The Beta News

I just updated my blogs to Wordpress 2.3. I know that some of you will be cautious, but I tried with one of my lesser known (!) blogs first and it went very smoothly. No errors or major problems. I deactivated all my plugins and replaced all files on my server with the new Wordpress 2.3 files.

Then I ran the upgrade script and that was it. Of course my blog looked weird without the plugins activated. I activated the relevant plugins and downloaded the ones that needed an upgrade. It is a nice feature in Wordpress 2.3. It shows which plugins that needs to be upgraded. It would be great if I could just click and they would update, you still have to download, unzip and upload, unless…

…you use OneClick from Anirudh Sanjeev. This clever little plugin to Wordpress and Firefox lets you click on the file link for instance in Wordpress Extend and your plugin or theme is uploaded to your blog. Anirudh has a thorough installation guide on his site.

And now the official word from Wordpress:

1. Native tagging support allows you to use tags in addition to categories on your post, if you so choose. We’ve included importers for the Ultimate Tag Warrior, Jerome’s Keywords, Simple Tags, and Bunny’s Technorati Tag plugins so if you’ve already been using a tagging plugin you can bring your data into the new system. The tagging system is also wicked-fast, so your host won’t mind.
2. Our new update notification lets you know when there is a new release of WordPress or when any of the plugins you use has an update available. It works by sending your blog URL, plugins, and version information to our new api.wordpress.org service which then compares it to the plugin database and tells you what the latest and greatest is you can use.
3. We’ve cleaned up URLs a bunch in a feature we call canonical URLs which does things like enforce your no-www preference, redirect posts with changed slugs so a link never goes bad, redirect URLs that get cut off in emails on similar to the correct post, and much more. This helps your users, and it also helps your search engine optimization, as search engines like for each page to be available in one canonical location.
4. Our new pending review feature will be great for multi-author blogs. It allows authors to submit a post for review by an editor or administrator, where before they would just have to save a draft and hope someone noticed it.
5. There is new advanced WYSIWYG functionality (we call it the kitchen sink button) that allows you to access some features of TinyMCE that were previously hidden.

Sounds interesting let’s see how it works.

UPDATE: I got an error on this blog when I saved a post or published one. It turns out that the plugin Google (XML) Sitemaps caused this. So before you start troubleshooting, make sure you deactivate all your plugins and activate them one at a time afterwards.

Did you upgrade to Wordpress 2.3 or are you waiting for the 2.3.1?