What is New in WordPress Version 3.3

This November, WordPress 3.3 will be released after months of beta testing.  With the new revision come some new improvements that will improve the already great CMS.  Now keep in mind that some of these improvements will help improve the CMS, but others may be considered some minor GUI improvements that may not even be noticed.

Noteworthy Improvements

WordPress Editor API Customization – Now plug-ins can be developed by third parties to improve upon the post editor, including the TinyMCE buttons.

Flyout Menus – Now when you hover over the navigational bar on the left of your administration menu, floating flyout options will appear to make submenu options quicker to access than the dropdown menus.

jQuery 1.7 and jQuery UI 1.8.16 – The full jQuery UI toolset is now available along with the jQuery update.

New Media Uploader – The new HTML5 uploader no longer relies on Flash and makes dragging and dropping media files for upload easier than before.

Improved Help Screen Options – A new, restructured and easier to find help section.  The tabbed navigation and better organization makes finding help less stressful than before.

Admin Bar in Backend – The famous admin bar (now titled toolbar) has been enabled to show in the administrator backend by default.

New Tooltips – Tooltip popup screens will now appear to show users how to use many function of WordPress.  This will come in handy because now third party plug-in developers can use these tooltips to guide users through their own plug-ins.

Minor Improvements

New WordPress Version Info Menu – The new “W” logo at the far left of the admin bar makes for easy retrieval of your current WordPress installation.

Admin Doctype changed to HTML5 – A necessary improvement to keep up with the current technology.

Disallow Indexing wp-admin and wp-includes in robots.txt – This is a good practice and had to be done manually before.

The truth is that this new version does not contain any “game changing” updates that will wow the administrator.  However, if you look at the big picture, you can see a gradual move towards a more dynamic and easy to use WordPress with more customization options for developers.

To view a full list of updates, Click Here.