I couldn’t wait till tomorrow to upgrade, so rather than try out WP 2.3, I went ahead and installed the release candidate. I had been running WP 2.3 Beta 3 on my personal blog for a while, and it seemed stable. Upgrading from 2.2.3 to 2.3 RC1 actually went very smoothly, and I’ve noticed a few changes:
- Some plugins broke: This was inevitable. Check this page to see which plugins are definitely not yet compatible with WP 2.3. ELA broke, and I really hope someone writes a replacement for it soon, as it has been in limbo for a long time. I have to use the packaged Recent Comments widget (which is not that good) and the default Dashboard (which has a lot of extra crap that I don’t use), but I’m confident that Get Recent Comments and My Dashboard will be updated soon enough. Most of these issues are more annoying than devastating.
- Tags: This is one of the big changes. I’m not sure yet how these will be implemented on Sea Slugs! because it is a major task to go and tag old posts. Also, the categories do a good job on an anime blog. I think this could be useful for many anime bloggers in tagging which series are current, dropped, or in limbo, because using nested categories to capture transient information messes up your permalinks. Interestingly, there is no tag management in WP 2.3, as the developers are waiting to see who can develop a sweet plugin for them to steal. There are some simple ones here and here. Here is a page about adding tag support to your current theme. And here’s a plugin to configure your tag cloud.
- Incoming Links Changed: The team decided to move away from Technorati and went with Google Blog Search. I’m not sure how I feel about this, since Google Blog Search picks up self-trackbacks, but I am a bit skeptical of how long Technorati will be around.
- Update Notifications: On your plugin page, WP will let you know if a new version of your plugin is out. Nice, but you still have to download and install the update yourself.
There are a few other changes, especially under the hood, but the ones I listed were the ones I noticed right away.
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This post was written by...
Kabitzin – who has written 1935 posts on Sea Slugs! Anime Blog.
One of the founders of Sea Slugs, I handle most of the blog admin tasks while wearing my I AM BOSS shirt. I like my action series well choreographed, and my romance series extra trashy. I also have a soft spot for puns.
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Yeah, I’ll have to look at 2.3 before updating it. I saw that there may be a problem with the google sitemaps, but it looked like only certain versions, so I’ll have to go check that out.
I made a new blog for something else just the other day, and I used the 2.3RC1 and I saw the tags thing too, but also didn’t see any place where I could do anything with it. If they want people to do something with the tags, then they should be able to, well, do something with the tags. Especially since we already have categories.
Concerning self-pingbacks, I have a plugin that fixes that and makes linking to yourself a lot faster and easier. I have a full description of the plugin and all the things it can do here:
http://www.jeremyduffy.com/tools/jtags/
Question. What plugin do you use for the drop-down category-list? I’d like to use that as well to reduce my loooooong list.
It is just a default widget in the newer versions (I think 2.2 ) of Wordpress. Very handy.
Widgets can be accessed in the Presentation menu. You should be able to drag and drop it in from the pool of widgets at the buttom (if your theme is widget-enabled).
Hmm, really? I guess I never saw it for some reason.
I’ll need to check that then. Thanks ^^
Woot, Get Recent Comments 2.0 was just released, so I’m back to using that plugin. I was alerted to the update by the indicator in the plugin list =D.
Odd that the actual WP 2.3 has yet to be released, though.
Just upgraded to 2.3, and it was supa-smooth. Doesn’t even warrant its own post.
Recently noticed that seaslugteam.com automatically redirects to http://www.seaslugteam.com now, as per the preferences set in the admin panel. Also, they seem to have fixed that horrific bug where you can’t delete categories and links without turning off javascript.
I’m still in two minds about the new release. Granted, I only installed it earlier today but the changes are either concerned with stuff I wasn’t bothered about to begin with or prevent stuff I WAS bothered about working correctly!
The tags sound like a neat idea but I’ve yet to find a use for them and I’m not sure if Freshy 2 supports them anyway. I think I’ll miss the Technorati over Google too, but my biggest beef is that the update has changed a load of DB tables. Now my DTree categories plugin has had to be scrapped and my A-Z reviews list (which I coded myself after many a SQL error message) is nigh-on useless too.
I’m afraid that 2.3 has made more work for me and has undone previous work into the bargain…I’m tempted to re-install 2.2 unless someone can convince me otherwise.