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With support for long-outdated technologies being dropped, they promise this will be the fastest and lightest WordPress in quite some time.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

For a while I’ve been wanting to improve the bug (and enhancements) tracking for my WordPress plugins. Right now I rely noting down my ideas and any suggestions that people have made and looking at that whenever I’m working on a plugin.

Now, though, I’ve installed MantisBT – a free PHP based bug tracking system. I’ve installed it on domain, configured it up and I’m in the process of adding content – my Simple Social Bookmarks is the guinea pig.

Anyone can view it, but I wanted tighter integration with this site. Plugins exist to do this but they rely on using a SOAP interface – my host doesn’t have this installed, so I can’t use it. Instead I’ve written my own code that directly accesses the MySQL database – and very well it works too. On the bottom of the plugin pages on this site are two new sections – Known Bugs and Planned Enhancements. Under each are listed any entries from the MantisBT database relevant to that category, as well as a link to the roadmap.

Before you go looking for this, it isn’t yet visible, as it’s part of the site revamp that I’m working on.

Right now, I don’t intend to release this as a plugin, but if there’s enough interest I may do.

The website planetOzh has an excellent post about blog posts that attract spam.

In it, he provides not only a piece of SQL that you can run to see how your site is affected, but even provided a PHP script that you can upload to your website to graph the results. Mine is to the right. I have my spam cleared out quite regularly, so the results are only recent ones.

As you can see, one of my posts was generating nearly 47% of all the spam. This is usually due to keywords within the article – the fact that it’s about a forum is possible a key. The second place “magnet” is a my review of  a Microsoft keyboard. I have no idea why, maybe because of it being Microsoft related.

I’ve resolved the first post by simply closing off comments (it was an old post and I think everything that needs to be said has been). The review, well, I’m not sure what to do there. I want to keep comments open on reviews. Others are mainly WordPress pages, which I need comments available for feedback and support. However, the fact that the plugins are related to PayPal, Facebook, AdSense, etc, I’m sure is no coincidence, and probably help to attract the spam.

So, not a huge amount I can do (having said that, I’ve reduced my potential spam input by 47% – assuming they don’t just target another one of my posts!), but interesting to know none-the-less.

Having said that, I’ve never really thought about closing comments on posts before and it’s something I will do in future – especially when I announce new or changed plugins, as comments can be placed on the main page itself.

Update: A WordPress plugin has been released of the code to produce the spam charts.