dslade.blog

So I spent yesterday (all day) reading about and upgrading my various blogs to the latest release of WordPress 2.3, my preferred blogging platform, or semantic something something as they call it. I was long overdue to run some updates and 2.3 offers some great features, which I won’t repeat here.

Be sure to check out their preparation doc (albeit short), and list of 2.3 compatible plugins, although there is a list of compatible themes, the list is short and some are not as they claim to be. I won’t point them out, for various reasons, but just be sure to read the comments associated with the themes.

I won’t go into details, time is limited, but I’d highly recommend any long overdue upgrade you need to do. There was a long list of bugs fixed, and some solid feature enhancements.

So now I have 2.3 running on this site, my jokes site, and my soon-to-launch blogs on my lessons and home repair sites. Nothing is horribly broke. ok, enough plugging my sites.

I think the biggest hit will come to those who have done a lot of customization around categories, linking and relations to them. Fortunately, i’ve done none of the above. Here is another list of changes that someone highlighted.

Anything I had to give up? Not really, afaik nothing really broke (that said, I did upgrade half my plugins). But I did have to make a choice on what to do about tagging, and figure out how to migrate the tags.

Tagging:
I made the choice to abandon UTW (ultimate tag warrior). It was a hard choice, UTW served me well on a couple sites for quite some time, standing ovation for Christine for her work on that. With WP now supporting tagging natively, I decided to bite the bullet and deal with any v1 pains it might bring.

Migrating from UTW to the new WP system, go to “manage” > “import”, and then they have an import wizard for a lot of different tag systems. I read a lot about people having problems with this, errors, etc., but I didn’t. Perhaps the issues were fixed, or for lack of heavy customization, I didn’t get bit in the butt.

Pros:

1. it’s built in
2. it’s fast (reportedly)
3. supported by many developers
4. higher visibility for improvements being part of WP

Cons:

1. The admin support sucks for them (using, etc)
2. The documentation (currently) sucks, they really should have had that prepared for the release. naughty developers. Felt like I was reading and early 80s instruction manual for VCR written by dyslexic ESL students.*
3. need a bunch of other plugins to support the tagging features I like
4. gave up my technorati tagging (any ideas?)

Recommended plugins to help tagging: get recommended tags or click tags, they will aid in showing, even recommending, what tags you have when you write a post. I they are almost identical, will let you chose.

I’m sure there are more, but after reviewing 20+ plugins across my sites, upgrading 4 sites, and trying to run my business and take care of my baby boy, well, i ran out of time. so shoot me.

I know this is part rambling, and part useful, but I hope this helps someone out there!!!

~dave

*Did I aid the cause and help update the documentation? errrr, no. I know, I’m lame. But I have the lazy gene in me and couldn’t be bothered to subscribe to yet another site.

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