Gary R. HessThe newest version of WordPress has now been out for almost a week. Once it was announced, I promptly downloaded and installed the newest version, giving me since Monday to create a list of what is new, what is good and what is bad.
What is new?
- Tags - You can now ‘tag’ all your posts. What is tagging? Basically keywords which allow visitors to click on the tag, then takes them to a page of related posts. It is used by Technorati to help their own visitors find sites of interest.
- Update notification - Now you will be notified when there is an update to any of your plugins or WordPress itself.
- Improved post and draft management - Now you can sort your posts and drafts by a search, the status, month or category.
- Pending review - You can now label your posts ‘pending review’ to allow someone else to review the post before making it live. How this defers much from a ‘draft’ is beyond me.
- Advanced visual buttons - You can now show and hide additional buttons on the visual editor.
Pretty URLs - Now theres a redirect from www to no-www if you choose. Also if you change the post-slug the previous will now redirect to the new post. - Updated Default Blogroll - Yeah, new crap added, yeepee….
- Developer - Power user stuff - jQuery, easier SQL functions, better importers, builtin backup maker button, added ‘widget’ sidebar functions.
What’s good?
- I love the built in tags. I didn’t try it out when it was just the ultimate tag warrior, but heard some good things.
- Pretty URLs can be useful for those who don’t want to mess with .htaccess. The slug changer is great as well.
- Power user stuff, jQuery is great, much faster. The importer is nice, built in backup button is great. Widgets are… OK if you are into that.
What’s bad?
- Since the update I have had some serious problems using WP-cache. It works… sometimes, but then throws out Internal Errors 500s out. This is caused by too much CPU usage. I never had a problem on 2.2 with this.
- The update made WordPress a lot less ‘light’. One of the reasons why some people like WordPress is because it came raw. You add in whatever you want, like what Firefox use to be. Most of the ‘improvements’ were already Plugins before.
- New default blogroll - I’m seriously tired of this. Yeah, it’s nice that the lead developers get some added links, which means added moolah. But seriously, the default blogroll is annoying. I haven’t seen many blogs which use the blogroll at all (although, I admit it can be useful for exchanging links) but even the ones who do use it don’t bother with the default blogroll. If you want people to link to all those websites, why not just leave it up to them? One or two links wouldn’t be bad… but damn, how many people do they have?
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Written: Sep 30, 2007Tags: blog, blogging, review, wordpress, wordpress 2.3
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I actually think the whole implementation of links in wordpress sucks. The links widget isn’t really useful at all. I wrote a plugin that replaces it, if you’re interested.
I replaced the links widget with a hand-coded unordered list using the text widget.