What is New in Wordpress 2.3 (Beta 1/2)?
[UPDATE 2: Mark Gosh has posted a nice summary of popular blog posts talking about what's new in Wordpress 2.3. Must Read.
TWP website has a new podcast that previews Wordpress 2.3 at the end of it.]
[UPDATE 1: Wordpress 2.3 Beta 2 was released a couple of days ago. Importers are added for Jerome’s Keywords and Simple Tagging Plugins(importer for UTW was already there; read the post). Ryan Boren talks about how the plugin developers can use the new actions added to Wordpress 2.3 related to status changes of the posts(Draft -> Pending, Pending -> Published etc).]
The first beta of a new version of Wordpress blogging engine, 2.3, was released a few hours ago. Wordpress aficionados might already know the new major and minor features that were being planned(and some of them later shelved ;) ) for this release through mailing lists and other sources but for the others, below is a summary of a few changes that can be found in the new Wordpress 2.3 interface. Go through them and if you later decide to dig deeper into these new features, you only have to download Wordpress 2.3 Beta 1 Beta 2(~1MB) and give it a try in XAMPP!
What’s new in Wordpress 2.3 Beta 1?
- The most important improvement in Wordpress 2.3 version is the built-in support for tagging of blog posts with relevant keywords in technorati style. There is no need to install a separate plugin like Ultimate Tag Warrior now. The text box shown below allows as many tags to be associated with a given post as is needed.
The tables used to manage the categories are now replaced by new tables to manage the tags i.e. wp_categories, wp_post2cat and wp_link2cat are replaced by the tables wp_terms, wp_term_taxonomy, wp_term_relationships. Lot of information on tag support is available on the Internet(especially email archives), so treat Google as your friend. More on database schema changes
- A new state in which the draft posts can now be saved under is “Pending Review.” It is useful when not all the authors are supposed to be allowed to publish their posts to the weblog before first being reviewed by an editor or an administrator.
Which means that drafts can be of two types now: posts still under editing(Draft) and posts that are ready to be published(Pending Review); there was no good way to differentiate like this earlier. An efficient way to immediately inform the contributor that the Pending Review post has been pushed back to Draft state by the editor, perhaps with a custom message attached explaining the reason for it, is however absent. EMail/IM etc are the alternate options for now; someone can write a plugin in the future that fills this need. (More info)
Also, Manage -> Posts now contains a drop-down box from which one can filter posts belonging to different states: Draft, Pending Review, Published and Private. So it can be used as a convenient place to access all the draft posts together. Similar filtering can be done based on Categories too. To search posts based on tags or other keywords, the same old search box can be used.
- A new button on the WYSIWYG editor toolbar can be used to show (and hide) a second (new) toolbar which has got additional editing buttons. These buttons allow operations such as underlining of text, font colour selection, inserting <H> tags, undo-ing, pasting directly from MS Word document etc.
I always use the plain text editor so it doesn’t matter to me how many additional buttons are added to the WYSIWYG editor! Doesn’t matter to those too who use their own favourite WYSIWYG editor in Wordpress.
- For those blogs that use the popular plugin Ultimate Tag Warrior to manage the tags, Wordpress 2.3 Beta 1 has an importing tool to import those tags to its own native tag format(importing Simple Tagging Plugin tags and Jerome’s Keywords likely in the 2.3 final version it’s there in Beta 2). POC(Plain Old Categories) can also be converted to tags using the provided converter tool. These two options can also be accessed from the Manage -> Import page.
- One of the first things I ever do after installing Wordpress is hide all the links from the default blogroll. The links now point to various resources related to Wordpress project instead of blogs of important Wordpress developers, but I still think I will have to hide them when upgrading to 2.3 version. Or make it visible only to the blog administrator.
- There are many other differences too, like file sizes in Manage -> Uploads section, Categories Widgets, Plugin (and core) Update Notifier etc.
Download it and try it out by yourself. Or check-out the source directly from the subversion repository to keep updated with the latest changes. Wordpress Planet website should keep us posted on the latest information on Wordpress 2.3’s journey towards the final release(more detailed than Wordpress development blog anyway).
