WordPress 3.1 was downloaded over 15 million times in less than 5 months. But time marches on, and so does the music. Yesterday,WordPress 3.2, also known as “Gershwin”, was released to the public, and in just 24 hours, the latest iteration of the website and blogging platform has been downloaded over 330,000 times. They grow up pretty quickly these days.

Why are so many people downloading the latest iteration? According to Matt Mullenweg and company, the goal for WordPress 3.2 was “lighter and faster”, meaning that Gershwin makes a play at removing extra code, rewriting certain queries for speed optimization, etc.

User interface has also seen a little bit of tweaking in the new version, as you can see from the comparison between versions 3.1 (left) and 3.2 below:

Another cool feature of v3.2 is what WordPress is calling “Distraction Free Writing” (DFW), which replaces “Full Screen” mode, with a new mode that has the dashboard fade into the background while the user writes to offer a less cluttered viewing experience. The team has also been referring to this as “zen mode”, and apparently users are feeling the power of the zen