Sometimes I get a little scared when my co-worker Zac Echola comes to me with news of systems upgrades. I’m afraid I give him that deer in headlights look and insist he speak to me like I was in the 4th grade. (That backfired awhile back when another techy co-worker reminded me of the technical proficiency of most 4th graders.) Anyway, he proceeded to tell me about the upgrade to WordPress 3.2 effective today.

The upgrade brings some technical changes. To see a complete list go to https://codex.wordpress.org/Version_3.2

But let me tell you about the changes that will most affect you.

The new default theme for new users will be called Twenty Eleven. That means if you sign up today for a blog it will automatically start your blog in Twenty Eleven. Prior to today the default was Twenty Ten. Twenty Eleven is very similar to Twenty Ten, but has a few more features for handling different post types, which was a feature that came with the last update. I think Twenty Eleven is a really sharp looking theme. I changed one of my blogs from Twenty Ten to Twenty Eleven just by going into the Dashboard, clicking appearance and selecting Twenty Eleven. Here’s what it looks like on my “Ear Candy” blog (that’s my blog where I celebrate embarrassing music).

Besides the sharper looking Twenty Eleven theme, users will also notice increased speed when loading things in the admin. There’s been a lot of optimization done to make things go faster there.

You’ll want to make sure you have updated browsers to use WordPress 3.2. That’s because support for IE6 will be dropped completely. IE7 users may notice problems in parts of the admin. WordPress and Automattic will be dropping support for IE7 soon.

Anyway, we think you’ll like it. If you experience any problems at all please email support@areavoices.com. You can also email me directly and I’ll forward to support if I’m unable to answer your questions.