WordPress 3.3 - See the new features!

Wordpress update released

The latest and greatest version of the WordPress software — 3.3, named “Sonny” in honor of the great jazz saxophonist Sonny Stitt — is available for download or update inside your WordPress dashboard.

WordPress has had over 65 million downloads since version 3.0 was released, and in this third major iteration we’ve added significant polish around the new user experience, navigation, uploading, and imports.

Features include:

  • New media uploader
  • Improvements to the dashboard
  • User experience improvements
  • Improvements to content-related tools
  • Under the hood improvements

New media uploader

This version introduces a new media and file uploader with drag and drop uploading, this makes life a lot easier if you’re having to upload a lot of files.

Improvements to the dashboard

The mix of the admin bar and the admin header, have been combined into a single admin toolbar. Of course, now that there’s just the single toolbar, the option to turn the admin bar off has been removed.

More and more people are wanting to manage their WordPress-based sites from their iPad or other tablet or touch devices, and there’s now better support for these. This includes better handling of touch, as well as a few responsive enhancements to ensure everything scales nicely on the smaller screens these devices have.

User experience improvements

There are now feature pointers which provide tips around the various WordPress admin screens when there are new features added. These help highlight what’s changed in the new version and give an idea of what the new feature does.

Improvements to content-related tools

If you run a WordPress site with multiple authors, co-editing could sometimes be painful with WordPress locking a post to a particular author and leaving it locked for too long. No more! In 3.3 this has been improved and content locks are now released immediately for a smoother co-editing experience.

Under the hood improvements

Wordpress now has performance gains, plus several new and improved APIs and external libraries have been updated to more recent versions. WordPress will now clean up after itself when theme and plugin files are uploaded to be installed.

For a full list of features in Wordpress 3.3 click here

Information posted by Giraffe Design: Friday 13th December 2011