I saw the wpdevel announcement in my email this morning and also in the news block in the Administration Panels of the sites I check every morning.; and, as per my usual routine, I jumped right into upgrading to this latest nightly version.

Here is an excerpt from the official post on dot-org announcing this release:

It seems like just yesterday that we released WordPress 3.1, but it’s actually been almost three months. We’ve spent that time putting together a new release focused on performance improvements, and are ready for our first beta testers!

As always, this is software still in development and we don’t recommend that you run it on a production site — set up a test site just to play with the new version. If you break it (find a bug), please report it, and if you’re a developer, try to help us fix it.

One of the big items in WordPress 3.2 is the “fullscreen” editor for writing posts and pages … and I have to admit that I was not really expecting to make use of it, but as I write this post as a trial-run I am quite impressed! Kudos to the developers on this new feature. It may take some getting used to but I think it has a great deal of potential.

If you would like to update your WordPress self-hosted web site to the latest nightly build and help out with the testing, or simply just have some fun with the new features, please take a moment to read the article I wrote here for reference.

To make this specific to this latest version you will have to make a small modification to the the process, it’s very simple:

  1. Open the /wp-includes/version.php file in core to edit.*
  2. Change (~ line 25) $wp_version = '3.2-alpha';
  3. Go to your Administration Panel of your WordPress installation.
  4. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the “stay updated” link in the bottom-right corner. (Refresh the page if the link is not there.)

Enjoy!

To see the Nota Bene click here.Nota Bene
* This is one of the very few and extremely rare instances where I would ever suggest editing a core WordPress file. I do not recommend this for anyone that is not familiar with how to make a correct back-up of their installation; and, how to re-install WordPress if the world falls in on their heads.