WordPress have given some initial details of the plans for WordPress 3.2.

Rather than adding lots of new features, this release is going to concentrate on speed improvements and restricting the WordPress minimum requirements (this will allow existing code to be removed and will make adding code in future easier).

The requirements changing are…

• PHP 5.2.4 required – WordPress will simply be dropping support for PHP 4 (i.e. there won’t be very many new PHP 5 features added)
• MySQL 5 Required – like above, WordPress will simply be dropping support for MySQL 4
• Internet Explorer 6 – no more fancy IE6-only hacks. WordPress will be officially discontinuing support for IE6 and instead providing a “use a real browser” nag screen (something this site already has installed)

With support for long-outdated technologies being dropped, they promise this will be the fastest and lightest WordPress in quite some time. To this end they will also be focussing on speed improvements all around, including (but certainly not limited to) the Dashboard and admin menu.

Two further announced changes are…

• New Fullscreen Editor -  a new fullscreen editor that’s “more beautiful, more useful, and simpler.”
• Better Upgrades – only changed files will be upgraded in future. Yay!

WordPress have also promised faster release cycles in future (concentrating on what’s promised and not adding further changes later on).

Certainly, I’m excited by this

I’m proud to announce that version 1.5 of my WordPress plugin YouTube Embed has been released.

Like 1.4, it’s a choc-full update…

• The post editor now has YouTube button, which inserts the YouTube shortcode (this can be switched off in the options screen)
• I’ve added a new option to disable keyboard controls
• I’ve also added an option to supply a video ratio, in case height or width are not supplied – the missing parameter will then be calculated using this ratio. If you don’t supply a ratio then it’s calculated using your default height and width.
• You can now add  a download link (for video and playlist) using a function call or shortcode
• On the options screen you can specify which set of parameters the demonstration video uses (i.e. “normal” or EmbedPlus). This allows you to try your options on a different video type without switching to it.

The next release is probably going to be version 2, with a LOT of new options and a complete re-write of the documentation and major changes to the code.

Full details are on the plugin’s dedicated page.

My WordPress plugin WP Plugin Cache has been updated to fix a couple of bugs.

If you use this plugin already, please update to 1.2 as soon as you can.

All details are on the dedicated page.