GeminiGeek’s Online Journal

Upgraded Wordpress 2.3!

September 25th, 2007 in Site Related and Wordpress

I’ve upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.3! Among the notable feature in this new version are:

1. Native Tagging Support. Now this is one feature that I’ve been waiting for. Although UTW did a great job on this, but I always think that it is good to do the tagging without going through a plugin. However, the tagging feature is not so great after all. More details on this further down.
2. Update Notification. I am someone who’s lazy to check plugin’s site to see any updates. With this, I can see it in my dashboard and download ‘em immediately. Though it doesn’t update for you automatically, this notification is sufficient
3. Canonical URLs. I’ve been using some .htaccess trick to achieve this, but looks like the devs manage to put in the core.
4. Better Post Management. There’s this new filter thing in your post management, and you can easily filter your drafts. Nifty.

There are more features in the developement blog.

The Upgrade Process

I thought the schema changes would kill my blog. I even created a testbed to test if the upgrades will work smoothly. I tried running the upgrades on the testbed. Everything works fine. Not as dramatic as Edrei’s case

The upgrade is a breeze if your plugin does not a direct call to the deprecated tables in your database. In my case, only KGArchives and Tan Tan Wordpress Report fails. Author of KGArchives may be doing some updates on the plugin released a WP2.3 compatible KGArchives, but there’s no news on Tan Tan Wordpress Report. UTW fails to work too, but there’s a UTW importer in WP2.3. Popular Post plugin have problem in the admin interface, but it works without a problem in the user end.

The transition from UTW to WP2.3 native tagging is rather painless, though there’s some iffy-ness somewhere in between. Now here’s a few things I don like about tagging in WP2.3:

1. There’s no proper tag management. It is said that the devs are waiting for the community to create plugins to further extend the tagging capabilities, and they can steal the idea and put them in the next release. So, I guess I have to wait for a while for a better tag management plugin to pop out.
2. Two words tagging fails. Space doesn’t work. All spaces in two words or more tags are replaced with a dash. UTW handles the presentation purpose with no problems, because I don’t see the dash in any tag titles, although there is in the admin area and slugs. Perhaps I have to make myself used to one word tagging.
3. The function to call out tags in a post, the_tags(), fails. I MUST use it in The Loop, which is kinda annoying because I have tags in the sidebar. Which is why, at the moment, I am not showing tags. Couldn’t something be done so that the_tags can be called anywhere in single.php?

Overall, WP2.3 is satisfactory, but not up to my liking.

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