Coming In WordPress 3.3

I decided to put WordPress 3.3 on my sandbox and start playing around with the new features to get my take on what is coming in the new WordPress release.  So far my initial impression is that the WordPress admin page appears to be faster and more fluid.

WordPress 3.3 Changes

One of the most notable changes is the default way you access your sub-settings under your various admin settings.  Instead of expanding showing sub-links, by default now when you hover over your master settings a menu appears to the right showing you all options you can select.  This is really fast and responsive and excellent for some area’s, but for settings if you have a lot of plugins installed it can lead to a giant list that you may have a hard time scrolling down to select the items.

When creating posts inserting media is made a little easier and now features the drag and drop capability.

However, I would still prefer you to have the ability to be able to just drag and drop an image right into the post instead of having to click the “insert” media button honestly.

The other thing I noticed was that you can see the month number before the month when scheduling posts.  Though this is a cosmetic change it is a welcome one and helps find the months easier when selecting them.

The top menu bar is also updated giving you quicker access to some of the things you do most often:

Simply hover over Add New and you can add new posts, link, page, user with 1 click.

I found no noticeable changes in the various other sub menu’s when click on each link under settings including Tools, General Settings, Permalinks, Post, Appearance, User Profile…etc.

I did find that the built in image editor when uploading media seemed much faster and responsive than previous versions, but this may just be because of my sandbox having less data too.

So far the changes are minor, but they seem to improve the flow of being able to select items in the dashboard and make it faster to get to some of the add –> new items that you would normally use.

Note, if you select one of the sub-menu’s then the column does expand.  So if you select Settings –> General, you will see the expanded Settings Column after it is selected.

So far I found it to be a little more elegant and you can get access to some area’s with one less click which makes things a bit simpler.

For a full list of Changes in the WordPress 3.3 Beta 2 you can read the WordPress Change Log

-Dragon Blogger