With the release of a new major version of WordPress, there are bound to be issues with themes and plugins out in the wild. I suppose that’s why the core team recommends updating themes and plugins throughout the development process each and every time WordPress is in RC.

As you venture forward with WordPress 3.3, or consider doing so this week, you might want to know just what to keep an eye out for when you upgrade. To put your mind at ease we’ve collected every instance of plugin compatibility issues and developer footnotes that you could want to know about when upgrading.

Keep in mind that many of these are small issues which shouldn’t keep you from upgrading. Go. Upgrade. Now. But just know that you might see some of the below happening while plugins and themes get their 3.3 act together.

Plugin conflicts/errors with 3.3

These are the plugins we know of that are currently causing conflicts with WordPress 3.3:

• The Postie plugin is reportedly causing conflicts that while “white screen” or keep you from getting to your Dashboard. Disable before upgrading.
• qTranslate has not yet been tested for 3.3 yet, and will disable itself upon activation (via comments).

Tip: Developers should use wp_enqueue_scripts, not wp_print_styles

This one’s a best practice that’s been around for a while, but core developer Andrew Nacin reminded everyone on the WordPress developer’s blog today since not doing so will cause a small issue with 3.3:

A possible incompatibility with WordPress 3.3 could arise if you are using the wp_print_styles hook to enqueue styles — your styles may end up in the admin.

The fix: Use wp_enqueue_scripts instead. Yes, it’s that easy.

So if you enqueue scripts in your theme or plugin, be sure to update it to use wp_enqueue_scripts so you don’t muck up styles on the Dashboard. You should update soon, all the cool kids are doing it.

BuddyPress is due for a maintenance update

There’s no threat of your site falling over with this one, but know that when you upgrade (and until BuddyPress 1.5.2 is out in the next day or two) there might be repeated items in your toolbar or some extra padding on the left margins of the Dashboard.

You can read more about this one on the BuddyPress forums.

Login Logo update includes a CSS fix

Mark Jaquith’s Login Logo plugin (which we’ve mentioned before here) now has an update for that fixes a CSS issue fix for 3.3. Be sure to update your plugin when you update WordPress.

Speak up

That does it for issues we’ve seen popping up so far. We’ll keep this post updated as we hear of anything else. If you run across an issue somewhere, be sure to notify the plugin or theme’s developer, and comment below so we can keep everyone updated.

WordPress offers a pseudo-cronjob functionality, which allows the developer to execute scheduled events. For example, the whole Update Notification does it. In these so-called Scheduled Events you can define your own jobs. Thereby you should however pay attention to one important thing: time.

The wp-cron.php works outside the core and loads only the most important things and leaves all settings of WordPress open. In the Settings -> General set time zone is not included. wp-cron.php runs on UTC.

That means: Are we in the time zone of Berlin, the local time is UTC +1. Are we performing a scheduled event, it will always be one hour after the actual time we like to execute. To change this, we use the following function:

function get_offset_to_gmt_in_seconds() {
	$current_timezone_offset = get_option( 'gmt_offset' );
	$offset = $current_timezone_offset * 3600;
	return $offset;
}

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WordPress 3.3, development upon which began as early as July, was put to bed just minutes ago. In other words: get to downloadin’ and updatin’.

3.3 final is nicknamed “Sonny” after the jazz player Sonny Stitt, so if you’d like to really get in the spirit go grab some of his best hits to play in the background while updating all of your WordPress sites.

Some fun facts about this release, since everyone loves fun facts:

• WordPress 3.3 was in development for four months and 15 days (or 138 days in total).
• This version saw over 1,200 individual changes to WordPress.
• WordPress has been downloaded 65 million times since 3.0 was released.
• WordPress 3.3 is being download a bunch. Just go watch the counter.
• WordPress 3.3 saw nearly 180 total contributors, 25 of which were Automattic employees.

There’s a lot in this release that will be better experienced than explained: the drag and drop uploader, new hover Dashboard navigation, an updated admin bar, improved co-editing support, the new welcome screen, revamped help tabs, and new feature pointers. To name a few. Then there are those features that you might want some additional guidance on: the new editor API, jQuery 1.7, and more efficient permalinks.

We’ll have you covered on both counts with a full feature overview post (very soon). I’ve even heard whispers of a First Taste on the way for WordPress 3.3, so stay tuned.