Last night, WordPress 3.3 Release Candidate 2 was released. As written in the release post, I think we’re really close to a final release.

In preparation for that, I went on a tear yesterday and contributed to six posts for developers on our main development blog. The posts were a mixture of tutorials and API documentation what’s new and what’s changed in 3.3:

• Admin Bar API changes in 3.3. An overview of what changes might break your plugin, how we’ve tweaked the terminology and APIs for 3.3, the new Groups concept, and how to move and modify menu items.
• What to watch for: Javascript and Editor changes. There were quite a bit of changes here. jQuery was updated to 1.7.1, the current version. The full jQuery UI is now included, and was updated to 1.8.16, also the current version. And then there’s an example for wp_editor(). The QuickTags API (the HTML editor toolbar buttons) was rewritten, and we’ve improved both wp_localize_script() and wp_enqueue_script().
• New API: is_main_query(). I introduced this function and WP_Query method during my ‘You Don’t Know Query’ talk in WordCamp Portland in September.
• Do not include wp-admin/includes/template.php to get add_meta_box(). I’m not even sure where to start with this one. When developing 3.3, we found that some plugins were doing something wrong when trying to call add_meta_box(). (Really, really wrong.) So consider this post a protip.
• The admin_user_info_links filter is gone. This needed to happen since we combined the admin bar with the admin header. Not too many plugins were using it. This comes after we dropped favorite actions in 3.2 as the UI continues to be refined.
• Help and screen API changes. This post goes through the process of adding new help tabs, as well as how to use the screen object to determine the context of the current page. I spent a lot of time fleshing out WP_Screen in 3.3, so it was nice to see it all summed up in just a few hundred words.

WordPress 3.3 — coming soon to a site near you.