WordPress 2.3 Evaluation
After being bogged down with projects for weeks, I finally was able to upgrade my blog to WordPress 2.3 over the Thanksgiving break. The first thing I noticed post-upgrade was that I also needed to upgrade a bunch of my plugins (I really liked the fact that WordPress now let’s you know your plugins are old). Once I’d done this I needed to import my tags from Ultimate Tag Warrior into the new WordPress tagging systems. Piece of cake! The next nifty thing I noticed was that the WYSIWYG editor has an “Advanced Toolbar”, which gives me access to the formatting dropdown and the paste from Word button.
Although tags are a welcome addition to WordPress 2.3, the new tagging system created some issues for me. I needed to look at several pieces of documentation to fix the theme I use.
- How to add WordPress 2.3 Tags To Your Current Theme
- How To Add WordPress 2.3 Tags To Your Current Theme, Part 2
- Documentation from WordPress Codex on THE TAGS template tag
While my fix isn’t perfect (other things are broken still), I’m able to get tags to display properly in my theme. Hopefully the theme creator will eventually update it for WordPress 2.3. In the meantime I’m probably going to create my own full fledge derivative to fix some issues I’m seeing and add some features I like from other themes. The one that Jason Griffey at Pattern Recognition uses has some nifty features I want to steal.
Features aside, another couple issues the upgrade created are tag cloud page doesn’t work any longer and there is no way to manage my tags. (The no way to manage tags thing is just DUMB) Both of these issues can be fixed by the installation of a plugin. SimpleTags helps you manage tags in your WordPress instance. I can use Exec-PHP to solve my tag cloud problem. So finishing the upgrade process just requires finding some mythical “free time”.
My overall opinion is WordPress 2.3 is awesome but with any upgrade there are growing pains to be dealt with. Hopefully I can resolve most of mine this weekend and start playing with some more of the nifty feature.