WordPress 3.3 release trends globally

The release of WordPress 3.3, dubbed “Sonny” in honour of renowned Jazz saxophonist Sonny Stitt, has generated so much online buzz that it has become a global trending topic on Twitter.

According to the blogging platform’s founder Matt Mullenweg, “WordPress has had over 65-million downloads since version 3.0 was released”.

He claims that in the newest iteration, his organisation has “added significant polish around the new user experience, navigation, uploading, and imports”.

Among the new features which WordPress claims are aimed specifically at end users are a “drag-and-drop-uploader hover menus for the navigation, the new toolbar, improved co-editing support, and the new Tumblr importer”.

The drag-and-drop media uploader means that you no longer have to upload your media files one by one. Users can, instead, select a number of files of various media folders and drag them into a marked off drop section.

Any user sharing the platform with other people will be particularly familiar with the pink warning strip warning them that somebody else is editing that particular post. According to WordPress, the revisions to the co-editing feature mean that the warning ribbon will only appear if the other person is actively revising the post at that very moment in time.

Mullenweg says Sonny is also friendlier for “people completlely new to the software”, as well as tablet users. The latter is comes in the form of “touch support to ease things along”.

Version 3.3 has significant improvements there with pointer tips for new features included in each update, a friendly welcome message for first-time users, and revamped help tabs throughout the interface. Finally we’ve improved the dashboard experience on the iPad and other tablets with better touch support.

Mullenweg also claims that the updates made with the release of 3.3 contain “a ton of candy for developers”. These reportedly include a “new editor API, new jQuery version, better ways to hook into the help screens, more performant post-slug-only permalinks, and of course the entire list of improvements on the Codex and in Trac.”

The multi-award winning platform is popular not only as a blogging platform, but also as a Content Management System. In fact WordPress is used by 14.7% of Alexa Internet’s “top 1-million” websites. Earlier this year, it released the results of survey it conducted with developers, suggesting that it powers 22% of all new websites in the US.

WordPress was also one of two platforms of choice when Twitter announced that people would be able to embed tweets in their websites.