My upgrade to Wordpress 2.3

16 years ago By Bryan Ruby

Screenshot of Wordpress WYSIWYG Write Post plus Tagging

I recently upgrade a blog of mine from Wordpress 2.2 to Wordpress 2.3. My wife and I don't post on the blog much (looking for better ideas on how to utilize the site), but it's great to keep around to test the latest and greatest Wordpress has to offer. In my view, the most important new feature in Wordpress 2.3 is the baseline introduction of tags (also called taxonomy or even categories in other CMS applications).

Previously, Wordpress users who desired the use of taxonomy in their blogging needed to utilize third-party plugins such as Ultimate Tag Warrior, Jerome’s Keywords, Simple Tags, and Bunny’s Technorati Tags. Luckily, users of these tagging plugins will find that Wordpress 2.3 also contains the ability to import the tags from these plugins into the Wordpress 2.3 tables (Manage > Import via the admin interface). I found the importer for the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin to be easy to use and experienced no issues (see screenshot below).

Example of importing UTW into the Wordpress 2.3 tables.

I do admit though that not needing third-party modules for tagging takes a little bit of time to get used to. I spent about five or ten minutes looking for how to activate the tag plugin. I eventually realized that it's not a plugin in Wordpress but tags are fully integrated into Wordpress 2.3 (always activated on). If you wish to allow for your visitors to see the tags, you'll need to make sure your theme is Wordpress 2.3 compatible and supports tags. For those that are using customized themes/templates, I've been looking for a Wordpress 2.2 to 2.3 developers guide but I haven't found one yet. If someone can post me a URL, I would appreciate it and will update this post with the new information.

The introduction of tags isn't the only thing new to Wordpress 2.3. Users and developers alike will likely also appreciate these new features in Wordpress 2.3: