WordPress 2.3 Changes

Well the new version of WordPress is here and it is great! While some people are complaining about lack of plugin compatibility, the pros far outweigh the cons in version 2.3. With a little tweaking WordPress is a powerful SEO machine. It is a very good content management system, but what separates it from other database driven CMS’s is its inherent support for SEO. There are several plugins that are vital to good SEO that I have written about. Most of the key plugins still function. One of the best changes to WordPress 2.3 is its capability to show when plugins have new versions. It also eliminates the need for a WordPress version check plugin since it tells you in the dashboard if a new version exists.

The upgrade of WordPress is always pretty easy and this update is no different. I was able to get it up on 17 blogs in a couple of hours. It is important to deactivate all your plugins before this update if you normally don’t do that. I like many webmaster can get pretty lazy when it comes to upgrading, so this time cover all the bases since there are many changes to the database in this upgrade. So please back up your database before updating, especially in 2.3. The WordPress site has a list of compatibility issues with themes and plugins here. This page is the features page with all the new stuff, but also has links to the plugins and themes compatibilities. The list is incomplete, but for the most part if your theme is widget compatible you should be all right.

Major WordPress 2.3 Features

The most obvious feature is tagging. WordPress has really gotten on the tagging bandwagon, probably in response to SES in San Diego where everyone was talking about tagging. One of the most obvious compatibility issues is with Ultimate Tag Warrior. This plugin was named as one of the most important plugins at SES, so it is a little weird that it won’t work with the new WordPress. Granted a lot of its features are now standard in the new upgrade and I am sure the developer will have a new update out soon. I personally have issues with a lot of tagging. I agree that tagging can be useful for posts that fall under multiple categories, but I have concerns over duplicate content issues that can arise from some tagging strategies.

Duplicate content is one of the biggest vulnerabilities with WordPress and giving search engines multiple ways to list the same content is dangerous. I use Technorati to handle tagging and tag clouds. The question is “How much does tagging help usability?” This is a big topic, but I prefer search over tags as a means for visitors to find what they are looking for on my site. Cluttered and long pages can easily disrupt a users concentration as they are searching for information on your blog. Deep link navigation and bread crumb navigation are the best ways to let your visitors know where they are, and where they have been. Previous and Next buttons can get confusing quickly.

One of the best things about the new tagging feature is the related posts by tags. Being able to have all the posts within specific tags listed can help users find all the info that your site has to offer on any given subject. The problem will be in filtering the output so you don’t have too many options for a user. Again cluttered sites are hard to follow and won’t get return visitors or high page views. If you aren’t sure of the difference or importance of these metrics read my post: Hits, Visitors, page views explained.

The tagging features eliminate the need for the following plugins:

• Ultimate Tag Warrior – this plugin is pretty hard to use for regular people like me anyway.
• Jerome’s Keywords – I always used this and was always irritated by how it would loose the keyword filed if you didn’t add the custom key “keywords” in the custom fields. I am still testing how this effects the meta tags.
• Simple Tags – I still use this because of its additional Technorati features.
• Bunny’s Technorati Tags – I always used Simple Tags so don’t know much about Bunny or her plugin.

If these were paid solutions I guess you would wonder if WordPress is becoming the Walmart of content management systems by pushing out the little guy. I will keep everyone informed on how the many tests on tagging that I am running are going.

Along with more features within the visual editor and tagging, the new WordPress also takes care of a couple of permalink and domain problems that have plagued them in the past. You now have control over the www and non-www version of your domain. We all know that Google can see the www and non-www version of a site as 2 different sites. Even though they have solved a lot of this in the Webmaster Center where you can assign the proper FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name) of your domain, it is good to have that backed up by WordPress. They have also fixed some of the slug and URL naming issues that occur when importing blogs like Blogger sites which tend to cut off the post title in the URL.

WordPress has always given you the control over the URL through the slug, but now you can be safe in importing or creating long URL’s with their new support of “pretty URL’s”. I know that there are experts out there that claim the URL isn’t important as much in blogs, but I disagree. I go as far as to end the URL string with a .html. While this might not matter to spiders, it does resolve canonical name issues that happen when the trailing slash is not included in the URL string. Yahoo might not care, but Google definitely does. I use the .html in the permalink to resolve this problem. Read more about it on my post – WordPress Permalinks Changing Links On An Existing Site - for more info.

The bottom line is WordPress 2.3 is a great update and worth the time. Back up everything and take it slow and you will be fine. I only scratched the surface of all the features. I have found the new version to be fast and clean. They did an awesome job with this update of WordPress.