The focus for this release was making WordPress faster and lighter. The first thing you’ll notice when you log in to 3.2 is a refreshed dashboard design that tightens the typography, design, and code behind the admin. If you’re starting a new blog, you’ll also appreciate the fully HTML5 new Twenty Eleven theme, fulfilling our plan to replace the default theme every year. Start writing your first post in our redesigned post editor and venture to the full-screen button in the editing toolbar to enter the new distraction-free writing or zen mode, my personal favorite feature of the release. All of the widgets, menus, buttons, and interface elements fade away to allow you to compose and edit your thoughts in a completely clean environment conducive to writing, but when your mouse strays to the top of the screen your most-used shortcuts are right there where you need them.

Under the hood there have been a number of improvements, not the least of which is the streamlining enabled by our previously announced plan of retiring support for PHP4, older versions of MySQL, and legacy browsers like IE6, which allows us to take advantage of more features enabled by new technologies. The admin bar has a few more shortcuts to your most commonly-used actions. On the comment moderation screen, the new approve & reply feature speeds up your conversation management. You’ll notice in your first update after 3.2 that we’ll only be updating the files that have changed with each new release instead of every file in your WordPress installation, which makes updates significantly faster on all hosting platforms. There are also some fun new theme features shown off by Twenty Eleven, like the ability to have multiple rotating header images to highlight all of your favorite photos.

This new version looks amazing so far. The only problem I found was a message after I updated saying that I was running an old version of explorer (Image above). Quite strange, since I’m using the last version of Internet Explorer.

You can update in your dashboard, on the “updates” tab, or download the latest WordPress site.

Expect new updates of Patagonia, Tandil and Director in 2011!

Enjoy 2011!

WordPress 3.0.3 fixes issues in the remote publishing interface, which under certain circumstances allowed Author- and Contributor-level users to improperly edit, publish, or delete posts. According to Peter Westwood from WordPress team, these issues only affect sites that have remote publishing enabled.

The feature called “Remote Publishing” is disabled by default. Some users have it enabled to use a remote publishing client such as one of the WordPress mobile apps. You can check these settings on the “Settings → Writing” screen.

Download 3.0.3 or update automatically from your WP “Dashboard → Updates” screen in your site’s admin area.

To get featured on the site, they recommend that bloggers use food-related tags like food, recipes, baking or drinks, so that their posts are easier to find for the site’s editor. So if you’re a food blogger and writer, be sure to use related tags on your posts. The bloggers currently post “thousands of mouth-watering recipes and food stories every day.”

Chances are that this won’t remain WordPress.com’s only attempt at establishing destination sites for different verticals. It’s easy to imagine similar sites that aggregate the best travel blogs on WordPress.com, for example. Assuming FoodPress is a success and an overall traffic driver, they expect that other niche content aggregators or “presses” will be launched later.

If FoodPress becomes popular, it could not only bring more traffic to WordPress.com blogs, but also provide some SEO advantage to the sites that are listed there. It will also incentivate their bloggers to keep updating their blogs with fresh content.

I used “cjcfat50″ for a $10 discount on an order above $50. Here are the codes:

cjcfat10 – 10% off (exp 10/31/10)
cjcfat20h – 20% off shared hosting (exp 10/31/10)
cjcfat30 – $5 off $30 (exp 10/31/10)
cjcfat50 – $10 off $50 (exp 10/31/10)
cjcfat75 – 15% off $75 (exp 10/31/10)
cjc749fat – $7.49 .com (exp 10/31/10)
cjcfat199 – $1.99 /mo hosting -3 mo (exp 10/31/10)

Enjoy!

The old Windows Live’s native blogging platform, Windows Live Spaces, will be deprecated. Current blogs hosted on Windows Live will be migrated to the WordPress platform. However, users will have about six months to migrate their blog over to the WordPress platform, before they close the system definitely. All old Windows Spaces URLs will be moved to the new blogs.

Automattic CEO Toni Schneider said: “Windows Spaces users can pack up all their stuff and migrate their blogs over to WordPress, and keep blogging on WordPress.com.”

Schneider also added: “8.5 percent of all sites on the Web are already powered by WordPress, adding up to about 26 million currently active blogs and 250 million visitors each month.” (Windows Live Spaces, by comparison, has about 30 million customers)

“As we looked at customers blogging needs and what different companies were providing, we were particularly interested in what WordPress.com is doing,” said Dharmesh Mehta. “They have a host of impressive capabilities, from a scalable platform and leading spam protection, to great personalisation and customisation. WordPress powers over 8.5 per cent of the Web, is used on over 26 million sites and is seen by over 250 million people every month.”

If you are using any WordPress plugin that connects with Twitter, you should update to the latest version that supports OAuth. Otherwise the plugins are not going to work. I personally use “Twitter Tools” plugin on my client’s Blogs and in some of my sites and I updated to version 2.4 for full compatibility with OAuth. You need to register each of your sites using this plugin in Twitter. (see picture above). The great news is that you can use your site’s name where it says: “about 10 minutes ago via WpThemesPlanet in reply to WordPress”. Instead of “BlackBerry” or “TweetDeck” You can see your own site’s name.

With this new feature, you still individually approve each application before using it, and you can revoke access at any time. To see which applications you have authorized or to revoke access, just go to the Connections section under Settings.

In order for Twitter applications to access your account, developers have been able to choose one of two authentication methods: Basic Authentication or OAuth. Both require your permission, but there is an important difference. With Basic Auth, you provide your username and password for the app to access Twitter, and the application has to store and send this information over the Internet each time you use the app. With OAuth, this isn’t the case. Instead, you approve an application to access Twitter, and the application doesn’t store your password.

Besides Twitter WordPress plugins, many other apps, including Echofon, TweetDeck, Twitterrific, Seesmic, and Twitter for Android, iPhone, and BlackBerry, are already using OAuth. The same feature explained above, applies for all these other applications.