WordPress 3.3′s new features are as follows:

Easier Uploading

File Type Detection

We’ve streamlined things! Instead of needing to click on a specific upload icon based on your file type, now there’s just one. Once your file is uploaded, the appropriate fields will be displayed for entering information based on the file type.

Drag-and-Drop Media Uploader

Adding photos or other files to posts and pages just got easier. Drag files from your desktop and drop them into the uploader. Add one file at a time, or many at once.

More File Formats

We’ve added the rar and 7z file formats to the list of allowed file types in the uploader.

Dashboard Design

Flyout Menus

Speed up navigating the dashboard and reduce repetitive clicking with our new flyout submenus. As you hover over each main menu item in your dashboard navigation, the submenus will magically appear, providing single-click access to any dashboard screen.

Header + Admin Bar = Toolbar

To save space and increase efficiency, we’ve combined the admin bar and the old Dashboard header into one persistent toolbar. Hovering over the toolbar items will reveal submenus when available for quick access.

Responsive Design

Certain dashboard screens have been updated to look better at various sizes, including improved iPad/tablet support.

Help Tabs

The Help tabs located in the upper corner of the dashboard screens below your name have gotten a facelift. Help content is broken into smaller sections for easier access, with links to relevant documentation and the support forums always visible.

Feels Like the First Time

New Feature Pointers

When we add new features, move navigation, or do anything else with the dashboard that might throw you for a loop when you update your WordPress site, we’ll let you know about it with new feature pointers explaining the change.

Post-update Changelog

This screen! From now on when you update WordPress, you’ll be brought to this screen — also accessible any time from the W logo in the corner of the toolbar — to get an overview of what’s changed.

Dashboard Welcome

The dashboard home screen will have a Welcome area that displays when a new WordPress installation is accessed for the first time, prompting the site owner to complete various setup tasks. Once dismissed, this welcome can be accessed via the dashboard home screen options tab.

Content Tools

Better Co-Editing

Have you ever gone to edit a post after someone else has finished with it, only to get an alert that tells you the other person is still editing the post? From now on, you’ll only get that alert if another person is still on the editing screen — no more time lag.

Tumblr Importer

Want to import content from Tumblr to WordPress? No problem! Go to Tools → Importto get the new Tumblr Importer, which maps your Tumblog posts to the matching WordPress post formats. Tip: Choose a theme designed to display post formats to get the greatest benefit from the importer.

Widget Improvements

Changing themes often requires widget re-configuration based on the number and position of sidebars. Now if you change back to a previous theme, the widgets will automatically go back to how you had them arranged in that theme. Note: if you’ve added new widgets since the switch, you’ll need to rescue them from the Inactive Widgets area.

Under the Hood

Flexible Permalinks

You have more freedom when choosing a post permalink structure. Skip the date information or add a category slug without a performance penalty.

Post Slugs: Less Funky

Funky characters in post titles (e.g. curly quotes from a word processor) will no longer result in garbled post slugs.

jQuery and jQuery UI

WordPress now includes the entire jQuery UI stack and the latest version of jQuery: 1.7.1.

is_main_query()

This handy method will tell you if a WP_Queryobject is the main WordPress query or a secondary query.

WP_Screen API

WordPress has a nice new API for working with admin screens. Create rich screens, add help documentation, adapt to screen contexts, and more.

Editor API Overhaul

The new editor API automatically pulls in all the JS and CSS goodness for the editor. It even supports multiple editors on the same page.

Below is a video which summarizes the items mentioned above:

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The focus of 3.2 is making WordPress faster and lighter thus we have a refreshed dashboard design that seems to fit the bill.  The new admin area feels much more streamlined if but spartan (which is a good thing).

On the backend of things, WordPress 3.2 brings a number of improvements and streamlines the codebase by dropping support for PHP4, older versions of MySQL and legacy browsers like IE6.

For more information, checkout this video:

You can download WordPress 3.2 from WordPress.org or if you’re going to upgrade multiple blogs at once, you may want to use my script for such purpose.

more from the WordPress Blog

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Various security hardening by Alexander Concha.
Taxonomy query hardening by John Lamansky.
Prevent sniffing out user names of non-authors by using canonical redirects. Props Verónica Valeros.
Media security fixes by Richard Lundeen of Microsoft, Jesse Ou of Microsoft, and Microsoft Vulnerability Research.
Improves file upload security on hosts with dangerous security settings.
Cleans up old WordPress import files if the import does not finish.
Introduce “clickjacking” protection in modern browsers on admin and login pages.

To update, simply click the Update Now link on your dashboard or if you need to update multiple wordpress blogs all at once, check out my bash script.

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There’s a slew of new features ( 1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements combined) so make sure to do your back ups before proceeding with the update (it’s a bitch to fix ). If you’re doing updates, you can always use my script to update multiple WordPress blogs at once.

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After over a million downloads of WordPress 2.9 and lots of feedback from all of you, we’re releasing WordPress  2.9.1.  This release addresses a handful of minor issues as well as a rather annoying problem where scheduled posts and pingbacks are not processed correctly due to incompatibilities with some hosts.  If any of these issues affect you, give 2.9.1 a try.  Download 2.9.1 or upgrade automatically from the Tools->Upgrade menu in your blog’s admin area.

Changelog: WordPress 2.9.1
Download: WordPress 2.9.1
Download: Modified files since WordPress 2.9

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If you’ve just logged in to your WordPress-powered blog, you might have already noticed the prompt for version 2.9 AKA Carmen.

Like previous major releases, 2.9 brings a whole lot of bugfixes, features and changes to WordPress. While this does brings users shiny new things, do note that the update that may break your theme and/or plugins so be sure to check the compatibility guide before pressing the button.
So what’s new with Wordrpess 2.9? Here’s a list of Carmen’s highlighted features:

• A built-in image editor for your uploaded media – It’s pretty basic, allowing to just crop, edit, rotate, flip and scale your images. It’s certainly no match for the copy of Photoshop installed on your system but hey, at least it’ll allow you to work on your uploaded images without re-uploading the processed images The screenshot below pretty much shows what the image editor can do.
  
• A trash feature. This acts like the recycle bin that we have on Windows that’ll contain posts, comments, etc that you delete. It replaces the annoying “are you sure” prompts that appears on everything you try to delete. WOrth it? Yep, especially if you’re trigger happy with the delete button.
• Batch plugin update and compatibility checking – This takes wordpress’ built-in plugin updater a step further by allowing you to update up to 10 plugins at once.
  
• Support for post thumbnails – FINALLY! I’ve been hacking themes for as long as I can remember to include thumbnails into posts, either via plugins or via custom fields. Now you can integrate it into your theme with very minor theme editing.If you’ve decided to include WordPress 2.9′s post thumbnails support to your theme, all you need to do is all this line to your functions.php.

  add_theme_support( ‘post-thumbnails’ );
  

  then you simply add this line to where you want the thumbnail to appear on your theme.

  <?php the_post_thumbnail( 'thumbnail' ); ?>
  

  The result?
  

• Optimize/Repair Database – Most of us use a plugin for optimizing and repairing our wordpress database. This is a must for very active blogs to keep performance at break neck speed. To install enable the optimize/repair database feature, all you need to do is edit your wp-config.php.

  define(‘WP_ALLOW_REPAIR’, true);
  

  After activating, you can access this feature by pointing your browser to:

  
  http://www.yoursite.com/wp-admin/maint/repair.php
  

  You’ll be presented with this screen where you can optimize and/or repair your database. Useful no?
  

That’s it? Hardly, there’s quite a lot more to WordPress 2.9 but the items listed above are likely to be the usual features that users will be using. If you want a more visual tour of 2.9, the video below does a nice job of summarizing the new release’s features

If you’re thinking of upgrading multiple wordpress blogs at once, be sure to check out my script for that very same task.

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If left alone, your wp_posts table will be filled up, causing performance issues (imagine selecting through 100,000 records).

While this feature is indeed useful, it does poses some problems later on because WordPress does not allow you to clean your revisions once you’ve made the final version of your post. Everything remains in the database.

To turn off this feature, add this following code to wp-config.php:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);

To delete all previous post revisions, run this query in phpMyAdmin:

DELETE a,b,c
FROM wp_posts a
LEFT JOIN wp_term_relationships b ON (a.ID = b.object_id)
LEFT JOIN wp_postmeta c ON (a.ID = c.post_id)
WHERE a.post_type = 'revision'

Be sure to backup your database first before performing any queries in phpMyAdmin.

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Normally, the way to do this was to proceed individually, hitting the update button (and if it’s how your server is configured) and you entering your FTP information. It’s a chore sometimes especially if you maintain a huge number of blogs. Lucky for us, the good old devs over at wordpress.org is shaping up the Batch Plugin Update feature for WordPress 2.9. It will give the users the option and ability to upgrade/update all of your plugins that have available updates at all the same time.

Here’s a screenshot of the beta version of the Batch Plugin Update:
Pretty useful don’t you think?

Judging from the screenshots, the Batch Plugin Update is still very basic.  All we get is just the option to choose which plugin to update, the current version of the plugin you’re running and it’s newest version.  Pretty lacking (since having the ability to view the changelog is pretty much defacto so you can decide whether to push the update or not. but hey.  It’s still a work in progress) though you have to admit it’s still a nifty add-on to 2.9.

[via: WP Engineer]

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Here’s where the beauty of linux comes in. Shell scripting (or shell programming) is an indespensible tool to automating tasks mundane tasks and it’s the perfect medium to keep your wordpress installations update.

What’s the motivation for this? Well, wordpress is a popular platform which is no wonder that the bad guys are targeting it. Since I’m in charge of running and maintaining several wordpress installations, I thought I’d do something to lessen the load off my back so I decided to clean the dust off my linux shell scripting experience and get down and dirty.

What do I need?

There are several requirements for this method to work so it won’t be for everyone. Hopefully though, I’ve managed to make the code flexible enough to fit the needs of anyone who can use it.

Ok here’s the requirements:

• SSH root access (or equivalent… you can have a non-root account but access to sudo)
• Your wordpress blogs are hosted in a single server (or multiple servers)
• Familiarity with the directory structure of your wordpress installation – you need this because the default structure that the script is based on may not apply to your server.
• Courage to tinker with the terminal.

Where’s the code?

It’s right here. You can copy paste it to your favorite text editor or download the attached file. If you opted to copypasta, be sure that you convert it to unix format (on notepad++ it’s Format > Convert to Unix format) or you’ll end up with ^M errors when executing.

A few important notes however:

• This code assumes that your server configuration hosts your wordpress blogs in the following structure:



• Take note that the script relies on account name = home directory. This shouldn’t be a problem for people using cPanel but for everyone else, take time to explore your server.
• The script doesn’t copy the wp-content folder since (depending on your server config) it may overwrite your current one (and you don’t want that)
• The script cleans after itself. If you’ve configured it right, you don’t have to worry about orphan files floating around.

Now the code:

blog[1]=domainOne
blog[2]=domainTwo
blog[3]=domainThree
blog[4]=domainFour
#blog[5]=blog5
#add another blog by uncommenting the line above
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz -O latest.tar.gz
tar xzf latest.tar.gz
echo "Wordpress has been extracted"
#for loop for your blog[] array
for a in 1 2 3 4
do
echo "Giving ${blog[$a]} an Upgrade"
cp wordpress/* ${blog[$a]}/public_html/

#copy files to wp-admin
echo "Manually copying wp-admin"
cp -Rf wordpress/wp-admin/* ${blog[$a]}/public_html/wp-admin

#copy files to wp-includes
echo "Manually copying wp-includes"
cp -Rf wordpress/wp-includes/* ${blog[$a]}/public_html/wp-includes

#change ownership of files you've just copied
chown ${blog[$a]}:${blog[$a]} ${blog[$a]}/public_html/*
chown -Rf ${blog[$a]}:${blog[$a]} ${blog[$a]}/public_html/wp-admin/
chown -Rf ${blog[$a]}:${blog[$a]} ${blog[$a]}/public_html/wp-includes/

echo "Done upgrading ${blog[$a]}"
done
rm -Rf wordpress
rm -Rf latest.tar.gz
echo "Done Cleaning up"
exit 0

Download wordpress_update

What do I do with it?

Make sure the script is configured to your server’s configuration (accounts, directories of hosted domains, etc) before proceeding otherwise you may end up cleaning up instead of updating anything.

Important disclaimer: Proceed at your own risk. I will not be held responsible for any damage done to your server since I’m just sharing what I’ve done on my side so that you can learn from it then apply to your own situation. If you own a VPS (or higher) make sure you know what you are doing. If you’re on shared hosting, consult with your host first.

• SSH to your server with root access (login via root account or equivalent)
• Upload the wordpress_update file in to the /home directory (you can rename it as you like)
• change file permission to 744

chmod 744 wordpress_update

• execute the script

./wordpress_update

• And you’re done. If it’s configured right, you should see this:

Click for the full size.

And you’re done. I hope you pardon me for brushing out 2 lines. Security purposes

Yes, the output is verbose (I can’t for one, remove the message of omitting directories with the cp command) and untidy but it works. And yes, I’m not an expert in linux shell scripting so if anyone can suggest something, please post a comment. I’ll be glad to update the listing with the new version .

If you’re going to re-release a version of the code on your blog, please link back here. Thanks.

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As you know over the past couple of months we have been working on the new features for WordPress 2.9. We have also been working on trying to make WordPress as secure as possible and during this process we have identified a number of security hardening changes that we thought we worth back-porting to the 2.8 branch so as to get these improvements out there and making all your sites as secure as possible.

• A fix for the Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently being seen.
• Removal of areas within the code where php code in variables was evaluated.
• Switched the file upload functionality to be whitelisted for all users including Admins.
• Retiring of the two importers of Tag data from old plugins.

Changelog: WordPress 2.8.5
Download: WordPress 2.8.5
Download: Modified files since WordPress 2.8.4

For everyone looking to upgrade multiple wordpress blogs on the same server at once, you can use my bash script to do that for you.

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