Yesterday the new 3.3 version of WordPress was released.

Read on for a quick summary of the changes and how they may effect you and / or your website.

Dashboard improvements

New Admin Bar

The Admin Bar was introduced in version 3.1 to give quick access to commonly used menu items, in both the administration area and when a logged in user is viewing the front end of a WordPress web site.

There’s a new version that fixes some sizing problems and changes the placement of of the menu items. It certainly does groups things together for a more condensed and useful menu.

Tool Tips

These will guide users through the core WordPress screens but they are also available to developers to provide more interactive help to users of their plugins and themes. Pictured here they sit on top of the interface to provide detailed help and tutorials.

At TheDMA we’re a keenly developing these new tool tips to be able to provide inline help for our customer web sites.

Admin Menus

The left hand menu has also been updated, featuring fly out menus the new layout aims to be more usable while still keeping all commonly used options easily accessible.

Media uploader

Apple is not the only one giving Flash the flick. The media uploader in WordPress 3.3 says goodbye to the Flash version and replaces it with an HTML 5 tool that features drag and drop of files, instant resizing of images and sort tools to sort the media library by file type.

The removal of flash will also mean better compatibility with mobile devices connecting to the WordPress administration.

Permanent widgets

This feature will certainly be popular with our team. Widgets often hold the content that is displayed in sidebars and footers. Until now they were tied to themes, so when you changed themes you would loose the contents of the widget. Now in 3.3 the widget content stays between theme changes.

Adaptive interface for WordPress Administration

With 3.3 comes an update of the familiar WordPress admin screens to make the interface more effective on a range of devices. This means that the interface will change to suit the device that you’re using to connect. So logging in to your administration screens on a device like an iPhone or iPad, you’ll find that it looks and behaves more consistently.

This is a work in progress, version 3.4 is slated to have a fully responsive interface that will take this concept to completion.

It’s true that there are apps for some devices like iPhone and iPad but not all of the functionality of the desk top version is not available in these apps. Now it should be possible to do everything on an iPad that you can do via a normal computer.

Get updated!

If you’re a customer on TheDMA Maintenance programme your site will be backed up and upgraded to WordPress 3.3 in the coming weeks, if not please contact us to organise an upgrade of your website installation.