Wordpress 3.3 Review

When we reviewed WordPress 3.2 there were a few nice additions in how the WordPress team tried to clean up the back end to make it more simple to edit pages and posts. In the process we did have a couple clients calling frantically trying to find where their past revisions went (so perhaps their efforts to hide more things wasn't a 100% great idea). Here are some of the improvements you'll find in WordPress 3.3

Menus

The improvement in menus is a leap, literately. The sidebar menus now leap out when you hover over them so you can get to where you want to go in the back end without having to make so many clicks. The top admin menu is also now consistent whether you are viewing the visitor view of your website or the back end admin area of the site.

Uploads

Borrowing from YouTube, WordPress now has the ability to use 'drag and drop' to upload videos. You just click the single upload button, and drag and drop the files you want to upload.  WordPress will auto detect what type of file you're uploading and then help you insert the file into your page or post.

Feels Like the first time

A nice feature for new users: WordPress has a new welcome screen explaining its new features, with popups on the backend to show you what the different icons and features do. You can dismiss each popup individually. Very nice for new users. Kind of a pain for users with more than one WordPress website.

Better SEO out of the box

We used to configure each WordPress site to have nice permalinks where the title of the post was used for the page url without any extra data. This is now the default behavior with each new WordPress install.