MadeGlobal.com

We’ve been playing some more with WordPress 3.3 and it is great. On the whole we would have to say that the changes made since WordPress 3.2 are evolutionary rather than revolutionary – it just seems to have a subtly faster to use admin interface, and no doubt many changes and bug fixes will prevent “strange” things happening.

The initial change you’ll see after an upgrade is the “tours” functionality which brings up little popup windows to talk you through the changes. As experienced wordpress users, we’ve found these a little distracting, but for the general public these are undoubtedly useful as they highlight features you might not notice otherwise.

The best change we’ve seen is, in the words of WordPress “Flexible Permalinks”.

You have more freedom when choosing a post permalink structure. Skip the date information or add a category slug without a performance penalty.

Why is that useful? Because now it doesn’t matter which “pretty permalinks” are used. They’ll all work nicely. And from our experience, all your old permalinks will still work too. Phew!

From a user interface point of view, it is nice that WordPress have now included the latest jQuery, something we’ve been overriding in our themes for years, and also that the entire jQuery UI stack is now included. That means that we won’t be working with the strange subset of UI that was there before. Nice.

WordPress also mention that they have completed an “Editor API Overhaul”. We need to see more about what this really means but from the WordPress site:

The new editor API automatically pulls in all the JS and CSS goodness for the editor. It even supports multiple editors on the same page.

Multiple editors on the same page …. hmmm … that opens up a lot of possibility!