WordPress has many features that make it ideal for building traffic and your business.
WooThemes, the team behind the wildly successful WooCommerce WordPress plugin, is getting themselves a new bankroll. Namely Automattic–yes, that Automattic–the company we can thank for WordPress itself.
The decision was detailed in a press release by WooThemes:
Over the past year, in response to the growing and more sophisticated requirements of the WooCommerce community, we have been exploring ways to accelerate our growth to be an even more accessible, easier to use, and enabling platform for our customers. We’ve met some very powerful and influential companies and potential investors, but none more ambitious and aligned with our values than the team at Automattic.
Source: WooThemes Joins Automattic
What are the implications of this move? We can easily expect to see baked-in integration with WooCommerce and the sites that are being hosted on the massive WordPress.com service.
And as for those who are hosting our WordPress sites independently like us, this likely means WooCommerce has cemented itself as the defacto eCommerce solution on WordPress in terms of theme and cross-plugin support.
This is something that was becoming true on its own prior to this announcement, so if you’re currently using any other WordPress shopping cart solutions out there like WP-Ecommerce or MarketPress, the time may come in the near future where you’ll need to move your operation to Woo.
While Drupal and Joomla continue to fork and swerve- WordPress continues to improve with refinements in the user experience- mainly, bringing more What You See Is What You Get WYSIWG features to the most used open source CMS going.
Almost 20% of the websites on the planet use WordPress as their backend- which is why we’ve been teaching our Websitetology Seminar since 2005.
New features of 3.9 – “Smith” are:
Improved visual editing: The updated visual editor has improved speed, accessibility, and mobile support. You can paste into the visual editor from your word processor without wasting time to clean up messy styling. Yeah, we’re talking about you, Microsoft Word
Edit images easily: With quicker access to crop and rotation tools, it’s now much easier to edit your images while editing posts. You can also scale images directly in the editor to find just the right fit.
Drag and drop your images: Uploading your images is easier than ever. Just grab them from your desktop and drop them in the editor.
Other features make it easier to actually see your galleries in the edit window, build audio and video playlists- and most importantly- cleaning up the horrendous whack-a-mole editing of sidebar widgets- with a true WYSIWYG editor.
All these improvements reinforce why WordPress is the 800lb gorilla in web content management. With every release, it gets EASIER to publish and manage your own site content.
WordPress Version 3.3, named for Sonny Stitts, released to the public.
The most important change in my humble opinion is that they finally ditched the 4 different options for uploading media. Now- with easier uploading file type detection – A single upload button allows Drag-and-Drop media uploads, and the media autosorts on the type of file- .mov is a video etc.
They’ve reworked the dashboard design with a new toolbar in the dashboard, combining the Admin Bar and admin header giving you quick access to the most important functions and the new flyout menus, providing single-click access to any screen without scrolling through long lists of options on your left side admin menu.
The new user experience options provide new feature pointers, helping users navigate new features and also help direct new users to basic functions that they need through the dashboard welcome area.
New iPad/Tablet support is included in the admin area, but I’ve not had a chance to look into it yet.
via Version 3.3 « WordPress Codex.
As always with new versions, make a complete backup of your installation before upgrading and be careful with custom themes.