4 New and Exciting Features in WordPress 3.3

I’m a big WordPress fan and here at XLD Studios we use WordPress for all projects where it is appropriate (which is a lot). Of course I am excited to play around with new versions of WordPress to see if they manage to improve the experience and take more steps towards a more robust CMS.

So, today I wanted to share a few of the new really cool things that have been added to WordPress 3.3 that is coming out soon.

 

Interface Tweaks

Added in WordPress 3.3 is a bunch of smaller, but powerful interface tweaks. The admin bar has lost its gradient which I think is a nice tweak. It has also been cleaned up and offers in general a bit more value in both the site view and in the dashboard. It’s just nice.

What’s perhaps the best interface tweak from a productivity standpoint is the fly-up menus. When you hover over a collapsed sidebar menu, you get a menu right away. Instead of having to click and expand the menu (keeping it there), you can quickly access sub-menu items that you may only want once and don’t want to expand the menu permanently for. Brilliant time saver.

Additionally, the main dashboard theme and layout is being changed to an adaptive one that means it will be more usable on small devices and screen resolutions as its layout will change depending on device, both in terms of functionality and design.

 

Drag-And-Drop File Upload

The media uploader has been pretty much the same through many WordPress versions now and I’m happy that they have decided to give it some love because frankly, it is one of the few parts of the post creation process that isn’t too well liked by many of our clients.

Once again it is a time saver thing. Instead of having to select files from a browser upload window, you can simply drag-and-drop them into an area on the screen and WordPress will upload them right away. Neat and effective.

Another benefit to the uploading process is better handling of scaling images as they have integrated Plupload into WordPress for the uploading process overall, which is what brings you all sorts of goodies.

 

Pointers To Help You Get Around

One of the most helpful new features as a theme designer and developer is to see a new pointers feature. This gives developers the ability to guide users around a theme (or WordPress itself) the first time you activate the theme. It is very exciting to think what we are able to do for new clients by integrating a walkthrough at their own pace right in WordPress.

It is probably even more helpful when looking at themes that are being released where users can be given a quick walkthrough when activating, saving the developer some support questions about usage.

Performance Enhancements

As with every new version, there are a bunch of performance enhancements to help WordPress run faster. This is as usual very much appreciated as a CMS unfortunately does load much lower than pure HTML equivalents (nothing weird about that). Every bit of enhancement that can be made towards better performance is a welcome one.

Conclusion

It is good to see that the WordPress developers are implementing some really useful features into this release. In fact, I can’t wait to be able to roll the new WordPress version out on several of our clients’ pages as well as implement the new admin pointers for new themes to help users get to learn how to use it.

Currently there is no scheduled date for when WordPress 3.3 is coming out, but my guess is that we will see it in a couple of months as it is currently still in nightly build versions, changing pretty rapidly.

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