WordPress 3.3.1 was released yesterday after a little over 2 weeks since the release of WordPress 3.3 despite the Christmas, Hannukah, and New Year holiday season. WordPress 3.3 Final was made available for download on December 12, 2011, and following a report by the GoDaddy security advisory, a cross-site scripting vulnerability was patched.

For WordPress plugin developers out there who want to check if their plugins are running against the current version of WordPress, the version of WordPress can be checked with the $wp_version variable defined in the wp-includes/version.php file.

Another change that web designers, particularly CSS purists, would be excited about is that the wp-includes/functions.php has been updated to replace the white gradient image background with CSS gradient backgrounds.

If you are doing styling for the administration pages, you would probably want to know that the rtl class is added to the body tag if a right-to-left layout is used, such as when displaying Hebrew or Arabic text.

UPDATE:

The WordPress 3.3.1 update seems to be buggy. The update takes the site down for about a minute but following the update, the blog displays the message: “An automated WordPress update has failed to complete – please attempt the update again now”. However, on the update page, WordPress reports that it is the latest version.

I ended up manually fixing the failed update.

UPDATE #2:

I have a test environment for WordPress that runs WordPress 3.3. WordPress indicates that it has no new core updates i.e. it is totally oblivious to the existence of WordPress 3.3.1. Note that this is a completely different environment from the WordPress 3.3.1 setup with the problem described above.