WordPress v2.3 is perhaps just hours away from being released. Monday is upgrade day! Despite this negative blog entry, I am excited and staying with WordPress.

Today I have been enjoying the day mostly inside, and with a bit of playing. Before I upgraded my blog, I did a backup of the whole site and disabled all plugins. I recommend all WordPress bloggers to have a look at a page listing all known compatible and incompatible plugins. I found one not working, well, I already had my suspions that the Simple Tagging plugin would not work with the new version. Some of the major new features announced with the new version are related to tags; the new version has the core functionality of Simple Tagging.

Sadly WordPress v2.3 is not capable of importing tags from Simple Tagging, so I have to tag all my articles again. First 6 pages are already done! I think that the Tag Cloud implemented is not as advanced as the one included in Simple Tagging, as I have not found options like how the tags in the cloud should appear; like alphabetic, random, most used and how many tags displayed at once. I simply don’t understand the fuzz about the new version, well-known plugins would already give you the same functionality, and in most cases with better options. An example, Simple Tagging would show you a list of related articles based on the used tags, which ment that you didn’t have to link them all up within the article! Lorelle on WordPress has listed the limitations of the tag implementation.

Luckily I will not meet any upgrade problems with the two blogs I maintain at work. They are both far simpler then mine in terms of functionality. I can only hope that tags support will become better in future releases.

What I really like with this version, is the new, enhanced visual text editor. It has improved a lot since v2.2. By pressing an icon for Show/Hide Advanced Toolbar (Alt+V), you will get up more “Word”-like functionality. I guess this new functionality will be highly appreciated by many users! Another great feature is the inbuilt update notification for new versions of WordPress and of your installed plugins.