Hari's Corner

Humour, comics, tech, law, software, reviews, essays, articles and HOWTOs intermingled with random philosophy now and then

WordPress upgraded to 2.3 (yawn)

Filed under: Site management by Hari
Posted on Tue, Sep 25, 2007 at 16:58 IST (last updated: Fri, Sep 28, 2007 @ 11:00 IST)

Notice anything different about WordPress now that 2.3 has come out?

I didn't either. I'm not really complaining though. WordPress has never really had any "spectacular effects" upgrade since 1.5 to 2.0 and I didn't expect anything big in 2.3 either. There is now native tagging support and there are some minor changes to the way the WYSIWYG editor is displayed but in reality there is nothing new to see here. There are probably a bunch of invisible security updates though.

TinyMCE hasn't really been XHTML 1.0 compliant and I'm surprised that the WordPress developers continue to use that as the editor of choice. To be frank, most people probably don't care, but WP has always advertised itself as a standards compliant blogging engine. To see the old <font color=> tag being used for text colouring is really suprising. Well, I don't use the WYSIWYG mode anyway.

Why do I continue using WordPress? Unlike a desktop editor, changing an entire website's back-end is not easy and needs a lot of work. Besides, conversion of posts and comments to other blogging tools is really iffy and tends to break a lot of things in the process including permalinks. As long as WordPress doesn't break, I probably don't care much. If you notice any problems on this blog, do let me know.

21 comment(s)

  1. I'm holding off on the upgrade. The last time I did a version change, my DSL dropped the connection, I had to start over, and my blog was down for an hour. It wasn't pretty. I've also heard about some plugin incompatibilities. I think I'll wait a couple of days to see what hits the fan.

    Comment by RT Cunningham (visitor) on Tue, Sep 25, 2007 @ 22:30 IST #
  2. They call this version "Dexter." I call it "Yawn".I actually just rsync-ed the files up to the server and ran upgrade.php and it was done. Nothing special.FTP is very slow. Since I have shell access on my server, I can use rsync (secure remote copy) instead of FTP. That's my preferred choice for uploading and downloading files from the server these days.I've seen nothing new at all in this version. Except the tagging system. But I guess tags won't show up if your theme isn't up to date.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Tue, Sep 25, 2007 @ 22:35 IST #
  3. I've been playing with 2.3 since 2.2 went gold (alpha baby!!!) and I must say that there aren't any really spectacular changes that one may notice at first. But, there are a few neat behind the escenes thngs that people will appreciate when they coime to the surface, like the upgrade notifications. Since 2.3 went final today, I noticed that there's a prompt to upgrade because there's a new version out. This functionality also extends to the plugins. That part I really like, as I can just check out the plugins page once in a while to see if there's an improvement or security update for the plugin. Then I go get it.

    Comment by MrCorey (visitor) on Wed, Sep 26, 2007 @ 06:10 IST #
  4. By the way, I don't think that I'll be going with the test bed any more, unless the wp-testers list shows some really cool thing that I just gotta have before anyone else (in 2.4, for example). I had just gotten hooked into the tags thing from 2.2 before it was yanked back out and I felt that I'd just ride it out. Of course I totally mashed the whole thing so I've got a fresh install that I'm rebuilding (sorry about the blogroll, folks).

    Comment by MrCorey (visitor) on Wed, Sep 26, 2007 @ 06:14 IST #
  5. I envy your shell access hari. Perhaps I should be really really nice to Drew...

    Comment by MrCorey (visitor) on Wed, Sep 26, 2007 @ 06:15 IST #
  6. So, this is the last of the spamming of your post, hari. I like those browser icons at the bottom of the comments. Well, perhaps Lynx will need to have a go...

    Comment by MrCorey (visitor) on Wed, Sep 26, 2007 @ 06:19 IST #
  7. MrCorey, yes, I noticed some changes, but really nothing much for a major upgrade. As for "tags", they leave me cold. Categories do the job just as well.Yeah, the browser icons are cool. I installed the Priyadi plugin some time ago and it seems to work well.And oh, I second your idea. Be real nice to Drew and buy him an icecream :razz:

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Wed, Sep 26, 2007 @ 08:14 IST #
  8. I'll do a bit of a "tags" post soon showing some of the good parts of 2.3, especially, what code to add to get the feature to work.

    Comment by MrCorey (visitor) on Wed, Sep 26, 2007 @ 09:49 IST #
  9. Thanks Corey. Your comment has been approved now! :)You can post with Lynx, provided your SK2 "karma" is high enough for you not to get the "captcha".

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Wed, Sep 26, 2007 @ 11:18 IST #
  10. See also http://wank.wordpress.com - the upgrade has caused much consternation wrt privacy. And it's also a fun read.My upgrade went pretty smoothly - which is par for the course. The plugins I don't use are out of date and a plugin I recently started using breaks some things. Easily fixed by disabling it. It's nice to have but not essential.

    Comment by Ray (visitor) on Wed, Sep 26, 2007 @ 14:35 IST #
  11. I'm now adding tags to posts, Ray. Seems a good idea, but I'm calling them "keywords".

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Wed, Sep 26, 2007 @ 15:01 IST #
  12. Keyword! You're it!.....I couldn't resist...

    Comment by MrCorey (visitor) on Wed, Sep 26, 2007 @ 15:55 IST #
  13. My mind is wandering after spending the last half-hour adding tags to old posts. Could you explain the joke, kind sir? :sad:

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Wed, Sep 26, 2007 @ 15:58 IST #
  14. I'll explain the joke. Tag, you're it. He substituted "keyword".

    Comment by RT Cunningham (visitor) on Wed, Sep 26, 2007 @ 19:19 IST #
  15. Oh, I see. It went over my head. I never remembered that usage of the word "Tag".

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Wed, Sep 26, 2007 @ 20:30 IST #
  16. I did have the advantage of being freshly awake after a night's sleep on my side of this globe, my friend. Of course, I am also prone to fall into a local colloquialism and express it without realizing that it may mean nothing to others.And, I really did chuckle (actually giggle a bit) when I posted that comment.

    Comment by MrCorey (visitor) on Thu, Sep 27, 2007 @ 06:08 IST #
  17. Oh, well, I wasn't thinking along those lines. :smile:

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Thu, Sep 27, 2007 @ 11:40 IST #
  18. Maybe it's too early for me, but I didn't get it either :???: I've started using tagging, we'll see how long I keep it up for........

    Comment by Ray (visitor) on Thu, Sep 27, 2007 @ 14:10 IST #
  19. Ray, the debate over at wank.wordpress.com is quite interesting. I do think that the WP developers have lost focus of what they want WP to be and so keep introducing features on a popularity vote rather than on what makes a good blog tool.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Thu, Sep 27, 2007 @ 15:20 IST #
  20. I like your tag cloud. Did you use a plugin to generate it? Or, did you follow some codex suggestion about formatting the call?

    Comment by MrCorey (visitor) on Fri, Sep 28, 2007 @ 19:59 IST #
  21. I used the codex suggestion. I created a tag.php file to generate the tag archive and then created a "page" with the tag template. I prevented the actual page contents from being displayed when the page is displayed using the template conditional "is_page" and "is_single" in the tag.php file.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Fri, Sep 28, 2007 @ 20:48 IST #

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