Time to Upgrade: Welcome to WordPress 3.3 “Sonny”

It’s late here in the UK but I couldn’t drag my carcass to bed without letting you all know that WordPress 3.3 has dropped which means it’s time for you to put your upgrade hats on, get out your FTP program, flex your clicking finger, and turn your WordPress into 3.3.

WordPress 3.3 has been named after saxophonist Sonny Stitt. Check out the video from wp.org:(Sonny Stitt is a pretty good choice but I’m still holding out for a WordPress version named after cosmic-jazz-lord Sun Ra. Since it’s unlikely, here’s his version of Pink Elephants on Parade which is one of my favorite things on YouTube:

(never thought I’d get that into a blog post ;) )

ANYWAY, you’re probably couldn’t care less about which jazz musician WordPress is named after (did you know, though, that BuddyPress is named after pizza shops? I learned that off Paul Gibbs last week I did. That’s a good piece of trivia for you). You’re interested in the new features.

Okay, I guess I can tell you what they are:

• New tooltips for newbies (with lots of potential for plugin and theme devs to take advantage of)
• Drag and drop uploader
• Hover fly-out menus for navigation
• Improved toolbar (previously the admin bar)
• Tumblr importer (yes plz!)
• Improved co-editing support
• Revamped help tabs
• Improved dashboard experience for iPad users
• New editor API
• New jQuery version
• Improved performace on post-name only permalinks (yay!)

You can check out the improvements in detail on the WordPress Codex. And no doubt we’ll be posting about them over the next few weeks.

We’re all excited! Thanks to all of the WordPress crew who put together our favorite piece of open source software.

I don’t know why you’re still here. I thought I would have lost you at upgrade, and definitely by the time I got to subjecting you to Sun Ra. Go upgrade! I’m going to bed now….

Tags:

• releases
• updates