Best New Features of Wordpress 2.3
Sep 17th, 07 | 14 remarksSome long awaited features are being finalized with the coming release of Wordpress 2.3 (scheduled for 9/24/07), which will be significant for basic and advanced bloggers alike. A few that I’m the most excited about include:
Update Alerts
If you’ve ever run into a situation where your WP install was working fine, and the next day it’s broken, you know how maddening it is to try and narrow down the cause. This has happened to me twice, and both times it was due to older plugin incompatibilities with Wordpress updates.
That shouldn’t be much of a concern after next week, because an alert system for an outdated core installation and installed plugins has been implemented! The plugin alerts tie in only with the official plugin directory, so it’ll be particularly important for devs to get into this directory if they want users to receive auto notification.
Inherent Tag Support
Another significant change (which was tossed out of 2.2) is coming in the form of built-in tagging. Unfortunately there’s not much of an interface for configuring them, and currently no support for editing or deleting them, except by manual edits in your database. I’m sure this will be addressed in a subsequent release once the developers have gathered enough feedback on how users interact with this functionality.
The good news - there’s an import tool which supports a few of the most popular plugins such as UTW, Jerome’s Keywords, or Simple Tags (just updated two days ago). Some questions have been raised however, as to whether the new tagging feature will conflict with any of these plugins… something to be aware of if you don’t want to use the inherent tagging feature just yet. Incidentally, UTW’s author Christine just today released a plugin for suggesting keywords, which is compatible with 2.3.
More SEO Friendliness
Probably the most exciting thing, at least for new (or less blog-savvy) users, is the built-in URL redirection. No more messing around with .htaccess rewrite rules (or host settings) while biting your lip and hoping you’re not screwing something up. WP will also be able to handle redirecting individual post URL changes! Sweet huh?
This comes as no big surprise, considering Matt mentioned a plugin for no-www back in June. If you’re scratching your head right now, you may not realize that http://whatever.com and http://www.whatever.com are not the same thing. Some SE’s consider them a mirror of each other and judging solely on Google’s duplicate content policy, this could be very bad for anyone not aware of this. You can learn more at no-www.org.
More cool features (such as a post status for multiple-author blogs) are on the way. If you want to get up to speed on release 2.3 before it comes out, the latest episode of The WordPress Podcast has you covered.
The tagging is something which I’ve been waiting for for a long time, one of the better additions to wordpress so far if you ask me. Plugin update notification I’m not sure about, the requirement of it having to be taken up into the wordpress system will probably take some time.
Asides from that many plugins stop development after a time anyways, so by the time an upgrade would be needed for most it isn’t going to come anymore but it is time to move on and look for newer plugins.
Sep 17, 07 | 4:04 pmI’m looking forward to shutting my site down for a day and spending several hours upgrading WordPress again ;)
Actually I am looking forward to this release - the new features are the most significant in a while. Although as I use the Simple Tagging plugin, I am slightly concerned that the native tagging features will conflict and/or not be as good as Simple Tagging’s. I’ll give it a few days before I upgrade so I can see what problems people run into.
Sep 17, 07 | 4:39 pm[...] Design Adaptations [...]
Sep 17, 07 | 5:29 pmThanks for this post. I keep thinking I’m going to take the time to see what’s coming in the next version, but never get around to it, so I appreciate the overview. I dread upgrading though… ugh.
Sep 17, 07 | 7:05 pmSlevi - it’s many plugins go by the wayside. My guess is that’s why the updates will only come from plugins associated with the official repository. First, to encourage the more serious authors to keep their plugins current, and second to avoid those who lose interest in their work (or don’t have time anymore) and drop support for for their plugins.
Aaron - I’m looking forward to it too… the release that is. I’m currently using UTW (haven’t tried Simple Tagging) and I’m a little worried about the native tagging as well. Lorelle is going to be reporting on any issues that arise by next Wednesday, so you might check there to see if any tagging problems are mentioned.
Randa, you’re not alone! :) Whenever upgrade time rolls around, I’m always just sure I’m gonna break something!
Sep 17, 07 | 9:35 pmLooks good…
Sep 18, 07 | 1:22 amI would like to see more capabilities for WP to become like a CMS though
With so much chatter and clucking about the tags addition, I appreciate the mention about the update notification.
Sep 19, 07 | 11:25 am[...] Design Adaptations（这一行为博客名，不做翻译） [...]
Sep 19, 07 | 8:57 pm[...] Design Adaptations [...]
Sep 23, 07 | 3:55 am[...] update of WP was a significant one, with additions such as native tagging, as well as abandoned functions and some big changes in [...]
Sep 25, 07 | 9:45 am[...] Design Adaptations（这一行为博客名，不做翻译） [...]
Sep 26, 07 | 2:54 am[...] Design Adaptations [...]
Sep 29, 07 | 2:30 pmNope. I’m still too scared to upgrade… ;) Maybe in a couple of weeks, once 2.3.1 is out!
Hope you’re well! Your email will be answered (several months late) this week… :)
Sep 30, 07 | 6:57 pm[...] Design Adaptations [...]
Oct 9, 07 | 8:05 pm