someone else manages that for you, don’t fret. You can find out if you’re ready for 3.2 with the Health Check plugin. In your dashboard, go to Plugins → Add New and search for “health check” (it should be the first result). Install it, activate it, and it will tell you if you need to update anything.

If you need more help, contact your host’s customer service and use this email template to ask them to help you.

Hi there. I host my domain [example.com] with you, and I run WordPress on my site. The minimum requirements are changing to PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0, and I would appreciate your help in confirming that my site’s setup meets these requirements. If I’m currently running an older version of PHP or MySQL, could you update it for me, or tell me how to do it? Thanks so much!

If your host replies that they can’t update to these versions, it might be time to look for a new host.

IE6 and Outdated Browsers

With 3.2, we’re also dropping support for Internet Explorer 6, a 10-years-old outdated browser that even Microsoft is ready to leave behind. From now on, if you access your WordPress dashboard from an outdated browser, we’ll let you know. Why? Because as web technology improves, so does WordPress, as we build features to take advantage of these improvements. If you’re using an out-of-date browser, chances are you’re missing out.

If your browser is out of date, you’ll see a friendly orangey-yellow box in your dashboard letting you know you a newer version is available (which you can dismiss, of course). If you’re using IE6, though, the box will be red, and your dashboard will not function properly. If you’re stuck on IE6 because the computer you use is maintained by a business, library, school, or the like, and you are not able to download a newer browser, here’s a sample email you can use to ask your boss/administrator/IT guys to update the browser.

Hi there. The computer I use at [where you use the computer] is equipped with an out-of-date web browser. Internet Explorer 6 was created 10 years ago, before modern web standards, and does not support modern web applications. More and more sites and applications are dropping support for IE6, including the new version of WordPress. Even Microsoft, the makers of IE6, are counting down until IE6 goes the way of the dinosaur (see http://www.ie6countdown.com/ for more information). Can you please install an updated version of IE or any modern browser (see http://browsehappy.com for more information) on the available computers? Thank you very much.

Welcome to the future!

Codex

Codex tools: Log in

Version 3.2

Languages: English • 日本語 • (Add your language)

On July 4, 2011, WordPress Version 3.2 "Gershwin", named in honor of the composer and pianist George Gershwin, was released to the public. For more information on this enhancement and bug release, read the WordPress Blog.

For Version 3.2, the database version (db_version in wp_options) changed to 18226, and the Trac revision was 18397.

• View Closed Tickets

Contents [hide] 1 Highlights 2 User Features 2.1 General 2.2 Dashboard 2.3 Posts 2.4 Media 2.5 Links 2.6 Pages 2.7 Comments 2.8 Appearance 2.9 Plugins 2.10 Tools 2.11 Users 2.12 Settings 2.13 Install Process 2.14 Multisite 3 Development, Themes, Plugins

Highlights

• Refreshed Administative UI - Admin redesign
• New Default Theme "Twenty Eleven" - Uses the latest Theme Features
• Full Screen Editor - Distraction free writing experience
• Extended Admin Bar - More useful links to control the site

• Requirements Changes -
  • PHP 5.2.4 or greater (old requirement - since WordPress 2.5 was PHP 4.3 or greater)
  • MySQL 5.0.15 or greater (old requirement - since WordPress 2.9 was MySQL 4.1.2 or greater)

• Enhanced Browser Compatibility -
  • Drop Internet Explorer 6 support
  • Start End-of-life (EOL) cycle for Internet Explorer 7
  • Browse Happy notify users of out-of-date browser

• WordPress is Faster and Lighter -
  • Faster page loads -- We've gone through the most commonly loaded pages in WP and done improvements to their load time
  • Faster Upgrades -- The update system now support incremental upgrades so after 3.2 you'll find upgrading faster than ever
  • Optimizations to WP_Filesystem -- Updates over FTP are now much quicker and less error prone
  • Stream downloads to the filesystem -- Improves update times and lowers the memory footprint
  • Performance improvements for wptexturize()
  • Remove PHP4 compatibility including timezone support
  • More efficient term intersection queries
  • Some optimizations in the HTML sanitizer (kses)
  • Speed optimizations for is_serialized_string()
  • Cache the Dashboard RSS Widgets HTML output to reduce unnecessary Ajax requests as well as the memory footprint
  • And many other improvements and tweaks

User Features

General

• Admin Bar: Add a Themes submenu under Appearance, for consistency
• Admin Bar: Add View Site/Dashboard links, 'View X' links in the admin, 'View' action link for terms, new custom taxonomy string: view_item, defaulting to 'View Tag' and View Category'
• Admin Bar: Support Edit link for Attachments
• Switch from "Panel/SubPanel" to "Screen" in inline documentation and Codex links
• Add collapse link to admin menu
• Help Tab text updates
• Favorites menu no longer exists
• New Freedoms (rights) and Credits links at bottom of admin screens
• Use monospaced font for HTML editor
• Validate the HTML in the admin area
• Make copying the PressThis bookmarklet code easier in WebKit browsers
• Move copyright notices to license.txt
• Refresh login form styles to match admin style

Dashboard

• Change View All Buttons into plain links
• Show full set of status links in recent comments box
• Drop "Change Theme" button
• Update core UI changes; "Update Automatically" changed to "Update Now", first core update is now a primary button
• Core support for partial updates

Posts

• Change Menu Name from 'Posts' to 'All Posts'
• Show the sticky posts checkbox ("Stick this post to the front page") Only when author has 'edit_others_posts' capability
• Updated styles for the Visual editor buttons
• Full screen editor experience called Distraction Free Writing - accessed via the Toggle Fullscreen mode tool in the Visual editor and fullscreen button in the HTML editor (Trac Ticket 17198)
• New sprite for the TinyMCE buttons
• Fix pagination when searching or filtering posts

Media

• Add 'Add New' button to edit media
• Update the blip.tv oEmbeds

Links

• Change Menu Name from 'Links' to 'All Links'
• Add 'Add New' button to edit links

Pages

• Change Menu Name from 'Pages' to 'All Pages'

Comments

• New comment bubble styling

Appearance

• New Default theme - TwentyEleven - based on Duster Theme (Trac Ticket 17198).
• Allow selecting previously uploader headers and randomly serving previously uploaded or default headers
• Denote images that are headers or backgrounds in the media ui
• Show hierarchy for pages and taxonomies in nav menus admin
• Introduce new is_multi_author() template tag to make it easier for themes to have different behaviour when a site has more than one author
• Be less specific about theme repo licenses (as they can vary in specifics). They are all compatible with the license WordPress uses

Plugins

• Allow plugins to disable screen options with filter
• Be less specific about plugin repo licenses (as they can vary in specifics). They are all compatible with the license WordPress uses

Tools

• Change Menu Name from 'Tools' to 'Available Tools'
• Press This bookmarklet redesign
• UI refresh for Press This
• Export commentmeta

Users

• Change Menu Name from 'Users' to 'All Users'
• Add 'Add New' button to edit users

Settings

Install Process

Multisite

• Show access denied page and list a user's sites if they visit an admin they don't have permissions for rather than redirecting to the users' primary blog
• Make "Space Used" gray instead of green in multisite Right Now box
• Make user validation when adding a user via network admin consistent with adding a user elsewhere and provide better feedback for validation problems
• Allow Pagination for Must-Use/Dropin plugins; respect WP_CONTENT_DIR & WPMU_PLUGIN_DIR for help text; move help text into WP_Plugins_List_Table
• Rename network admin submenus to not clash with top level menus

Development, Themes, Plugins

• Add a per-post-type nav menu items filter for plugin control
• Add an extra FTP_LANG_DIR override constant to short-circuit WP_Filesystem_Base::find_folder(WP_LANG_DIR)
• Add .ics / text/calendar to the whitelist of allowed file types
• Add cache_domain argument to get_terms() to allow caching to a unique set of cache buckets; useful when taxonomy queries have been modified via filters and need their own cache space
• Add menu id for admin-bar's dashboard and view-site link
• Add option_page_capability_$option_page filter
• Add quotes to [value="some"] selectors re: jQuery
• Add theme feature strings for translation
• Allow custom author elements such as email
• Allow get_pages() to support multiple post statuses
• Allow plugins to control user and network admin canonical redirect
• Allow plugins to hook into wp-admin/update-core.php
• Allow querying empty meta values
• Allow retrieving comments by post type, status, author, author, name, or parent. Fetch only published posts for recent comments widget
• Allow taxonomies to be queried by $_GET parameters on non-taxonomy url's
• Allow WP_Query 'post_status' parameter to accept an array, as well as a singular value and comma separated list
• Apply 'editable_slug' filter to parent page slugs in get_sample_permalink()
• Apply 'editable_slug' filter in post_slug_meta_box()
• Centralize pagination bound exceeding redirects for list tables
• Change esc_url_raw references to esc_url
• Check return value of wp_check_browser_version() and make return value consistent
• Code readability improvements
• Default WP_LANG_DIR to `WP_CONTENT_DIR/languages` when `wp-includes/languages/` doesn't exist
• Deprecate wp_clone() but left the function in wp-includes/load.php
• Don't 404 for empty post type archives
• Don't load themes functions.php for upgrades
• Don't refresh the admin menu after page load, apply the user-state from PHP, fix behaviour after folding the menu
• Don't set fields to empty values in _wp_translate_data()
• Don't show broken 'View' links when a custom post type is not publicly queryable
• Don't use array calling for post_status in wp_edit_attachments_query() to prevent any use of the deprecated query_string filter (as in, don't use it)
• Ensure all theme searching is done case-insensitive
• Fix handing of super admins that don't have a blog in get_dashboard_url() and login
• Fix mistaken use of publicly_queryable in when public was what was intended for register_post_type()
• Fix notice when invalid taxonomy is passed to wp_tag_cloud()
• Hide update bubble counts for users who can't perform the update
• Introduce get_screen_icon()
• Introduce is_multi_author() to check if more than one author has published posts for this site
• Introduce 'name_admin_bar' label and 'show_in_admin_bar' (Add New menu) argument for Post Types
• Introduce Stream-To-File for the WP_HTTP API - reduces memory consumption during file downloads; implemented in download_url() for upgraders
• Introduce wp_http_supports() as replacement for the http_transport_(get|post)_debug hooks
• Introduce WP_MAX_MEMORY_LIMIT' constant for the high memory limit set when image processing and unzipping; ensure it is always filterable by plugins as well as configurable in wp-config.php
• Introduce WP_Meta_Query and relation support
• Pass image URL's to thickbox via L10n in script-loader.php; allows thickbox to be used on any page in the install without defining the image URL variables
• Properly handle https in ixr client
• Provide more arguments to the widgets on the 404 page so as to avoid notices
• Rename duplicate 'delete_post' and 'deleted_post' actions to 'before_delete_post' and 'after_delete_post'
• Remove support for the PHP HTTP Extension from WP_HTTP. The PHP HTTP Extension is a wrapper around libcurl and fopen() providing limited configuration and is supported on a minority of servers due to its non-default inclusion
• Return false from is_page_template() if the template is default
• Set is_* flags for AND taxonomy queries
• Set the mb_string internal encoding to ISO-8859-1 whilst uncompressing archives using PclZip; fixes 'PCLZIP_ERR_BAD_FORMAT (-10) : Invalid block size' errors on systems utilising mbstring.func_overload
• Stop themes and plugins from overriding the admin bar CSS
• Support Chrome Frame
• Update jQuery to 1.6.1
• Update jQuery UI to 1.8.2
• Update json2.js
• Update _old_files
• Update phpass
• Update phpmailer and smtp to 5.1
• Update pop3 class
• Update TinyMCE to 3.4.2 (Trac Ticket 17086)
• Update wp_mail to correctly call the Address adding functions on PHPMailer for To, CC, BCC and preserving support for full RFC2822 address specifications
• Updated PHPdocs for wpdb class, XML-RPC functions, HTTP API, add_submenu_page, wp_templating_constants(), wp_check_browser_version()
• Use the post type object in get_posts_by_author_sql() and add a post type parameter to count_many_users_posts(); pub_priv_sql_capability filter is considered deprecated
• Validate post status against capabilities in Press This
• Verify certificate matches both the common name and the provided hostname; WP_HTTP_Curl requires CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST be either 2 or false
• When upgrading plugins/themes, if the new destination folder is different from the previous folder, delete the old folder upon upgrade
• XML-RPC add support to wp.getPostFormats to provide a list of the currently supported post formats in addition to the complete list
• XML-RPC allow Pages to have a status of pending
• XML-RPC include the post status in the response for mt.getRecentPostTitles calls
• XML-RPC introduce a special wp_die handler for XMLRPC requests to ensure we send an XML response

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