12 January 2012 | WordPress

What’s new in WordPress 3.3

After five months of hard work, WordPress 3.3 is finally there.
Let see what’s new in WordPress 3.3.

Dashboard Design

First notable change is a redesigned dashboard:

Flyout Menus

Speed up navigating the dashboard and reduce repetitive clicking with the new flyout submenus. Hover over the menu items and the submenus will appear, providing single-click access to any task, such as going to the page overview or create a new blog post.

admin flyouts
Flyout Menus

Header + Admin Bar = Toolbar

The admin bar and the old Dashboard header are now combined into one toolbar. Hovering over the toolbar items will reveal submenus when available for quick access.

toolbar
toolbar

Responsive Design

Certain dashboard screens have been updated work better at various sizes, including improved iPad/tablet support. When reducing the screen size, features such as the side menu automatically collapse.

New Feature Pointers

When new features are added, navigation’s are moved, or anything else that need some focus with an update, there will be new feature pointers explaining the change.

new feature pointer
New Feature Pointers

Easier Uploading

File Type Detection

Instead of needing to click on a specific upload icon based on your file type, now there’s just one. Once your file is uploaded, the appropriate fields will be displayed for entering information based on the file type.

media icon
One click add various media

Drag-and-Drop Media Uploader

Super easy adding photos or other files to posts and pages. Drag files from your desktop and drop them into the uploader. Add one file at a time, or many at once.

drag and drop uploaded
Drag-and-Drop Media Uploader

More File Formats

Added formats for upload are the rar and 7z file formats.

Content Tools

Better Co-Editing

No more time lag with co-editing activity. You’ll only get the editing alert if another person is still on the editing screen.

coediting
Better Co-Editing

Tumblr Importer

WordPress can now import content directly from Tumblr. Tumblog posts can be converted to a matching WordPress post format.

More changes under the Hood

  • new dashboard welcome screen for fresh installations
  • more flexible and faster permalinks
  • less funky (garbled) post slugs
  • new WP_Screen API for working with admin panels
  • now includes the entire jQuery UI stack and the latest version of jQuery: 1.7.1.
  • new is_main_query() which will tell you’re in the main WordPress query or in a secondary query
  • new editor API automatically pulls in all the JS and CSS goodness for the editor