Update Your Site to WordPress 3.3 ‘Sonny’

Hello WordPress 3.3! The legendary Content Management System (CMS) — or blogging platform for us mortals — has been given a slick update, code-named ‘Sonny’ after the late jazz saxophonist Sonny Stitt.

WordPress 3.3 is now available us an automatic update through your WordPress dashboard, or as a separate download from the official WordPress site. Acunetix recommends that you keep updated with all the latest versions of your WordPress installation as well as the plugins you use. So, let’s explore what’s new in WordPress 3.3:

WordPress 3.3 For Users

The following release details were extracted from the Official WordPress Codex.

Highlights

• Easier Uploading
  • File Type Detection – A single upload button.
  • Drag-and-Drop Media Uploader
• Dashboard Design
  • New Toolbar in the dashboard, combining the Admin Bar and admin header
  • Responsive design for some screens, including iPad/tablet support
  • Flyout menus, providing single-click access to any screen
• New User Experience
  • New feature pointers, helping users navigate new features
  • Post-update About screen
  • Dashboard welcome area for new installs
• Content Tools
  • Better co-editing that releases post locks immediately
  • Tumblr Importer
  • Don’t lose widgets when switching themes
• Under the Hood improvements
  • Use the postname permalink structure without a performance penalty
  • Improved Editor API
  • is_main_query() function and WP_Query method
  • Remove a number of funky characters from post slugs
  • jQuery 1.7.1 and jQuery UI 1.8.16
  • A new Screen API for adding help documentation and adapting to screen contexts
  • Improved metadata API
• Performance improvements and hundreds of bug fixes

User Features

General

• Admin doctype changed to HTML5 (#18202)
• Show admin bar in backend by default (#17899)
• Drag and drop multi-file uploading (except older IE)
• Fix Press This editors
• Switch admin menus to flyouts from dropdowns
• WebMatrix support
• Improve cron locking; avoid multiple cron processes looping over the same events
• Add pointers feature, and pointer to admin bar
• Introduce help tabs and WP_Screen
• Style tweaks to the update nag

Dashboard

• Ensure text in the dashboard recent comments widget wraps up properly

Posts

• When inserting a Gallery to be ordered by Date/Time use the post_date field for ordering rather than ID
• Rename ‘Post Tags’ to ‘Tags’
• Make DFW content width match exactly the reported width from the theme
• Improve the image drag-resize detection in the visual editor (supported in FF and IE only), remove the size-* class if the image is soft-resized
• Add TinyMCE command to handle opening of the upload/insert popup, fix the shortcut “Alt+Shift+M”, fix the “image” button in DFW
• Allow Apostrophes in Post Passwords
• Add post formats to quick edit and bulk edit
• Hide post title field in DFW if title is not supported by the current post type or missing
• Clean up remnants from having negative Post_ID

Media

• Merge media buttons into one
• Add the styling for “drop area” to Media->Add New
• Add support for rar and 7z file uploading

Links

Comments

• Use WP_Editor when editing or replying to comments
• Use ‘View Post’ instead of ‘#’ for view post links in comment rows

Appearance

• Use the Settings fields/sections API in Twenty Eleven
• Load all Parent theme stylesheets before Child theme stylesheets in the TinyMCE Editor
• Clean up Plugin/Theme uploads after successfully installing them
• Improved Theme upload and validation
• Avoid losing widgets when switching themes
• Make Distraction Free Writing content width match exactly the reported width from the theme
• Allow current_theme_supports() to be used to check for specific post formats
• Improved Menus
• Contextual help for Twenty Eleven theme options page

Plugins

• Improved Plugin upload and validation
• Stop remembering the last viewed plugins screen; always show all plugins when returning to plugins.php

Tools

• Add the Tumblr importer to the Importers List
• Add wxr_export_skip_postmeta filter for skipping postmeta in exports

Users

• Removed user option to disable Toolbar (admin-bar in 3.2) in the Dashboard

Settings

• Add postname to Settings > Permalinks and remove the help text talking about permalink performance; make the slugs (and /archives/ rewrite base) translatable
• Clarify Settings > Privacy
• Use title case in Settings > General
• Disallow indexing wp-admin and wp-includes in robots.txt

Install Process

Multisite

• Allow creating sites with IDN domains
• Move network/settings.php POST handling out of network/edit.php
• Dissolve wp-admin/network/edit.php
• Add ‘Network Enable’ link after installing a theme in the network admin
• Use update_blog_details() in wpmu_update_blogs_date()
• Change Network Settings to just Settings
• Implement bulk update for network/themes.php
• Fix inviting existing users to a site with email confirmation
• Check for plugin/theme updates every hour when hitting update-core.php, not just themes.php/plugins.php

Update to WordPress 3.3 Today

Apart from some really neat usability enhancements, make sure to update your WordPress installation to ensure your website or blog is no longer vulnerable to any known WordPress security issues. To really ensure that your site and visitors are safe, register to the 14-day Acunetix Trial, and identify any vulnerabilities that might be lurking in your WordPress installation.

THE AUTHOR

Acunetix

Acunetix developers and tech agents regularly contribute to the blog. All the Acunetix developers come with years of experience in the web security sphere.