The new and improved edition of WordPress will be version 3.3 which is due for official release in November and it contains some exciting new features and improvements.
Admin Menu bar
This improved version has had some re-arranged items and it also contains new menu items such as the WordPress logo in the top left corner. When you hover over it, reveals some useful links such as an “About WordPress” and also links to the WordPress site, documentation, and support forum.
In the older version the menu bar has be changed such as the dashbord and appearance which are now combined together now in the new one and labeled it as bearing your site's name.
Modified and Improved Menu Sidebar
The menus on the sidebar have also changed and most if not all of the menu changes are actually only CSS3 implementations. For instance in previous versions the sidebar menu items utilized a click-to-expand format.Now each component within the sidebar menu contains a neat fly-out menu which appears when hovering over it with the mouse. This was something you would see in previous WordPress versions when the sidebar menu was in the collapsed state but now it is also part of the main menu state.
The fly-out menus greatly reducHaving said that the old functionality still applies. That is, you can still expand menu items vertically when clicking on them. See the picture below to see examples of both formats.e the number of clicks a user needs to make in order to locate an item and they also improve screen real-estate. For instance someone might have 30 plugins installed and each plugin might have its own settings menu in the side-bar.
The new version has been improved with the latest view of the sidebar and it is easily navigable
Beautiful Display Enhancements For Admin Page
Continuing from the above point, another neat feature resulting from the changes made to the admin side-bar menu is that it is now more responsive and adaptable to screen size changes.
The side-bar menu will automatically collapse if required – such as when you re-size the browser window to a small size. This greatly maximizes screen real-estate and also makes navigation easier. (see the example image)
The latest version has been improved with the display effects and it can be viewed in the other devises like mobiles and tablets
Improved Help Menu
The help menu has also changed and as a result screen real-estate has also been maximized. Previously when you clicked “Help” from the admin panel you got a wall of text which was not very well organized and helpful.
The improved help menu appears in an economically sized section at the top of your screen and the items are well positioned into tabs which are easy to read and navigate.
This is also great news for developers because this functionality is fully customizable. For instance developers can create their own help menu using these cool tabs to display helpful information regarding a plugin.
Permalink Improvements
The permalink menu has been slightly changed and now the “postname” permalink structure also appears as a standard selectable option.
In previous versions of WordPress the postname permalink method was considered a custom structure. It also never really worked very well because this structure bloated the database for cases when there was a large number of posts or pages. As a consequence it also had a negative effect on performance. In WordPress 3.3 this has been resolved and has resulted in improved performance
New look of Multi-Media Uploader Enhancement
The multi-media uploader facility has been greatly enhanced in 3.3.
For instance the uploader now features a drag-drop capability where you can select an image or other multi-media file from your desktop using your mouse and then drag and drop it into the uploader box instead of using the “Select Files” button and then navigating to the file.
This new feature utilises HTML5 Silverlight but the uploader can also still use Flash depending on whatever is available.
In addition, the four media icons in the edit post/page have now all been combined into one which greatly reduces confusion.
Good Performance
As mentioned earlier, previously there were performance penalties which people paid when using a custom permalink structure such as the postname permalink due to the sheer number of redirects and requests to the database.
This version of WordPress has greatly improved in its performance due to the internal changes in the way pretty permalinks are now implemented.
