I recently came across John O’Nolan, a UK based core member of WordPress specialising in the UI, because of a plugin that he’s released, named UI Labs. This offers experimental WordPress admin UI features and is a great way for John to try out and get feedback for his ideas. I have it installed and am already benefiting from coloured tabs on my post and page screens, easily indicating the post types.

If you’re a WP developer I’d recommend following his Twitter feed.

Available on SlideShare are a couple of excellent presentations of his – again, if you’re “into” WordPress, these are excellent (and non-techie).

The first is titled “Designing WordPress” and was given at Heart & Sole 2011. Heart & Sole is a UK event in which professionals working in Web design and development get together to to interact, share experiences and learn together.

And there’s a matching video of the presentation, courtesy of Vimeo…

The second (and most recent) presentation is titled “Taking Control of WordPress: How to Build a Better Blog” and was given at TBU 11, another UK event but this time for travel bloggers.

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With support for long-outdated technologies being dropped, they promise this will be the fastest and lightest WordPress in quite some time.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

Today I’ve released minor updates for 3 WordPress plugins – Flu Pandemic Level, Simple Twitter Data and Simple URL Shortener.

This is to fix a bug in the file fetching routine which may cause it to fail for some users.