The crew worked together on a few client and personal projects, and some of the biggest releases of the week were major updates to WP Stripe and YouTube DJ. As for the fun aspect, they were kind enough to snap several photos throughout the week.

Does this look like fun to you? If so, you might want to host a WP on Tour event in your home town.

The first issue will feature articles from 11 well-known contributors, and due to demand from the pre-orders, 2,000 copies are making their way through the printers as you read this. A lot of thought went into the design of this magazine, and you can see a video blazing through the various drafts below.

It’s not too late to reserve your copy, so if you want to be a part of this historical launch, you should place your order soon before they’re shipped.

The feature list may be just a bit basic now, but there are more features on the way, the design is very clean-cut, and if you’re interested to see how you’re doing versus “the status quo,” this is definitely the way to do it.

If you’re a theme designer, you might also be interested in their core product, which provides metrics for theme usage.

Folks with a strong memory may notice the similarity to iThemes’s Educator Program. While the Student Edition of the toolkit is not free, the $880 discount is something that can’t be beat, especially if you’re busy spending money on your tuition. If you have plans to launch a WordPress-focused career in design, consulting, maintenance, and other such things, this is a great way to get a head start.

Disclaimer: iThemes is one of our advertisers.

WP-Snippets has finally received a major upgrade, making it even easier for you to find the code you’re looking for. The various snippets have now been broken up into categories, and more words can be filtered to narrow down the choices to just the snippet you need. If you find one that you’re particularly fond of, you can now favorite a snippet to leave it on the front page when you come back to the site. Speaking of the site, it now has a fully responsive design, so it looks great on your mobile phone when gathering snippets on the go.

If you’re a fan of WordPress and have a few snippets to share on WP-Snippets, there is also a new contribute page to satisfy your urge to share your knowledge.

There are tons of snippets available at WP-Snippets, so dive in and see what you can find, or help out by adding tons of your own.

If you want to try a similar hosted blogging service, WordPress.com has you covered with a new importer, a handy guide, and free support if something goes wrong.

If you think it’s time to host your own blog, you might be interested in running a self-hosted WordPress.org blog. There are no Splinder importers for WordPress.org yet, but you can import to a WordPress.com blog, then export the resulting blog to any WordPress.org installation. Before you choose between WordPress.com and WordPress.org, make sure that you review the differences between the two.

Having been through two similar service closures myself, I recommend moving your Splinder blog as soon as possible. When those doors shut, they tend to shut for good, and you don’t want to be one of those who just waited too long. Even if you don’t plan on moving to WordPress, you might want to import into a WordPress.com blog now, just to preserve your content until you know what your plans are.

This update is recommended for all users, and can be done from the Dashboard -> Updates section of your blog’s Dashboard.

To add a custom header image to your plugin listing, you’ll need to have a 772 × 250 pixel jpeg or png checked in to your plugin’s SVN directory at assets/banner-772×250.(jpg|png). After a few refreshes, the image should appear for everyone.

For some examples of the new header image at work, see Akismet, bbPress, BuddyPress, and Jetpack.

This is still an experimental feature, so there is always a possibility that the dimensions, placement, and other aspects may change in the near future.

Among those surveyed, 90% feel that WordPress has graduated from blog publishing tool to full-fledged CMS, 68% use WordPress for sites requiring extensive CMS functionality, 77% make money from WordPress while 31% make their living from it, and 76% find responsive web design to be an important factor in their theme choice.

While we’re on the subject of surveys, you may want to take this short 5-question survey to help improve the quality of the main WordPress.org site.

The app now features a fully refreshed UI, a new post editor with a formatting toolbar, support for Android-powered tablets, background posting, and improved stats!

If you aren’t an Android user, never fear! There are plenty of WordPress mobile apps to choose from.

Hotfix is a powerfully yet simple plugin. Just keep it active and up to date to receive important bug fixes between official WordPress releases. For WordPress 3.3, Hotfix already prevents “plugin and theme styles from bleeding into the dashboard” and works around “a bug for people without built-in JSON support.”

Hotfix is not an official plugin, so it’s not an excuse to stop updating, but it’s safe to run between updates as it’s developed by two of the lead WordPress developers using fixes that are already prepared for the next official release.

If you aren’t running Hotfix yet, now’s the perfect time to install it.

If you haven’t upgraded to WordPress 3.3 yet, or you have never tried WordPress, now’s the perfect time to give it a shot. Let’s see what sort of record download numbers we can bring WordPress 3.3 to in its first week!

There are too many to list overall, but here are some of the more popular plugins which have received compatibility updates for WordPress 3.3 since its release:

All in One SEO Pack – Support for WordPress 3.3.

BuddyPress – Intended to fix some cosmetic issues with the new WordPress 3.3 toolbar, and is a recommended update for all existing BuddyPress 1.5/1.5.1 and WordPress 3.3 installations.

Login Logo – Support for WordPress 3.3.

Postie – Removed get_user_by function to make compatible with wp 3.3 – now requires 2.8+.

SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam – WP 3.3 compatibility fix as wp_enqueue_script was called incorrectly.

WordPress SEO – Fixed a notice in 3.3 which was caused by wp_reset_query being called too early.

Not necessarily a plugin, but a fully featured theme, Suffusion – Added support for a good number of WP 3.3 features.

As mentioned, these are just the most popular of the updated plugins, so check your plugins for available updates today.

Of all the changes, the most noticeable are the simplified toolbar (formerly known as the admin bar), the new drag and drop media uploader with support for multiple files, hover-powered Dashboard menus (no more wasted clicks), better help menus, a new Tumblr importer, and a complete introductory welcome page for new users.

For developers, there’s a new version of jQuery, better help screen hooks, and a new editor API.

If you’re running into trouble after upgrading to WordPress 3.3, there is a master list of known issues and FAQs on the forums which will be updated regularly, and the kind volunteers in the support forums will be more than happy to help you with any of your troubles.

If you’re a plugin or theme developer, and you haven’t tested your products against WordPress 3.3 yet, you my have just a few days (if not hours) left before the final release is public.

Andrew Nacin has provided an outstanding WordPress 3.3 field guide for developers and Mika Epstein has provided an awesome WordPress 3.3 known issue and FAQ master list.

As always, feel free to report any bugs that you find and contact the support forums if you need any help.