From the WordPress site-

On December 12, 2011, WordPress Version 3.3, named for Sonny Stitts, will be released to the public. For more information on this major release, read the WordPress Blog.

For Version 3.3, the database version (db_version in wp_options) changed to 19470, and the Trac revision was 19592.

Highlights

• Easier Uploading
  • File Type Detection – A single upload button.
  • Drag-and-Drop Media Uploader
• Dashboard Design
  • New Toolbar in the dashboard, combining the Admin Bar and admin header
  • Responsive design for some screens, including iPad/tablet support
  • Flyout menus, providing single-click access to any screen
• New User Experience
  • New feature pointers, helping users navigate new features
  • Post-update About screen
  • Dashboard welcome area for new installs
• Content Tools
  • Better co-editing that releases post locks immediately
  • Tumblr Importer
  • Don’t lose widgets when switching themes
• Under the Hood improvements
  • Use the postname permalink structure without a performance penalty
  • Improved Editor API
  • is_main_query() function and WP_Query method
  • Remove a number of funky characters from post slugs
  • jQuery 1.7.1 and jQuery UI 1.8.16
  • A new Screen API for adding help documentation and adapting to screen contexts
  • Improved metadata API
• Performance improvements and hundreds of bug fixes

User Features

General

• Admin doctype changed to HTML5 (#18202)
• Show admin bar in backend by default (#17899)
• Drag and drop multi-file uploading (except older IE)
• Fix Press This editors
• Switch admin menus to flyouts from dropdowns
• WebMatrix support
• Improve cron locking; avoid multiple cron processes looping over the same events
• Add pointers feature, and pointer to admin bar
• Introduce help tabs and WP_Screen
• Style tweaks to the update nag

Dashboard

• Ensure text in the dashboard recent comments widget wraps up properly

Posts

• When inserting a Gallery to be ordered by Date/Time use the post_date field for ordering rather than ID
• Rename ‘Post Tags’ to ‘Tags’
• Make DFW (Distraction-Free Writing) content width match exactly the reported width from the theme
• Improve the image drag-resize detection in the visual editor (supported in FF and IE only), remove the size-* class if the image is soft-resized
• Add TinyMCE command to handle opening of the upload/insert popup, fix the shortcut “Alt+Shift+M”, fix the “image” button in DFW
• Allow Apostrophes in Post Passwords
• Add post formats to quick edit and bulk edit
• Hide post title field in DFW if title is not supported by the current post type or missing
• Clean up remnants from having negative Post_ID

Media

• Merge media buttons into one
• Add the styling for “drop area” to Media->Add New
• Add support for rar and 7z file uploading

Links

Comments

• Use WP_Editor when editing or replying to comments
• Use ‘View Post’ instead of ‘#’ for view post links in comment rows

Appearance

• Use the Settings fields/sections API in Twenty Eleven
• Load all Parent theme stylesheets before Child theme stylesheets in the TinyMCE Editor
• Clean up Plugin/Theme uploads after successfully installing them
• Improved Theme upload and validation
• Avoid losing widgets when switching themes
• Make Distraction Free Writing content width match exactly the reported width from the theme
• Allow current_theme_supports() to be used to check for specific post formats
• Improved Menus
• Contextual help for Twenty Eleven theme options page

Plugins

• Improved Plugin upload and validation
• Stop remembering the last viewed plugins screen; always show all plugins when returning to plugins.php

Tools

• Add the Tumblr importer to the Importers List
• Add wxr_export_skip_postmeta filter for skipping postmeta in exports

Users

• Removed user option to disable Toolbar (admin-bar in 3.2) in the Dashboard

Settings

• Add postname to Settings > Permalinks and remove the help text talking about permalink performance; make the slugs (and /archives/ rewrite base) translatable
• Clarify Settings > Privacy
• Use title case in Settings > General
• Disallow indexing wp-admin and wp-includes in robots.txt

Install Process

Multisite

• Allow creating sites with IDN domains
• Move network/settings.php POST handling out of network/edit.php
• Dissolve wp-admin/network/edit.php
• Add ‘Network Enable’ link after installing a theme in the network admin
• Use update_blog_details() in wpmu_update_blogs_date()
• Change Network Settings to just Settings
• Implement bulk update for network/themes.php
• Fix inviting existing users to a site with email confirmation
• Check for plugin/theme updates every hour when hitting update-core.php, not just themes.php/plugins.php

Development, Themes, Plugins

• Abstract word-trimming from wp_trim_excerpt() into wp_trim_words()
• Add wp_unique_post_slug filter
• Add _doing_it_wrong() when a plugin or theme accesses $wp_scripts or $wp_styles too early (also fixes localization)
• Add a filter to is_multi_author()
• Add a general filter to wp_unique_post_slug to allow for full customisation of the uniqueness functionality
• Add filter for the args into wp_dropdown_pages() in the page attributes box; give the list_pages filter the context of the post object
• Add filter so the users can select custom image sizes added by themes and plugin
• Add filters for install/upgrade queries, so that unit tests installer can force creating InnoDB tables, so that we can use transactions to revert the database to its initial state after each test
• Add inflation support for java.util.zip.Deflater in WP_Http_Encoding::compatible_gzinflate()
• Add magic get/set/isset methods to WP_User to avoid data duplication; standardize on WP_User::ID
• Add pre_ent2ncr filter
• add_site_option should not update existing options, should return a boolean and should only run actions on success
• Allow get_blog_option(null,…) to hit the cache for the current blog; new return values for add_blog_option, update_blog_option, delete_blog_option; don’t set the cache in those functions if add/update/delete_option failed
• Allow ‘id’ to work in get_bookmarks(); add link_notes even though such sorting is a bad idea
• Allow sorting by id in get_bookmarks()
• Allow the text parameter in wp_trim_excerpt() to be omitted altogether, instead of requiring a blank string
• Automatically set ‘compare’ => ‘IN’ in WP_Meta_Query::get_sql() when the meta value is an array
• Change month dropdown display in date pickers to include month number
• Completely remove wp_add_script_data()
• Consolidate update count code into wp_get_update_data()
• Count only published posts when updating term counts; fire term count updates on transition_post_status
• Deprecate favorite_actions(), add_contextual_help(), add_screen_option(), move meta_box_prefs() and get_screen_icon() in WP_Screen
• Deprecate get_userdatabylogin() and get_user_by_email()
• Deprecate media_upload_(image|audio|video|file)(), type_url_form_(image|audio|video|file)(); these now wrap wp_media_upload_handler() and wp_media_insert_url_form()
• Deprecate RSS 0.92 feed and 301 it to the default feed
• Deprecate screen_options(), screen_layout(), screen_meta()
• Deprecate wpmu_admin_redirect_add_updated_param() and wpmu_admin_do_redirect()
• Eliminate verbose rewrite rules for ambiguous rewrite structures, resulting in massive performance gains
• Fix back compat issues with delete_postmeta and deleted_postmeta actions as these should be passed the meta ID
• Fix QTags.closeAllTags(), replace ‘tb’ with ‘ed’ in quicktags,js to make it clear it is the editor instance not the toolbar, small comments quick edit fixes
• Fix typos in documentation
• Fix wp_update_user() so it doesn’t stomp meta fields
• Force display_errors to off when WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY == false; technically a backwards incompatible change so if you want the passthrough to php.ini (which false used to provide) then use WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY === null
• Harden up is_user_logged_in() against empty $current_user instances to prevent PHP Notices on XML-RPC requests
• Have dbDelta() loop through tables it knows about, rather than loop through a potentially expensive and definitely unnecessary SHOW TABLES
• Improve _wp_menu_output()
• Improve the parsing of email addresses in wp_mail to re-support RFC2822 nameless “<address@…>” style
• Instantiate some MS variables as objects before using them
• Introduce ->mysql to allow drop-ins to declare themselves as MySQL and therefore allow minimum version checks to still apply
• Introduce is_main_query() that compares the query object against $wp_the_query
• Introduce metadata_exists(), WP_User::get_data_by(), WP_User::get(), WP_User::has_prop(). Don’t fill user objects with meta
• Introduce new hooks, registered_post_type for register_post_type, and registered_taxonomy for register_taxonomy
• Introduce register_meta(), get_metadata_by_mid(), and *_post_meta capabilities
• Introduce wp_allowed_protocols() for use in wp_kses() and esc_url()
• Introduce wp_cache_incr() and wp_cache_decr()
• Introduce WP_Dependencies::get_data() method, change scripts and styles priority to follow the “natural” order in HTML, i.e. the last one wins
• Introduce wp_get_db_schema() for retrieving various flavors of db schema; eliminates need to use global; allows multiple calls to wpmu_create_blog()
• Introduce wp_suspend_cache_addition() to allow reduced memory usage when cache additions aren’t useful
• Make check_theme_switched() run an action so plugins and themes authors can avoid losing widgets when switching themes
• Optimise get_term to not query for term_id = 0 and improve the prepared query to use %d for the term_id
• Optimize parse_request for the home page
• Performance improvement for wp_list_pluck()
• Properly handle display of Order, Template, and Parent page attributes in Quick/Bulk Edit
• Properly handle nested arrays in wp_list_filter()
• Recognize urls that start with a question mark as relative urls that do not require a scheme to be prepended
• Refactor Quicktags
• Remove return by ref from get_role()
• Remove support for <link rel=start>, end, up, and index. These rel=”" values have been dropped by the HTML Working Group
• Remove the old root feed files, but don’t add these files to old_files to leave them on existing installs
• Require show_ui rather than public for a taxonomy’s parent post type
• Rework get_hidden_meta_boxes() to leverage a full WP_Screen object; prevents custom post types from having their explicitly supported meta boxes being hidden by default
• Set up the post global variable in the comment feed loops so that any calls to post related template tags work correctly
• Store screen help and options as static data against WP_Screen; individual screen objects no longer hold data it can’t re-generate on construction or otherwise fetch; convert_to_screen() now returns a WP_Screen object; various globals are gone; introduces WP_Screen::get_option(); allows for a formal factory to be introduced later
• Support an array or comma-seperated list of excluded category IDs in get_adjacent_post()
• Support for using wp_enqueue_script() and wp_enqueue_style() in the HTML body; all scripts and styles are added in the footer
• Sync pomo library with the current GlotPress version
• Turn delete_meta() , get_post_meta_by_id(), update_meta(), delete_post_meta_by_key() into wrappers around the Metadata API; add back compat *_postmeta actions to Metadata API
• Turn is_blog_user() into a convenience wrapper around get_blogs_of_user(); fixes is_blog_user() for blog prefixes that do not contain a blog ID
• Update blog last_updated time only on publish_post; both private_to_published and publish_phone are overly broad and otherwise redundant
• Update jQuery to 1.7.1
• Update jQuery UI to 1.8.16
• Update Plupload to 1.5.1.1
• Update quicktags.js (HTML editor)
• Update TinyMCE to 3.4.5
• Use add_option() method, introduce add_option_context() method for adding specific text above the screen options
• Use get_template_directory() instead of TEMPLATEPATH in Twentys Ten and Eleven
• Use json_encode() for adding script data (formerly l10n); add the same functionality to WP_Styles for adding inline css after a stylesheet has been outputted
• Use wp_print_scripts() in install.php
• Various PHPdoc updates including: for all_items, menu_name, WP_List_Table::views(), cache.php, get_option(), wpdb::prepare(), get_template_part(), esc_url(), get_meta_sql(), WP_Screen, WP_Http_Encoding::compatible_gzinflate(), zeroise(), wp_add_script_before(), wp_editor()
• WP_Filesystem_*::mkdir() untrailingslash path consistently, don’t waste time attempting to create an “empty” path

Whether you’re in the process of building a new website or redesigning an existing site, it’s vital to build it with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind.

The king of search engines, as everyone knows, is Google, making up over 65.3% of all search traffic (in October 2011).

Google’s goal is simple: to give their users the most relevant, high-quality search engine results as accurately and quickly as possible. So in early-2011 Google introduced an update to their search engine algorithm, dubbed Panda, as part of the company’s continual pursuit of that goal.

For those of you who are unaware, the Google Panda update reportedly affected the rankings of almost 12% of all search results — more than any other update before.

Since then, Google has rolled out several other updates to Panda, dramatically changing how thousands of websites are ranked.

Those that were considered to be high-quality sites saw their rankings improve, while those of supposed low-quality essentially vanished from ranking at the top.

So now, the obvious question is this: How can we make websites that are seen as high-quality in the eyes of Google Panda?

Read the following tips to make sure your site is optimized for Google Panda.

Design for Engagement and User Experience

To put it simply, Googlebot is starting to view websites more and more like humans. Thus the design of a site is going to start playing a much larger role in how it’s ranked more than ever before.

The Panda update is looking closer at several metrics to see how engaging and user-friendly a web page is. Some metrics that help quantify engagement and user experience quality are:

• Amount of time spent on the website
• Bounce rate
• Number of web pages per visit
• Page response times
• Conversion rates

These metrics give you a clue as to how good a website is in keeping visitors engaged. For example, a website with a high number of web pages per visit could mean that the visitor thinks the website is interesting and engaging.

Well-designed sites are typically more visually pleasing, easier to understand and often fare well in the metrics mentioned above than those with poor designs.

Thus, your goal is to craft a website with a great user experience that captivates your audience. In addition, make sure that the website is optimized for speed, as this also affects the user experience and the site’s usability. Remember that usability and SEO go hand in hand.

For tips on improving engagement and the user experience, read the following articles:

• Simple Strategies for Engaging Your Visitors
• Creating a Timeless User Experience
• Increase Your User Activity with Points, Badges and Status
• How Cognitive Biases Shape User Experience
• 10 Usability Tips Based on Research Studies

Spelling and Grammar is Important

This might sound obvious but you will be very surprised at how many websites suffer from poor spelling and/or grammar. Google does evaluate content quality of websites. In fact, Matt Cutts, a highly-regarded individual in the SEO community and member of the Search Quality group at Google, addressed this in a YouTube video.

Cutts said, “We noticed a while ago that, if you look at the PageRank of a page — how reputable we think a particular page or site is — the ability to spell correlates relatively well with that. So, the reputable sites tend to spell better and the sites that are lower PageRank, or very low PageRank, tend not to spell as well.”

Focus on Content Quality

Google likes content. This is not a newfound idea, but it is one that is often neglected. You have to be dedicated to developing high-quality, original content.

Try to become an authority in your industry by writing content that visitors would want to bookmark, share or recommend.

Google specifically states what they look for in a high-quality site by providing you questions to ask yourself. Here are just a few questions they suggest you ask when you produce content:

• Would you trust the information presented in this article?
• Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
• Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?

As you can see, a large emphasis in quality is being placed on the creation of content. This must be at the forefront of any design or website management duties.

For tips on improving content quality and content strategy, check out the following articles:

• Is Web Copy Ruining Your Design?
• Components of High-Quality Blog Posts
• How to Develop Your Website’s Tone of Voice
• Viral Content: Why We Share Some Things and Not Others
• The Importance of Web Content Strategy

Avoid Too Many Ads

Again, this goes back to designing with humans in mind. Having too many advertisements can make Google think the site exists just to serve ads rather than provide authoritative information.

Avoid Duplicate Content

Avoid having the same content being displayed on any pages. Each web page should have their own unique content specifically tied to what that page is about.

A web page should also have its own unique meta description and meta title attributes. For more information on this topic, read 5 Common SEO Mistakes with Web Page Titles.

Less is More

Over time, if a website is not regularly tended to, it can begin to have hundreds of pages that, many times, even the website manager is unaware of.

Google states that having a lot of poor quality pages on your site can bring down your rankings, even if you have plenty of high quality pages.

In these cases, it is best to consolidate to create a cleaner experience for the end user.

Ensure High-Quality Code

It is important to run your website through code quality assurance processes. Good markup hints that the quality of the website is also good. At the simplest level, you can just use the W3C Markup Validation Service to ensure your HTML complies with W3C standards.

D2 Web Designs is now administering a new DeviantArt social group specializing in just Web Designs and Administrative Backend Designs.

The goal of this group is to help other web developers and web designers create stunning, functional and user friendly websites by using this peer group as a litmus test of sorts for their designs.

Feedback, communication and critisizm about their designs will ultimately make everyone of them a better designer.

Everyone is welcome to join the group to view the content, but only approved designers can submit art to our galleries for review.

You can see the galleries here: http://justwebdesigns.deviantart.com

WordPress is evolving quite faster than ever, and every update gets all excited (especially those who make a living on it). WordPress has released it’s 3.3, Beta 2 version just 2 days ago for testing. This update is focused on more improvements, refining and making things faster and better. Today, we’re going to round up what’s coming in the next big version.

It’s worth noting that 3.3 Beta 2 isn’t ready for production environments yet. For those of you who would like to wait before a stable version is released, this post is just a list of what to expect from this version:

Performance Improvements

There are several subtle changes made in the admin area. Most of these changes would be more helpful for users with slower internet connections. The menus are more responsive and change to icon only mode when the width of your browser window is reduced. This is a good direction to go forward and I could only hope that when a stable version or in future version we could have optimized layouts for different screens & devices.

Improved Admin Bar

I personally never was a fan of the admin menu, but have to admit it does save few clicks. The menus have been re-arranged, and the major addition is the WordPress logo with a drop down menu with links to version, credits and other WordPress resources.

Admin Pointers

This is something new and exciting.  Admin pointers are small boxes that are displayed when user selects a menu/link. These small boxes contain information about new features. This feature can definitely be used by developers to highlight and give a walkthrough of custom functions developed for their clients.

Fly Out Menus

To access something like Widgets, or sub menus, it took 2 steps. With WordPress 3.3 the sub menus could be access faster thanks to the fly out menus. Though this feature existed butThe arrow on the right next to menus to show the sub menus no longer exists.

A New Media Uploader

This definitely is my favorite feature of this upgrade. The new feature now allows drag and drop uploading. On Post & Pages, the 4 upload/insert icons have been merged into 1. The new uploader uses plupload an open source upload handler from the developers of TinyMCE. Plupload removes the dependency on Flash and allows support for HTML and  Silverlight. With now the ability to easily drag and drop files, WordPress is making our work easier..

Language Packs

Until now if your theme required different language version of WordPress, your only option was to download .po and .mo files for core, themes and plugins separately. From version 3.3 onwards and introduction of Language packs, you would be able to use a plugin to manage .po and .mp files for your WordPress core files, plugins and themes. This plugin will download all necessary language files from WordPress.org to your blog.

Improved API’s for Metadata, Settings & Editor

Among these, the Editor API’s now allow us to have backend editor like settings in the front end. This is very useful when creating custom control panel for the users without giving them access to WordPress admin and only further allows us to use WordPress to be used as development framework.

Permanent Widgets

Ever got into a situation where you lost all your widget setup after change of theme? Well you are not alone. Thanks to WordPress 3.3, all widgets would remain fixed when you change themes.

Permalinks Improvements

Large WordPress website using  %postname% permalink structure might have faced performance issues as WordPress can’t differentiate whether the URL is of a page or a post and it has to generate verbose rewrite rules to solve this problem. In WordPress 3.3, developers are working to avoid triggering the verbose re-write rules.

Some of the other Minor improvements that make using WordPress even better are:

1. Welcome Screen on 1st time install and 1st time post-update. New users would be shown a welcome screen with admin pointers to get them familiar with the dashboard and post update screen will be used to display information on what’s changed.
2. Child Theme Support in Theme Repository and Theme Installer to install child themes in the theme directory.
3. JavaScript changes and improvements. Version 3.3 includes jQuery 1.6.4 and jQuery UI 1.8.16.
4. wp_unique_post_slug() Filter to set your own slug
5. Shortcodes now work in text widgets
6. Options to hide upgrade warning
7. Performance improvement on custom menus to load them faster.

Some of these above features have not been perfectly implemented as of in version 3.3 beta but as based on WordPress Trac, I am certain we would see them in the final stable version of WordPress 3.3

NOTE:
This is a beta version which is still in development and has many bugs to fix. I strongly advise not to use it for live websites. WordPress 3.3 is expected to be released by end of November, however if you do help in reporting bugs, I am sure we can expect an earlier release.

I am very curious to see how “Admin pointers” are used by Theme & plugin developers but my favorite feature definitely is Drag & Drop Uploading. What’s yours?

You can view all 28 of them here: Smashing Magazine

Media Uploader Enhancements

There have been talks of enhancing the media uploader, but it always got pushed back. Finally in version 3.3, we will see an improved uploader. The plans are to integrate Plupload into the dashboard. Plupload is a highly usable upload handler that lets you upload files using HTML5, Gears, Flash, Silverlight, BrowserPlus, and the good’ol normal upload.

Plupload Features

This project is being carried by Jacob Gillespie as part of Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project.

The potential new features that could be added are:

Multiple file transports, starting with HTML5, with a fallback to Flash, then to HTML4
Drag and Drop Uploading
On-the-fly image resizing
Hooks for in-browser image processing (so that a plugin could add pre-upload sepia tone for example)

This should definitely improve the overall user experience of the file uploader. This will also set a good base for future as it will progressively improve based on user’s browser and environment.

There is a good chance that we will see an improvement in our image manipulation and gallery management section. There is a suggestion to get rid of the thickbox and move everything inline, so we will see if that makes it in or not.

New User Experience

When you first setup Gmail or your cPanel Hosting account there is a first time welcome screen that guides the new user with helpful guides. WordPress lacks this much needed feature, and it will be added in WordPress 3.3. The proposal is to have a first time install welcome screen which will have introduction text and checklist of steps to get going; first time post-update welcome screen, and first time exposure popup for new features.

This is definitely good news for beginner users because the dashboard can be overwhelming for first timers.

(P.S. we are always here for WordPress Beginners as well, so don’t forget to follow us on twitter (@wpbeginner) and like our facebook page).
Responsive Admin Interface

Responsive Admin User Interface

We saw a user-interface overhaul in WordPress 3.2, and now the goal is to make it display nicely on devices with various screen size (including wider screens) and human interface mechanisms, such as touch.

Improve Admin Bar

WordPress Admin Bar was introduced in version 3.1. The goal in WordPress 3.3 is to improve the admin user-interface by combining the admin bar (in dashboard) with admin header to reduce duplication and save vertical space.

Performance Improvements

There is a huge deal around highly desirable permalink structures not being scalable. Chris Coyier had some major performance issues with his site and he explains the story on Digging into WordPress blog. Hopefully after the release of WordPress 3.3, you can have the SEO friendly URLs (Permalink structure) without any performance penalty.

A fix will be made related to the issues of special characters in permalinks using an upgrade routine. There are several fixes that will be made to improve performance of WordPress menus.

Language Packs

Provided that a translation exists, you should be able to download a language pack from Glotpress to localize your WordPress website. This would work for plugins, themes, and for the WordPress core. This is going to be derived from the work work of Marko Novakovic in his GSoC project. Here is a screenshot of what it could look like:

Language Packs

Until this comes out, you can always use Native Dashboard Plugin to change the language of your WordPress dashboard.

Child Themes in the Repository

There have been a strong push to use child themes to speed up development and make the codes more secure and optimized. However up until now, it is not possible for developers to host their child themes on the official WordPress repository. Things are likely to change in this area, as one of the most awesome WordPress developers, Otto, take charge and add this feature to the WordPress.org site in version 3.3.

Mixed Bag

There are a lot of updates that are worth mentioning, but don’t fit in a category of its own. So they are listed here:

• When you change a theme, your widgets disappear. Hopefully in WordPress 3.3, we can keep our widgets and make the theme change
• Dismissible admin notices
• Improvements to the Settings and Meta API

We continue to nourish you with a monthly spoon of inspiration. This post features 25 free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for September 2011. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper!