The latest and greatest version of the WordPress software — 3.3, named “Sonny” in honor of the great jazz saxophonist Sonny Stitt — is immediately available for download or update inside your WordPress dashboard. We’ll be covering lots of the new features of 3.3 this week, but for now, go and great the latest version! As we’ve mentioned before, it’s the best way to keep your WordPress site safe and stable.
WordPress 3.3: It’s here!
The final release of WordPress 3.3 brings lots of goodies just in time for the holiday season. Not too long ago we had a sneak peek at the Beta 2 release, so some of what’s in the final release will be familiar, and some we haven’t covered yet. Let’s take a look at what new features there are to discover and what things have been fixed up.
Here are some of the big highlights you’ll find in WordPress 3.3:
- New media uploader
- Improvements to the dashboard
- User experience improvements
- Improvements to content-related tools
- Under the hood improvements
- Tell me more!
New media uploader
This version introduces a new media and file uploader with drag and drop uploading! That’s pretty exciting, and makes life a lot easier if you’re having to upload a lot of files. As we’ve come to expect from a lot of fun new things, the drag and drop uploading won’t work on older versions of Internet Explorer (but you’re not using Internet Explorer anyway, right?).
The new uploader also combines the various upload buttons that were there before into a single upload button, and has built-in file type detection. Support for uploading .rar and .7z files has been added too.
Improvements to the dashboard
There are some really nice improvements to WordPress’ dashboard in version 3.3. Where we used to have a strange mix of the admin bar and the admin header, they’ve 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.
Ever been annoyed at having to click multiple times to get from one screen to another in the admin? Well you shouldn’t have to worry about that much anymore, as the menus in admin now fly out when you hover over them, allowing you to get to most screens in a single click!
User experience improvements
As if we hadn’t had enough user experience improvements on the dashboard already, there’s more! These improvements are mainly based around making the whole installation and update procedures much friendlier.
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.
We also have a screen that will be shown to users after an update is run with a brief summary of what’s new and improved in the updated version of WordPress, and a welcome screen for brand new users just logging into their freshly installed WordPress (those lucky people don’t even know what delights await them!).
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.
For people who have content on Tumblr that they’d like to move across to WordPress, there’s now an importer for that. The process of migrating your hosted Tumblr blog to a self-hosted WordPress install just got a lot less painful.
Speaking of less painful, if you’ve been trying a few different themes on your site and then gone to look at your collecting of widgets to find a mess, this new version should improve that for you too. Widgets are saved when switching between themes, and if you want to quickly try a new theme and decide to switch straight back, all your widgets will be as you originally had them. Magical!
Under the hood improvements
For as long as WordPress has been around, if you had a large number of pages / posts and were using /%postname%/ as your permalink structure, you were suffering a pretty big performance hit. When users accessed your pages, and when you published or edited your pages, there was a bit of waiting to do. The problem only got worse the more content you had. Luckily, the WordPress team have sorted this issue out, and there are now “massive performance gains” to be had with this update if you’re using that structure.
A number of new and improved APIs have had some TLC too, including the Editor API, the Screen API for adding help tabs and adapting to different screen contexts, and the Metadata API.
A few of the external libraries and extras used in WordPress have been updated to more recent versions, including jQuery upgraded from 1.6.1 to 1.7.1, jQuery UI upgraded from partial 1.8.12 to the complete 1.8.16 (including widgets and effects), and TinyMCE upgraded to 3.4.5.
WordPress will now clean up after itself when theme and plugin files are uploaded to be installed. The files uploaded will be deleted from WordPress’ file structure once the install is complete.
Another thing that theme developers will appreciate is that you are now able to use wp_enqueue_script() and wp_enqueue_style() within the HTML body. This means that if you have some specific functionality in a page template in your theme, you can include any scripts or styles right there, and they’ll be added in the theme’s footer.
Tell me more!
Well we could rave all day about the awesome work the WordPress core development team and the rest of the contributors have put into our favourite content management system! For now though, we’ll point you to the details on the WordPress 3.3 “Sonny” release post (make sure you watch the intro video too!) and the WordPress Development Updates blog. Those two links will give you all the nitty gritty details about what’s changed, how you should use the new bits, and (if you’re a developer) how you should fix the bits that might be messing with your theme or plugin.
So, now you’re up to speed, go download WordPress 3.3 from the website or via update from your WordPress admin. Once you’ve had a play around, come back and tell us what you think.
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By Japh Thomson
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WordPress is just awesomw
@brandon in addition to posts about this new 3.3 upgrade (which I hope will be many) – please consider adding an area which is grossly under-serviced on the web, namely: posts explaining the use (and modification) of aspects of the Twentyeleven theme. ie – when developing your own blog, is it really “best” practice to create a “child” theme (requiring loading BOTH the parent and the child at run time) or in these days of bloated code is it better to modify the Twentyeleven into your own theme which only loads what is necessary without all the redirects etc.?
Also, a good explanation of the rubber-on-the-road use of the standard “posts-types” of the Twentyeleven is nearly absent on the web.
Frankly, I wish you could convince Chris Coyier to do an article on how he developed his new theme: COMPLETE responsive design (wide and small), multiple post types, hot-links, threaded comments, pagination, code upload and snippets, video, CSS3 effects … . Man, I wish I had a clue how he did it all!
Thanks for the ideas DJ – And yes, Chris’s new theme is pretty awesome… you forgot to mention how ridiculously well he handles the semantics of the theme classes and elements. I’m pretty sure he has a wizard wand that he waves at the screen though… maybe something to ask for over the holidays
Where is this new theme of Chris’? I wanna see!
There were also changes to the Admin bar API among other things. Core developer Andrew Nacin posted a useful roundup of important changes:
http://nacin.com/2011/12/07/wordpress-3-3-field-guide-for-developers/
Thanks Steven!
Great one, Steven! Thanks for posting the link
long live WordPress…
Japh,
WordPress is my best friend, so your nice description of what’s new was a hit. And, I can’t imagine trying to do this without your fine screen shots – the next best thing to a video actually pointing out the changes. I am going to give it a day or two to find out if all my plugins make it before I take the plunge. Thanks again for the tips! –Sally
Hi Sally, I’m glad you liked the article! We have a video walkthrough of all the new features planned for later in the week, so keep an eye out for it.
Good plugin developers should be testing their plugins on WordPress’ source code even before official release, so you might be ok to go now. As always though, make a backup first, just in case
This version of wordpress really rocks… Nice article .
Well, I have several plugins I can delete now – whoohoo! Love the updates.
I’m in love with how the new WordPress is working! I’m always using the nightly version so I can always keep up to date, regardless if I’m live or not because I always have the desire to be surprised, and it never fails to notice how much better WordPress gets! 3.3 is definitely the best update out of all.
Good post guys!
I don’t know why it does what it does… But the new WordPress is bullshit! The styles from the WP Dashboard brakes randomly and I don’t know anymore how to fix it! Also if I log out, I have to try many times to get back in! I’ve tried everything! I spent over 20 hours to figure out what is the problem, but it seems that the problem is WordPress itself. I’ll return to the previous version! If anyone got the same problems that I do, please send me a message!
Sorry to hear you’re having troubles, Daniel. Do you still have those problems even with all your plugins disabled?
If so, hopefully someone can help you find a solution over on the WordPress Support Forum.
I particularly like the Responsive Design of it, and how it will work better with tablets and mobile devices. They have added a ton of functionality that I was using plug-ins for like built-in jQuery! I’m excited about this new version!
well nice updates are there, i like the 3 major upadate, Now 3.3 is the third major update which the company has added to bring new experiences including uploading, imports, navigation and others.
http://www.techiecop.com/technologynews/download-wordpress-3-3-sonny.html
The new media player is amazing. Great work WordPress
Absolutely thrilled about this update.
More friendly/consistent user interface, improved performance for optimized url structure…
The WP community is doing some great stuff here!
Great overview of the new and improved WordPress!
等待繁體中文版
One issue I’ve found with the new admin bar, is that since it has a fixed position. It covers up the first few lines of php errors. Has anyone found a way to deal with this other than disabling the admin bar all together?
Good point, Jason! Perhaps someone needs to write a SUPER-simple plugin to add a bit of padding to the top if there are error messages and WP_DEBUG is enabled or something, just enough that they’re visible.
Nice features. Need to test it with some themes. The new media uploader look promising.
Much awaited version of WordPress and cool new features too! Happy blogging.
The backend seems to be much faster and easier to navigate once you get used to the layout. I must say though, the permalink improvement was really needed and the WordPress team really came through with this release.
It was really unexpected that they pushed through the RC’s and got the final out so fast after testing.
Great introduction to wordpress 3.3 new features. Hoping to get maximum out of new features. thanks for sharing
For that permalink stuffs, much has been said and aired. But, I’m not sure if they are yet to edit or update, their page still warns against the usage of %postname% as the desired structure followed by %category% and other custom permalinks.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks
Hi Aamit, there are certainly fixes in place, however it could be that the Codex page you’re referring to hasn’t been updated yet, or they simply still recommend a more robust URL structure even despite the fixes. I’ll see if I can find out for you which it is
Hey again Aamit, just to follow-up, Andrew Nacin has now removed the warning to bring that page into line with the most recent update. Nice spotting!
Thankx Japh !!!
I think it was perhaps doc-writers and coders that perhaps went out of a sync for a brief moment (or mybe deliberate). Now I can see the permalink stuffs has been modified according to what the latest release claims to be. And this has to happen only when I settled with %year%/%postname% structure couple of months ago for my blog. Since my blog is fairly new (2-3months), I think I can better do it with 301 redirects. But a welcome improvement indeed !!!
Yeah , this new version is excellent. I love the fly-out menus and the new media uploader.
The timing of this release couldn’t be better. I’m already using it for new website and it’s been great so far.
I Think Bug XSS not Fixed
WP is simply great……Its now becoming as world’s number 1 CMS….
The new media uploader works well and the pop-out menu structure is a time saving improvement. The admin toolbar looks good but takes a bit of getting used to though.
Haven’t really seen the under the hood changes yet but this new version hasn’t broken anything which is a good start!
From a developer perspective, I think we should mainly focus on leveraging the user experience features in our own code. For example I’d like to see a complete write-up on how we can integrate and customize the new feature pointers in themes and plug-ins.
The ‘under the hood’ improvements are actually quite impressive, especially when considering the timeframe the core commiters struggled with the
/%postname%/permalink structure.It’s also worth noting that the
wp_enqueuefunctions are now context-free.As for the API improvements, I presume the new Editor API will challenge us to update all functionality related to rich text editors.