WordPress is evolving quite faster than ever, and every update gets all excited (especially those who make a living on it). WordPress has released it’s 3.3, Beta 2 version just 2 days ago for testing. This update is focused on more improvements, refining and making things faster and better. Today, we’re going to round up what’s coming in the next big version.
It’s worth noting that 3.3 Beta 2 isn’t ready for production environments yet. For those of you who would like to wait before a stable version is released, this post is just a list of what to expect from this version:
Performance Improvements
There are several subtle changes made in the admin area. Most of these changes would be more helpful for users with slower internet connections. The menus are more responsive and change to icon only mode when the width of your browser window is reduced. This is a good direction to go forward and I could only hope that when a stable version or in future version we could have optimized layouts for different screens & devices.
Improved Admin Bar
I personally never was a fan of the admin menu, but have to admit it does save few clicks. The menus have been re-arranged, and the major addition is the WordPress logo with a drop down menu with links to version, credits and other WordPress resources.
Admin Pointers
This is something new and exciting. Admin pointers are small boxes that are displayed when user selects a menu/link. These small boxes contain information about new features. This feature can definitely be used by developers to highlight and give a walkthrough of custom functions developed for their clients.
Fly Out Menus
To access something like Widgets, or sub menus, it took 2 steps. With WordPress 3.3 the sub menus could be access faster thanks to the fly out menus. Though this feature existed butThe arrow on the right next to menus to show the sub menus no longer exists.
A New Media Uploader
This definitely is my favorite feature of this upgrade. The new feature now allows drag and drop uploading. On Post & Pages, the 4 upload/insert icons have been merged into 1. The new uploader uses plupload an open source upload handler from the developers of TinyMCE. Plupload removes the dependency on Flash and allows support for HTML and Silverlight. With now the ability to easily drag and drop files, WordPress is making our work easier..
Language Packs
Until now if your theme required different language version of WordPress, your only option was to download .po and .mo files for core, themes and plugins separately. From version 3.3 onwards and introduction of Language packs, you would be able to use a plugin to manage .po and .mp files for your WordPress core files, plugins and themes. This plugin will download all necessary language files from WordPress.org to your blog.
Improved API’s for Metadata, Settings & Editor
Among these, the Editor API’s now allow us to have backend editor like settings in the front end. This is very useful when creating custom control panel for the users without giving them access to WordPress admin and only further allows us to use WordPress to be used as development framework.
Permanent Widgets
Ever got into a situation where you lost all your widget setup after change of theme? Well you are not alone. Thanks to WordPress 3.3, all widgets would remain fixed when you change themes.
Permalinks Improvements
Large WordPress website using %postname% permalink structure might have faced performance issues as WordPress can’t differentiate whether the URL is of a page or a post and it has to generate verbose rewrite rules to solve this problem. In WordPress 3.3, developers are working to avoid triggering the verbose re-write rules.
Some of the other Minor improvements that make using WordPress even better are:
- Welcome Screen on 1st time install and 1st time post-update. New users would be shown a welcome screen with admin pointers to get them familiar with the dashboard and post update screen will be used to display information on what’s changed.
- Child Theme Support in Theme Repository and Theme Installer to install child themes in the theme directory.
- JavaScript changes and improvements. Version 3.3 includes jQuery 1.6.4 and jQuery UI 1.8.16.
- wp_unique_post_slug() Filter to set your own slug
- Shortcodes now work in text widgets
- Options to hide upgrade warning
- Performance improvement on custom menus to load them faster.
Some of these above features have not been perfectly implemented as of in version 3.3 beta but as based on WordPress Trac, I am certain we would see them in the final stable version of WordPress 3.3
NOTE:
This is a beta version which is still in development and has many bugs to fix. I strongly advise not to use it for live websites. WordPress 3.3 is expected to be released by end of November, however if you do help in reporting bugs, I am sure we can expect an earlier release.
I am very curious to see how “Admin pointers” are used by Theme & plugin developers but my favorite feature definitely is Drag & Drop Uploading. What’s yours?
Enjoyed this Post?
Subscribe to our RSS Feed, Follow us on Twitter or simply recommend us to friends and colleagues!
By Harish Chouhan
Join our newsletter!
Create a Tutorial, Get Paid!
Have something to teach the world? Want to earn money doing it? Tutorials, screencasts, and articles published here on Wptuts+ are largely contributed by readers just like you! We'll pay you great money for good content. Find Out More
Looking forward to the new version of WordPress
My favorite new feature would have to be the permalinks. Unfortunately I have a website that uses %postname% and has many posts and I do not want to change the permalink structure.
I have 60 websites running WordPress, all with %postname% as the permalinks. Is this going to be an issue to upgrade?
The upgrade will fix the permalink issue. The issue is only for pages right now.
Out of these “Permanent Widgets” is seems to be the best update for me
Others are ok.
Did they fix the domain-dependency in the database? Like permalinks being added to the database referring to the current domain, and then if you are developing locally and update your wp site to the server, you have to search and replace the DB dump every single time. Biggest WP drawback IMHO.
Totally agree! Would be sweet with a fix on that
@Caio I agree. If you do get time, you should mention that in WordPress feature suggestion. Maybe the developers could work on in future. Secondly (just a guess) I think the reason for them to not do that way, would be to reduce queries.
will do it. thanks for the post btw.
One thing I would at least like to see is a database backup/search & replace tool that automatically saves a copy of the database with the search & replaced URL’s. I understand the optimization part, which is why I wouldn’t request taking the dependency out, though it’d be nice to be able to change it in the wordpress backend.
Nice update . it’s better waiting for stable release..
@Caio – use BackupBuddy! Invaluable tool that backs-up and restores and changes all references in the database.
Dave
“Shortcodes now work in text widgets”, I’d love to have this implemented over my website. Secondly, fly out menu will manage them all neatly and would save clicks while digging up for options. I’ve also kept my fingers crossed if they have fixed 404 errors produced when clicked over categories (due to custom permalinks) & Plugin update errors.
My favorite? The new media uploader and the flyout menus. I hope they roll out the version soon.
My favorites are the new media uploader and the permanent widgets. Very nice features.
And I’m with @Caio – would love to able to move from dev to production without having to replace permalinks.
My favourite is the new improved api for meta data and settings! Also the drag and drop media uploader is very much 2011.. Looking forward to it.
Thank you for this good post Chawla. It looks WP 3.3 will change somethings. BTW I found a type in Language Packs section: “.po and .mp files”
Oh thanks i really wondering this kind of information..thanks admin
Fantastic new features!
I’m REALLY excited about the Admin Pointers!
Those are going to be a wonderful addition for plugin and theme developer!
Woot! WordPress Rocks!
The new media uploader seems awesome.
Would be nice to see WordPress including some awesome features like a custom post type manager or
a custom field with filed repeater manager.
@Xander from custom post type manager what do you exactly mean?
And yes custom field repeater would really be helpful. I can think of so many situations where I needed it.
Any chance of folders for our uploads?
Can’t wait for the final release! The file uploading function is going to be a blast!
These are some really great features, especially the improved admin bar is not that buggy now (I tested the beta release)
Maybe here would be the place to warn theme and plugin authors – WordPress 3.3 won’t support some zip structures for uploading themes and plugins – it will strictly support only the ones contained within one folder – for example:
theme-name.zip
-theme-name(folder)
–style.css
–index.php
but it won’t support zip structures like this one:
theme-name.zip
-style.css
-index.php
I hope this will be helpful
@Dennis. Thanks buddy. I missed that one. I will try to update the article with that warning once the final stable version is released.
Where can we find information on the new api for meta data and settings?
I’ve been using the farinspace meta data api for some time now and would love to see if wp has caught up yet. So far I can’t find anything in the way of docs on either meta data or the settings api.
*In the future, it would be really handy if when you list new features, that at the very least links are provided where we can read more about the features. Otherwise, nice writeup
I also never took the the admin bar, I always disable it. The new changes might change my mind, we’ll see. Looking forward to the new release however.
Liked the article, latest word press release is quite good and offering some nice features. Would have to explore more about it.
There’s a sweet little feature in the media uploader that site designers/developers are going to love. The option to scale down images when uploading! How many times have you found clients uploading full sized images off their digital cameras, bloating the backups, slowing down performance and just being simply bad practice.
I hope WP gives devs a way to force this on always.
i would love to have something like sidebar/widget for pages. or in other words, the widgets function in the “write a page” site included that i can add features individually to my pages’ sidebar without registering sidebars or with the use of metaboxes…
Expecting more new features in wordpress 3.3.