Last Monday, WordPress launched its latest iteration—the WordPress 3.3. Dubbed “Sonny” in honor of the saxophonist Sonny Sitt, the third CMS update refines its user experience, navigation, uploading and imports. In fact, the WordPress 3.3 provides better interface for both experienced and new users, while offering tons of feature improvements for the developers.
Here are some of Sonny’s big highlights and improvements.
Dashboard
WordPress 3.3 really made some nice improvements on its dashboard. First, they’ve combined the admin header and admin bar in a single toolbar. Second, Sonny provides a better touch handling and responsive enhancements for touch devices like iPad. In turn, people who would like to manage their WordPress-based sites from their touch devices are guaranteed to have their CMS scaling nicely in their device’s small screen. Lastly, the menus now fly out when you hover over them, making multiple clicks to switch from one admin screen to another unnecessary.
User Experience
New users will definitely love WordPress, as the third iteration provides a welcome screen just for them. Meanwhile, experienced users can see feature pointers that provide tips about new features. Basically, WordPress 3.3 makes the whole installation and update procedures more user-friendly.
Content-related Tools
Running a WordPress site with multiple authors can be daunting for co-editing tasks—but not with WordPress 3.3. The content lock can now be released immediately for a smooth co-editing experience. Additionally, importing your Tumblr blog to a WordPress site is now less painful. Moreover, Sonny allows user to switch from one WordPress theme to another without messing their collection of widgets.
Media Uploader
With WordPress 3.3, users can now upload their files with a single upload button, built-in file type detection, and drag-and-drop features. Moreover, users can now upload .rar and .7z files. However, this feature is not available for older versions of Internet Explorer.
Under the Hood
Under the hood update is something that developers will love. WordPress has sorted out its issue with the /%postname%/ permalink structure. Additionally, Editor API, Screen API and Metadata API have improved with its help tabs and various screen context adaptation. In line with these, WordPress 3.3 also updated its jQuery, jQuery UI, and TinyMCE external libraries. Another thing is that developers can now use wp_enqueue_script() and wp_enqueue_style() within the HTML body, enabling them to include any script or style in a page template.
As WordPress matures, its iterations focus more on refining what already works for users and developers. Content management for business owners is easier with WordPress 3.3.