Hover to explore my nether regions.
- Final Fantasy XI Chat & Macro Commands
- E3: Telltale Breathes New Life Into Monkey Island
- X-Men Origins: Wolverine
- Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
- E3: Final Fantasy XIV Online Announced
- Archives…
- Evan Sims
- Champaign, IL 61820 U.S.A.
- hello@evansims.com
- Cell: +1 (217) 621-0379
- Skype: evansims
- WLM: evansims@gmail.com
- XMPP: evansims@gmail.com
WordPress 2.3 Impressions
-
So as many of you are certainly well aware, the long awaited Wordpress v2.3 was released today after a long series of betas and release candidates. 2.3 has had the blogging community foaming at the mouth for one reason: tags.
You might ask yourself, if Wordpress has had categories since day one, why do we need tags? What’s so swell about ‘em? Well, my dear friend, allow me to enlighten you. Categories and tags, while similar at first glance, help you manage your content much easier than either could do alone. Think of categories like manilla folders, and tags as post-it notes on the folders. Categories help organize posts in a strict structure, but tags help identify the content of posts in those categories.
Take my Web Development category for example. I think it goes without saying- everything in there is somehow related to developing stuff for the web. However, how those posts relate to web development vary wildly. I have topics ranging from writing for APIs to setting up Apache on a Windows box. Tags allow me to mark what kind of content these posts have, and in turn makes it easier for me to identify relationships between topics. From a reader standpoint, it gives everyone a quick, one-click search for finding similar content in my site.
Of course, tagging also has the wonderful bonus of making content easier to identify and sort using service like Technorati.
The Upgrade
I was more than a little worried what an upgrade of this magnitude might entail. Coming from a background in content management systems, let me assure you that a shift in platform this radical can very easily lead to disaster. One import flaw in the system and boom, you’ve got hundreds, even thousands of users with blog databases destroyed.
Needless to say, that didn’t happen to me, and I haven’t heard of anyone else having any catastrophic failures either. The upgrade, more or less, went flawlessly.
The two biggest problems I, and most users, will encounter are updating their themes and updating or disabling their plugins. As I said, 2.3 is a pretty major update from a backend point of view (anyone who laughs is a communist); it goes without saying that this is going to break some people’s code.
For me, I had to drop a few of my favorite plugins (at least until they update them to work with 2.3), and make some minor changes to my theme. Popularity Contest had to be scrapped, and I had to upgrade Google Sitemap Generator to a version that played better with the new Wordpress version. Luckily, the Wordpress Codex has a pretty wonderful list of compatible and incompatible plugins that I was able to reference before starting the update, so I had my setup updated and 2.3 compatible before I uploaded a single file.
Updating My Theme
After disabling all my plugins (except Maintenance Mode), uploading 2.3’s files and re-enabling my plugins, it came time to update my theme. Having a custom theme, I made a lot of changes to incorporate features from some of the plugins I had to uninstall, so I had to scrape some of my code. Nothing major, mostly Popularity Contest related stuff.
With the new tagging feature, WP2.3 obviously includes some fancy new tags for exposing these things in your theme. I included a tags list in my index and single page views, and replaced my Simple Tagging tag cloud with 2.3’s new native tag cloud.
That was pretty much it; very trivial changes.
Impressions
So far I’ve noticed a few welcome changes. First, the whole system seems peppier. Speedier. More responsive. This might have to do with an upgrade to the AJAX framework they use, or more excessive changes in the core itself, but whatever the cause I welcome it. It might be in my head, but the post/page editing interface seems a little tighter… did it receive a small face lift? I can’t tell. Maybe I’m just nuts.
The new tagging system is integrated nicely, and if you’ve used tagging plugins like Simple Tagging or Ultimate Tag Warrior in the past you’ll feel right at home. No major changes in use from the plugins, which is great. The Wordpress team even included an Import system for importing all your posts’ tag relationships from old plugin databases. I used it to import my Simple Tagging tags, and it worked brilliantly!
All in all, I’d say 2.3 is a fantastic upgrade for any Wordpress user, and the team has done a fantastic job with it. If you’re looking to upgrade, just remember to back up your database before hand, disable all your plugins before you start the process, and ensure that you’re up to date with all of them. I highly recommend referencing the plugin compatibility page before you begin so you can replace plugins that are known to have issues.
