What’s New In WordPress 2.3?
WordPress 2.3 has been released and has a lot of bug fixes and nice new features. Here is a list of some of the changes.
- Native tagging support - in addition to categories, tags are now natively supported by WordPress. Importers for Ultimate Tag Warrior, Jerome’s Keywords, Simple Tags, and Bunny’s Technorati Tag plugins are included.
- Update Notifications - if an update for WordPress or a plugin is available, a message is displayed indicating.
- Canonical URLs - enforces no-www preference and attempts to redirect incomplete URLs or URLs to posts with changed slugs to the correct location.
- Pending Review - now a contributing writer can submit a post for review by an administrator or editor.
- More features in WYSIWYG Editing - additional features of TinyMCE have been exposed.
- Full Atom 1.0 Support - including the publishing protocol.
- Using newer jQuery 1.1.4 - the latest and greatest jQuery is version 1.2.1, but at least they’ve upgraded to a faster core. jQuery is a great Javascript library.
- New taxonomy system - post and link categories have been combined with tags.
- Ability to disable update notifications - in case you don’t want these notifications.
- Pluggable Importers - you should be able to write or use plugins to import from additional sources.
- 351 Bug fixes - which is nice
Will Your Plugins Work?
Be sure to check the Plugin Compatibility List to get an idea of whether your installed plugins will have trouble under WordPress 2.3.
Upgrade Preflight Compatibility Check
Be sure to install and run the Wordpress Upgrade Preflight Check to look for compatibility issues before you upgrade to version 2.3.
Upgrade Preflight Check is a plugin that will attempt to check your other plugins and themes for problems that may cause errors when upgrading to WordPress 2.3. Run this before upgrading and it may save some headaches. It works in version 2.3 too and may be useful to help identify the cause of errors.
Problems Upgrading to WordPress 2.3
They say to turn off plugins before upgrading, but who can be bothered with that? Well, I should have (a) run the preflight check and (b) turned off plugins.
The upgrade went fine for the most part, but I did run encounter two situations that required some attention, recorded here in case someone else trips over them (i.e. was as careless as I).
A couple sites running UltimateTagWarrior crashed with the following error on all pages.
Fatal error: Cannot redeclare is_tag() (previously declared in …/wp-content/plugins/UltimateTagWarrior/ultimate-tag-warrior.php on line 110
The fix was simply to comment out the is_tag() function in the ultimate-tag-warrior.php file.
/*
function is_tag() {
global $utw;
return (count($utw->GetCurrentTagSet()) > 0);
}
*/WordPress database error: [Table 'wp_....wp_terms' doesn't exist]
Typically, if you don’t upgrade your database immediately after performing an upgrade, your site is mostly okay until you hit the admin interface and upgrade the database. However, after upgrading to WordPress 2.3, visitors to your site may see the above error until you perform the database upgrade step.
Not a big deal, since you need to upgrade the database anyway, but it might be a good argument for doing the upgrade in an off hour.
A Nice Upgrade
All in all, WordPress 2.3 is a nice upgrade and sets the stage for WordPress 2.4, slated for December, 2007. Tagging is now native, though support is limited. The dashboard feeds are pluggable, the canonical URL handling adds some SEO benefits, update notifications will help you keep on top of things, and the other new features — not to mention the bug fixes — argue for (carefully) upgrading to the new system.
