What is new features of WordPress 3.2

Now, here is WordPress 3.2.1 installed on this blog.

Let’s see the new features on 3.2, since 3.2.1 is a maintenance update only.

One of the important is that it is not support IE6 any more. Actually when I design a site, I am not thinking about IE 6, not testing the layout on IE6. It is 2011 already. It is too hard to find a IE 6 test bed in my office.

The second one is Full Screen Editor, I am working on it right now.  This Full Screen is not the real full screen, but a full screen of the current Window, maybe call it Full Window is better.

The third one is Faster page load. This is very important for User and Search Engine. Fast site can get higher rank on Google. Then, more users will see your site on Google. On the other side, Faster site make users happy.

Full list of the release notes below:

Highlights

• Refreshed Administrative 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

• 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

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

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