Upgrading to Wordpress 2.3.1

October 31st, 2007 in web development  |  4 Comments

I was looking forward to the new native tagging feature of WordPress 2.3 but decided to wait to upgrade my blog until 2.3.1 was released. And so it has, and so I’ve updated.

I’m going to be blunt: I’m not impressed. I admit, it’s nice that all future tagging plugins will be mostly compatible because they’ll be building off native features, but what once took me one plugin to accomplish now takes two. I needed to grab WP 2.3 Related Posts to get related posts going which I even had to modify to get it to display correctly within my theme. Then I needed to install Advanced Tag Entry just so I could manage the tags.

And the_tags() doesn’t even work outside a loop, like the_category() or the_date() do. It took me a bit to figure out what was wrong, since I needed to show the tags in my sidebar. In the end I had to use this crazy hack:

<?php if (is_single()) { ?>
  <?php rewind_posts(); ?>
        <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
             <?php the_tags('', ', ', ''); ?>
        <?php endwhile; ?>
<?php } ?>

Another thing that irks me is the switch to Google Blog Search for incoming links, which seems to be a lot less comprehensive than Technorati. I know my blog isn’t popular, but just compare the results from Google and Technorati. Google says I’ve got a whopping six incoming links, two of which are my own! Technorati tells it straight with 18, and none from myself.

Maybe my expectations were too high. Maybe I just have to wait for a good tagging plugin that does it all. Maybe I need to get a life and stop complaining about blogging software. :)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 at 2:16 pm and is filed under web development and tagged with , , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

4 Responses to “Upgrading to Wordpress 2.3.1”

  1. Christine From The Internet

    October 31st, 2007 at 3:26 pm

    I’m vaguely thinking about making a cohesive UTWesque plugin out of the various single purpose tag plugins that I’ve been cobbling together as a pay-for uberplugin. Does it seem like the kind of thing that’s worth, I dunno, five or ten bucks?

  2. Chris

    October 31st, 2007 at 4:08 pm

    If I weren’t dirt poor, the price sounds reasonable. If I really needed to, though, I’d probably just install your single plugins or settle for a lesser tagging plugin before buying your uberplugin. I don’t like paying for things I don’t have to.

    I noticed you have a donation button. Does anyone ever donate if you suggest it?

  3. Christine From The Internet

    October 31st, 2007 at 4:59 pm

    No-one likes paying for things they don’t have to (:

    For a while I did have a “suggested donation” thinger on a download page; but there didn’t seem to have much of a correlation between downloads and the suggested donation d:

    People do, however, donate on their own accord anyway; so the donation thing isn’t a completely futile sort of an exercise.

  4. lutfiallail

    December 15th, 2007 at 5:43 pm

    Great article, i have find how to display tags in my sidebar, and now you have.
    Thanks…

Leave a Reply