WordPress 3.2 plans begin to take shape

Mark Jaquith, a lead developer for Wordpress, recently posted on a WordPress developer's blog the plans for WordPress 3.2.  Below are some of the changes and features Jaquith says will be on this new version of WordPress that caught my eye. My personal comments gave been added to the side.

  • Faster release cycle than 3.1 - Project development the past few years must have been like molasses the past few years, because projects like WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, and Mozilla Firefox are all promising quicker release cycles this year. They did appear to have their IE6 > IE7 "Sputnik" moment in 2010, didn't they?
  • Faster and Lighter - Old code and outdated technologies are being dropped from WordPress. This move isn't just to improve performance but also also to improve the writing experience. You can expect some user experience changes here too with emphasis on "distraction free writing".
  • List Tables API improvements - Finalize the API for third party use and more flexibility.
  • PHP 5.2 (5.2.4, specifically) to be required - Unbelievable, I hadn't realized that WordPress hadn't dropped PHP 4 before this release. A number of open source projects already made the commitment from PHP 4 to PHP 5 a couple years ago. Oddly WordPress is "dropping the the old, not adding the new". Why wouldn't you embrace PHP 5 all the way?
  • MySQL 5 to be required.- Relax on this one. I have yet to see a MySQL 5 upgrade requirement gone bad.
  • Upgrade improvements - Changed-files-only upgrades can be done with zero changes to core.