WordPress 3.3 is Leaner and Meaner

A new leaner and meaner version of WordPress  has recently been released and is available for download/upgrade.  WordPress 3.3 “Sonny”, named in honor of the great jazz saxophonist, Sonny Stitt, sports some new drag & drop media management functionality as well as some great administration updates that streamlines the tasks admins work with all the time. 

The WordPress CMS has had over 65 million downloads since version 3.0 was released, and this third major iteration is predominantly around streamlining the administration user experience.  According to a recent WordPress release posted by [tooltip content=”A born and raised Houstonian and a founding developer of WordPress.” url=”” ]Matt Mullenweg[/tooltip]:

[quote]We’ve added significant polish around the new user experience, navigation, uploading, and imports. [/quote]

Check out this short video that summarizes the new WordPress 3.3:

Thinking about updating to 3.3? Wait just one second.

Before upgrading to the latest version, there’s a few things you should know.

• Being the first to update is dangerous as open source things are never fully fleshed out prior to early release.
• Version 3.3 has new ‘hooks’ which may break poorly written themes or plugins designed for older versions.
• This upgrade will overwrite some of the core WordPress files as well as some core database settings.  You can’t “undo” upgrades like this if anything goes wrong.

For all those reasons (and a few more), JDM recommends setting up a subdomain with a duplicate install (totally separate) of WordPress.  You can uses a plugin like BackupBuddy to migrate the site to the new subdomain and new SQL database.  Then, on this testing subdomain, upgrade to WordPress 3.3.

If everything works fine, simply delete the testing version and upgrade your live website with confidence.  If anything breaks, seek professional help and breath a sigh of relief you didn’t break your live site.

If you have to seek professional help, I may take a little time to sort the problem out.  In the meantime, if that yellow bar at the top of the admin saying “WordPress 3.3 is available! Please update now.” is bothering you, here’s how to hide that update nag.