The latest and greatest version of the WordPress software — 3.3, named “Sonny” in honor of the great jazz saxophonist Sonny Stitt — is immediately available for download or update inside your WordPress dashboard. WordPress has had over 65 million downloads since version 3.0 was released, and in this third major iteration we’ve added significant [...]

The third (and hopefully final!) release candidate for WordPress 3.3 is now available. Since RC2, we’ve done a handful of last-minute tweaks and bugfixes that we felt were necessary. Our goal is to release version 3.3 early next week, so plugin and theme authors, this is your last pre-release chance to  test your plugins and themes  to find any [...]

It’s almost that time again, when the WordPress core development team gets together in person to review the year’s progress and talk about priorities for the coming year. Next week Matt Mullenweg, Mark Jaquith, Peter Westwood, Andrew Ozz, Andrew Nacin, Dion Hulse, Daryl Koopersmith, Jon Cave, and I will meet at Tybee Island, GA, the [...]

The second release candidate for WordPress 3.3 is now available! As the first release candidate was well-received, we think we’re really close to a final release. Primarily, we’ve ensured that new toolbar (the admin bar in 3.2) has a consistent appearance across all browsers, and the API for developers is now final. You can check [...]

Release Candidate stage means we think we’re done and are about ready to launch this version, but are doing one last check before we officially call it. So take a look, and as always, please check your themes and plugins for compatibility if you’re a developer. Stayed up late tonight, Hammering toward RC1. Now with [...]

The march toward 3.3 continues! With all our major tickets closed, we are very close to a release candidate. In Beta 4 we’ve fixed a bunch of bugs, cleaned up the UI, added real text in some of the screens that still had placeholder text in Beta 3 (post-update screen, the Dashboard welcome area, new [...]

We need your opinion! One of the features we’re adding to WordPress 3.3 (currently in beta 3) is intended to reduce widget pain. Say you’re using Theme A and you have a handful of widgets set up. You switch to Theme B, and it has different widget areas, so you add/remove/edit your widgets. Then you [...]