If you’ve ever used the /%postname%/ permalink structure on your WordPress site (and haven’t we all at some point) then this bit of news will interest you. A handful of WordPress core contributors have completed a patch that greatly improves the speed and scalability of WordPress’ verbose rewrite rules.

Andy Skelton, Otto, Mark Jaquith, and Jon Cave worked on the ticket, which was committed just last week for the 3.3 release cycle. Improving these verbose rewrite rules was one of the times on the checklist for 3.3, so things seem to be on track for a November release.

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The WordPress Weekly Developer Chat was held on Wednesday, and during it the final scope for version 3.3 was determined and published. While it shouldn’t be seen as exactly what we can expect out of the next version of WordPress (likely out sometime in November), it’s the declared goal for this release cycle.

You can visit the development blog post for details, but in short the next version should bring:

• Enhancements to the media uploader
• A special experience for new users (likely not Clippy)
• Responsive Dashboard for larger monitors and other devices
• Improvements to the admin bar
• Various internal performance improvements, including permalink structures and menus
• Improvements to the meta and settings API
• Inclusion of language packs (a GSOC project)
• Enhancements to automatic upgrades

That’s the end of the list of primary goals, though a few others made a short list of secondary items which are mostly slated for activity in version 3.4. There are still a number of ways to get involved, so don’t hesitate to visit the blog post and chime in.

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WordPress 3.2 was only released 18 days ago, but the schedule for version 3.3 has been published, and we could be seeing WordPress 3.3 as early as Tuesday the 15th of November (the target date), with a beta somewhere around the end of September.

A number of tickets have already been fixed for the 3.3 Milestone, some of which include switching the administration to a HTML5 doctype, proper I10n of Admin Color Scheme Titles, along with simple bug fixes or typos.

With that it also brings many new and exciting tickets that are still being worked on, and I’d hedge me bets they’ll be in for 3.3 because they’ve been “blessed” in Trac, some of which include making the %postname% permalink better for performance, introducing a meta box class with basic API and adding in a welcome screen (though whether Clippy will be implemented is still to be seen).

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Matt Mullenweg answered a number of questions during a town hall session at WordCamp Montreal on Sunday (which Joachim Kudish liveblogged brilliantly). The conversation during the session quickly turned to the future of WordPress, specifically what’s on deck for version 3.3 of WordPress. Plans for WordPress 3.3 haven’t come together fully yet, but Mullenweg did say the next version could be the “U” version, focusing on improving the uploader and updates.

It’s not clear just what an update to the uploader would look like yet, though the media system has been on the “maybe” list for improvement the last couple of version releases.

Regarding updates, the goal seems to be to move WordPress toward the Chrome implementation for updates. Google’s Chrome browser updates seamlessly on its own, in the background. Mullenweg would like to see WordPress and plugin updates work the same way.

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