We’re excited to hear that WordPress 3.3 “Sonny” (in honor of the great jazz saxophonist Sonny Stitt) is now available to the world, both as an update in your dashboard and a download on WordPress.org. WordPress has had over 65 million downloads since version 3.0 was released, and in this third major iteration significant polish has been made around the new user experience, navigation, uploading, and imports.
Important theme updates
After ever major release of WordPress we test and update all of our WordPress themes to make sure they work perfectly. Check the themes changelog in the wiki to see if you need to update your theme.
Features at a glance
What’s new in WordPress 3.3 you ask? Well we’ll had a good poke around and have detailed some of the new features below.
Flyout menus
In WordPress version 3.2 it used to be that the sub navigation would only appear when the menu was collapsed, but this is one of the changes in “Sonny”, we now have flyout menus.
Admin bar revamped
The new admin bar is a lot more responsive than the previous iteration, having a hover state on the top level links. It has been rearranged, making it a lot easier to find things. It’s worth noting that the menu bar is now fixed in its positioning. The option to disable the admin bar in the previous iteration has been removed.
New media uploader
WordPress 3.3 now features a super cool drag-and-drop media uploader. Simply drag the files you wish to upload from your desktop onto the new uploader and voila!
Permalink and performance issue
You have seen sites all across the web referencing to SEO Friendly URL structure in WordPress. Mostly those articles either refer to simple %postname% or /%category%/%postname%/. The fact is that up until 3.2.1, these permalink rules could cause serious performance issues if your site has a lot of pages. In WordPress 3.3, the core team decided to add Post name as one of the suggested permalink option and has fixed this problem – huzzah!
