WordPress 3.4 Beta 1 Released

This morning it was announced that the WordPress 3.4 Beta 1 was released.

If you are a web developer who develops custom themes and/or plugins, you should be watching the next release as there are changes very relevant to your work.

Here’s some of what’s new:

• Theme Customizer with Previewer
• Flexible Custom Header Sizes
• Selecting Custom Header and Background Images from Media Library
• Better experience searching for and choosing a theme

And some of the under-the-hood changes:

• New XML-RPC API for external and mobile applications
• New API for registering theme support for custom headers and backgrounds
• Performance improvements to WP_Query by splitting the query (Please test!)
• Internationalization improvements (improved performance and locale support)
• Performance and API improvements when working with lists of installed themes
• Support for installing child themes from the WordPress Themes Directory

You can download the WordPress 3.4 Beta 1 here.

Tags: API, plugins, Themes, WordPress, WP_Query

How to speed up your WordPress Blog

I finally got around to speeding up my WordPress blog and wanted to share with everyone the various things I did.  I reduced my average page load time on certain pages from 15 seconds to about 1.5 seconds.  That’s a big change.

My favorite test was a quick click through.  On my new host I timed 6 page loads down to about 5 seconds.  When I did the same test on my old setup, it took about 20 seconds (I know, below the 15 seconds average, that was really only for 1 page, but one of my most trafficked pages).

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Tags: apache, Blog, CSS, deflate, hosting, plugins, Speed, tweak, web host, web hosting, WordPress, wordpress hosting, WP-SuperCache