I was just catching up on some of the changes that are slated for WordPress 3.2 – this will be coming out at the end of June (if all goes according to their plan)! There are a few major items that may certainly impact whether or not you will be ABLE to upgrade to the new release once it comes out.
According to WordPress Development site, the following 3 items are in scope for the WordPress 3.2 upgrade:
- PHP 5.2 (5.2.4, specifically) to be required.
- MySQL 5 to be required. This quite literally involves no work beyond changing the requirements.
- IE6 EOL for the admin.
While there is no real affect on the WordPress Blogger for the day-to-day operations you face as a blogger, it will require that your hosting company do work.
Currently most hosting companies are not on PHP 5.2 – this is the language that WordPress 3.2 is written in. You may have heard of COBOL, or FORTRAN, or Visual BASIC – WordPress is written in PHP. As of this writing, the most recent (stable) release of PHP is 5.3.6, however, many hosting companies are still using a lower version. If you use my hosting partner, HostGator, they are already in place for this change as they are running 5.2.4. Excellent!
The next requirement is for MySQL 5 to be required. This is a program that WordPress uses to store all your “stuff” (posts, comments, settings, etc.) in a database. The most current release is 5.5.11. Again, if you are already on HostGator, you have v 5.1.52 and are already in place!
The last main change to affect Bloggers with the release of WordPress 3.2 coming out at the end of June is that Internet Explorer v6 will experience its EOL (that’s, End Of Life). You will no longer be able to access your Dashboard with IE v6. Again, good news is that most people are already using version 7 or 8. Better yet… close Internet Explorer forever and use another browser like FireFox or Opera 🙂
I hope this short little update helps you. If you have any questions, feel free to ask – WordPress 3.2 will be here before you know it!
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