The last major version of WordPress; WordPress 3.1  was released back in February and the team had already begun planning for  WordPress 3.2 back in March.

It looks like most of those plans are now finally beginning to take shape with the release of WordPress 3.2 Beta 1. WordPress 3.2 will contain several new changes including dropping support for older technologies like PHP4 and MySQL4 among other things. WordPress 3.2 requires PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0 to run.

In addition to that, WordPress 3.2 will also stop supporting Internet Explorer 6. Users browsing the site through IE6 will be shown a message to switch their browsers.

WordPress 3.2 also includes several performance improvements which make it faster than the earlier version. One more new addition that will be liked by users is the inclusion of Distraction-free Writing in the visual editor. Additionally, WordPress 3.2 includes a refresh to the Admin UI and a new default theme called Twenty Eleven. It will also include more links in the admin bar, however, you can always disable or hide the Admin bar in WordPress if you don’t like it.

Overall the changes look pretty decent and should make the next generation of WordPress better than its predecessor. I will be doing a full review of WordPress 3.2 shortly, so stay tuned for it.

Here are some of the major changes that are included in WordPress 3.2:

• Performance improvements like you wouldn’t believe. What’s that mean? Things are faster!
• Distraction-free Writing. The visual editor’s full-screen composing experience has gotten a major overhaul, and is now available from HTML mode, too. More than ever, WordPress allows you to focus on what matters most — your content.
• Admin UI Refresh. The last major redesign of the WordPress admin was in 2008. This isn’t a major redesign, just a little facelift to keep us feeling young. WordPress turns 8 later this month, you know.
• New Default Theme. Introducing Twenty Eleven, based on the popular Duster theme. Rotating header images, post format support, and more.
• Browse Happy. WordPress is made to work with modern browsers. If you visit your Dashboard using an outdated web browser, we’ll let you know there’s a newer version available.
• Admin Bar. We’ve added more links to the admin bar to make it even more useful.
• WordPress has new minimum system requirements: PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0.
• Internet Explorer 6 will no longer be supported.
• The favorites menu has been removed. If you’ve written any plugins that use this menu, it’s time to switch over to an admin bar placement.

You can download WordPress 3.2 Beta 1 from here.

If you have upgraded to WordPress 3.1 recently and are seeing problems with permalinks redirects specially for category pages, you are not alone. There are several people who have reported similar issues and are seeing 500 errors on permalinks and redirects.

There is no straightforward way to fix this issue and it might take a bit of time to figure out what is going wrong. However, some of the core WordPress team members have come up with a plugin that fixes this particular permalink and redirect issues with WordPress 3.1 upgrades.

According to the plugin description, there seems to be a problem with the REQUEST_URI variable being set on certain WordPress 3.1 installations.

This plugin ensures the REQUEST_URI variable is set during the initialization of WordPress, allowing permalinks to work correctly.

So if you are facing the permalink and canonical redirects problem with WordPress 3.1 go ahead and install the Permalink Fix & Disable Canonical Redirects Pack.

(h/t @lorelleonwp)

WordPress 3.1 was released yesterday and it added a lot of new features which make it a very exciting prospect. Most of the new features that were added were under the hood, but there are a few features which can be used by regular users like the new Internal linking feature which allows you to link to your existing posts easily while writing articles.

The Internal Linking feature is available as part of the regular linking workflow, however, in addition to adding a link, WordPress 3.1 also allows you to search for existing posts and link to them.

When you use the link option in the write panel, you will now see an option called "Or link to existing content". Expanding this option will allow you to search and link to existing posts quickly and easily. The feature also allows you to use search terms so that you can narrow down the posts.

One of the good things I saw about internal linking is that it is fast and would definitely increase your productivity if you link to your own posts pretty often.

Have you upgraded to WordPress 3.1 yet? If yes, have you used this feature? Do you find it useful and productive? Do let me know your views through about it.

WordPress is an open community and practically anyone can develop plugins or themes for it. However, there are several shady plugins for WordPress out there which you might as well stay away from.

One such plugin is called BlogPress SEO, which promises users hundreds of backlinks once you install it. However, don’t fall for it, it is a trap and will expose your login information to the developer of the plugin and will allow them to automatically login to your blog.

There are couple of blog posts from Yoast and Mtekk which expose the big problems with this plugin. First of all, this plugin stealthily emails your admin email address to the author of the plugin. The second and bigger problem is that, the plugin has a function which allows the plugin author to bypass the WordPress login.

Yes, you read it right, the plugin first emails your admin email to the author and then allows him to login to your WordPress admin without a password. Scary right.

If you have installed the BlogPress SEO plugin, you have to do two things. First of, deactivate the plugin ASAP. Secondly, change your admin email address. Changing your password will do no good. Thirdly, only install plugins which are available in the WordPress repository as they are safe.

WordPress 2.9 seems to have a bug which is annoying the hell out of people. The problem is occurring with scheduled posts and missed cron jobs. Some users reported that scheduled posts were either missed or posted in the past.

The main reason why this is happen is because of some code introduced at the last minute, which in turn has apparently broken the WordPress cron. This is only affecting a minor percentage of users.

If you are experiencing a problem with scheduled posts or other Cron jobs not running on your blog, you can find the patched files on this page, along with the description of errors. WordPress might release 2.9.1 in a day or two to fix this issue. In the meantime you can use the files from the page above to fix the missed schedule posts and cron jobs issue with WordPress 2.9.

WordPress 2.9 is out, and my inbox is really full, with questions whether WordPress Automatic Upgrade still works, and whether it will allow you to upgrade to WordPress 2.9. As I have answered this question in the past, WPAU hardly relies much on the underlying code in WordPress and mostly works on its own.

So the answer to whether WPAU will work to upgrade WordPress 2.9 is a big YES. I personally upgraded few of my blogs using WPAU, since I prefer it to the inbuilt upgrade.

If you have been using WPAU, you can rest be assured that it will continue working for any future updates in WordPress. I promise to update it, if and when it stops working with any new versions of WordPress.

If you are looking to upgrade the manual way, visit the WordPress Codex entry and follow the instructions to upgrade your blog to WordPress 2.9. Please remember, no matter which option you choose to upgrade to WordPress 2.9, always make sure to make backups of your database and theme files, WITHOUT FAIL.

Asides, I have been monitoring the WordPress forums for any problems with an update to WordPress 2.9 and haven’t seen any major one’s right now. One issue I did see was that you will require to have at-least MySQL 4.1.2. My advice would be to use a web host who supports both PHP 5 and a higher version of MySQL.

Have you upgraded to WordPress 2.9? Did you come across any issues with it? Do let me know through your comments.

WordPress 2.9 the latest version of WordPress has hit the roads, you can download or upgrade to WordPress 2.9 Carmenright away, the new features include a global trash feature, which allows you to store deleted posts in a trash. An inline image editor to edit images and more.

This version of WordPress is named Carmen, who is a Jazz vocalist. WordPress 2.9 also includes a cool new feature to embed videos using oEmbed technology and batch plugin and compatibility checking. For more info on this release, visit the official release post on the WordPress development blog.

Visit our tips and tricks section for WordPress 2.9 for interesting tips in using WordPress 2.9

WordPress 2.9 includes a really good basic image editor which can come in very handy. The image editor allows you to crop images, flip images and rotate them with ease.

To edit images in WordPress, click on the Edit Imagebutton when the image is uploaded. Once you do that a new Image editor will be displayed.

To select an area to crop, just click your mouse on the image and drag it as required, click on the scissor image to crop. You can also rotate and flip the image using the available buttons. Another interesting and useful function is the ability to undo or redo your changes.

The image editor allows you to apply the change to all the image sizes or just the image thumbnail.

Just like trash feature for posts, WordPress 2.9 also includes a trash feature for comments too. It works in a similar way to posts. In WordPress 2.9 you can trash and restore comments, by default the comments are stored in trash for 30 days, however you can always update this.

Trash Comments in WordPress 2.9

In WordPress 2.9, the delete functionality has been replaced by Trash, clicking on the Trash link will move the comment status to Trash, and store it for 30 days or as long as you have set it up to.

Undo Trash Comments in WordPress 2.9

Another interesting feature in WordPress 2.9 is the ability to quickly Undo your Trash action, similar to what you can see in Gmail.

Browsing Trash Comments in WordPress 2.9

To browse trashed comments, just click on the Trash link in the Edit comments page.

Restore Deleted Comments in WordPress 2.9

Restoring Trash Comments in WordPress 2.9 is pretty easy, just visit the Trash comments and click on the Restore link to restore it back. Bulk actions are also available for restore.

Disabling / Limiting Trash Comments in WordPress 2.9

Trash feature is an excellent addition to WordPress, however, if you want to disable the trash feature or limit the number of days deleted comments are stored in Trash, you can do it by adding a small constant.

This is similar to how you would limit post, you can read about it in our earlier post: Disabling or Limiting Trash feature for posts. One thing to note is that, both the posts and comments use the same constant, so you cannot disable it for one and expect it to be working for the other.

If you decide to disable trash feature, it will be disabled for both post and comments.

The WordPress team has just released WordPress 2.9 Beta 2. You can download and test the latest version of WordPress right away.

The new beta includes several fixes which can be seen here. Do not use this on your production blog as there may still be bugs in it.

Download WordPress 2.9 Beta 2 (direct link)