I’ve successfully migrated this blog to WordPress 2.3, and I was actually a little surprised at how painless it was.  I did turn up a handful of duplication errors with regard to the wp_term_relationship tables, even though I’d made sure I deleted those tables beforehand, but in spite of that, I think everything migrated to 2.3 just fine.  The UTW conversion went very smoothly, converting nearly 1200 tags and over 4100 tag-to-post relationships in about 3 seconds.  Very slick.

I’ve also just spent the last 45 minutes upgrading plugins, thanks to the nifty little plugin update notifier that’s now built into WordPress, and I’ve also coded this theme to be compliant with WordPress 2.3 tags.  I’ll rebundle it tomorrow and distribute it on the download page.  All in all, I’m very happy with what I’m seeing.

This is the only one of my WordPress installations that I’ve run tags on, since UTW was, quite frankly, such a pain in the neck to implement.  I’ll be converting a couple of my other installations over to tags soon, as well, and I’ve been toying with the idea of setting up a Tumblelog but was waiting for 2.3 to come out before doing so.  I think I’ll be setting that up in the near future now, as well.

As much as I love my hosted version of WordPress and the power I have to customize it however I see fit, there are some drawbacks to the system that I have yet to be able to hurdle.

• openID. I’ve wanted to set up an openID server for my blog for quite awhile now.  The idea of being able to use my domain to securely log into other websites that use openID, rather than having to hassle with different usernames and passwords, was very appealing to me.  However, the technology was initially so new that it was difficult to incorporate openID into WordPress without some hefty file hacking to make it work.  Then plugins started coming out, some of which worked better than others.  Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to get openID to work here, despite a nice little WordPress plugin that’s supposed to take all the hardship right out of installing it.  I suspect that problem lies with inadequate support from my webhost, and all my attempts to contact the plugin’s author have been met with the silent treatment.  The plugin itself hasn’t even undergone any changes, additions, or revisions since it was first published, so I suspect that it’s probably no longer being supported.  This, then, continues to leave me in an openID black hole until something changes either with my webhost or with a plugin developer that can produce an openID plugin that works so well that almost anyone can use it on any hosting package.
• dp.SyntaxHighlighter. I work enough with CSS in the occasional WordPress or bbPress theming project that I do like to share snippets of code when the situation demands it.  There’s a host of good code sharing plugins out there for WordPress, but the WordPress.com developers have incorporated a syntax highlighting package into the .com blogs that’s really slick.  The thing that I like so much about it is that it has a little button that will automatically copy all the code to your clipboard for easy pasting into a text editor.  Gone is the need to highlight and copy and then have to manually remove the numbers from the beginning of each line.  Unfortunately, dp.SyntaxHighlighter has not yet been bundled as a WordPress plugin, and not being terribly adept yet at coding in PHP, I’m not sure where I’d even start to create a plugin to incorporate it into hosted versions of WordPress.  I may try tackling the project here at some point and learn much more, I’m sure, about PHP in the process, but that will have to wait for another time when I don’t have quite so much on my plate. I suspect, though, it’s only a matter of time before else beats me to it.

• LaTeX. The WordPress.com blogs also have LaTeX installed on them for the uber math geeks.  I had a brief introduction to LaTeX when I took Calculus from my father-in-law during my undergraduate education (though I hadn’t yet then met his daughter).  I’ve always been somewhat intrigued by coding and markup languages, and LaTeX seemed similar in many ways to HTML and C.  The beauty of LaTeX, though, lies in its ability to allow you to easily and attractively put complex mathematical formulas and diagrams on a page.  The downside to LaTeX, though, is that the software necessary to make it work is rather complicated to install and somewhat less complicated to use.  It’s gotten better in recent iterations, of course, but it’s still somewhat cumbersome to set up.  The brains over at WordPress.com actually took the time and effort to make LaTeX work with their blogs and to allow anyone who wants to do so to render LaTeX formulas on their WP.com blogs.  There are a couple of plugins that allow you to use LaTeX on hosted versions of WordPress, as well, but they depend heavily on all the LaTeX software being installed on your server.  Most webhosts do not have these software packages installed, and it is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to install these packages yourself or to get tech support to install them for you.  So, unfortunately, I have yet to get LaTeX installed on this blog.  This does, however, providing a major driving motivation for me to use my WordPress.com blog a bit more, especially since I intend to spend some time working my way through my old Calculus textbook (yes, I did keep it) in an attempt to learn Calculus again and learn it better this time.  So, I may end up referring you back and forth between the two blogs, at least until I can find a way to get LaTeX installed here.

Small Potato covered one of the new tag functions that will be appearing in WordPress 2.3 – <?php the_tags(); ?>.  I was pleased to find, though, that the WordPress development team had included the new tag cloud function, as well, since I currently use UTW’s tag cloud as an enhanced site index.

The documentation on <?php wp_tag_cloud(); ?> is currently incomplete, so I had to do some digging into the core code to find out how to adjust the parameters.  <?php wp_tag_cloud(); ?> takes a string of parameters that adjust how your tag cloud displays.  For example, <?php wp_tag_cloud('number=20&order=desc'); ?> will display a tag cloud of your top 20 tags and sort them in descending order.

Here are the various settings:

• smallest – Adjusts the size of the smallest tags in the cloud.  Default is ‘8’.
• largest – Adjusts the size of the biggest tags in the cloud.  Default is ‘22’.
• unit – Sets the unit type for font size (i.e. point or em).  Default is ‘pt’.
• number – How many tags will display in the cloud.  Default is ‘45’.
• format – ‘Flat’ displays an inline cloud with each term separated by whitespace. ‘List’ generates an unordered list.  ‘Array’ lets you define an array of tags.  Default is ‘flat’.
• orderby – Sort the cloud by ‘name’ or ‘count’.  Default is ‘name’.

• order – Sort the cloud in ascending or descending order.  Default is ‘ASC’.

  The new native taxonomy isn’t as powerful as UTW was, but I’m sure it won’t be too long before there will be a host of new plugins to change that.

  WordPress 2.3 Beta 2 releases on Monday.  I’ll write about any new changes somewhere around then.

Small Potato has written up a preliminary review of WordPress 2.3 Beta 1, and I must say that the new features being introduced into this version are positively yummy.  I think I’m going to really like having tags native to the WordPress core.  I was worried about the need for a tag importer for those of us who use tagging plugins, so I’m pleased to see that the WordPress development team will be including an importer for UTW and are currently testing importers for a couple of other popular tagging plugins, as well.  It was also nice to get a closer look at the new template tag for tags – <?php the_tags('', '', ''); ?>.

The default blogroll has also been the source of much contention lately, in light of the debate over what constitutes sponsored links and what doesn’t.  Matt’s integrity has also been called into question over a number of issues lately, so it’s nice to see the development team taking the suggestions of the WordPress community seriously by replacing the legacy default blogroll links with others that point at WordPress development and documentation links.

I haven’t had a chance to install and test out the WordPress 2.3 Beta 1 yet, but I’m already liking what I’m hearing from those who have.  I can’t wait to take a look at a full feature list for the next version of WordPress.  I expect that some of my current plugins may break with 2.3, but I think the trade-off for new native features will be well worth the extra trouble.