WordPress 2.3 was released yesterday. At first, I wasn’t sure if I was going to upgrade to it, due to a lot of changes, some of which could have broken the theme. But then I played around with it, and nothing conflicted, except for one plugin, which was easy enough to disable. While I’ll have to get another plugin to replace that one, it’s no big deal since I already know which one works with 2.3.

So what has changed in WordPress that concerns users? Let’s take a quick look at some of them…

1. Tags - WordPress now has tagging capabilities built into the core. Tags can be used in addition to the regular catagories, so people are not stuck using one or the other. While categories can be used to place posts in a broad topic, tags can be used to place it in more specific categories, or used to link to more specific topics. For an example, if I were to do a post on a weekend, I would put it in my Life category, and use tags for the more specific things I did that weekend, such as bike, work, etc. (Ok, so maybe that was a bad example, but I couldn’t think of anything else at the moment)
2. Update Notifications - Yes, the latest edition of WordPress will tell you when there are updates to WordPress itself as well as plugins you have in the plugins directory. While some on the WordPress mailing lists don’t like this (another post for another day), I love it, since I want to make sure that I have the latest versions of plugins, and checking manually is a time consuming process.
3. Canonical URLs - I’m not going to explain this, since Mark Jaquith, one of the lead developers, explained it in detail on his blog in a post titled simply enough, WordPress 2.3: Canonical URLs. I do like this, since it can only help me in the search engine wars. And since I can deactivate a plugin that was doing the same thing.

Those are probably the three biggest things that I like about 2.3; there are many more new features to WordPress 2.3 - if you’d like to read them, check out the WordPress 2.3 Announcment Post on the WP Development Blog.

Now to make some changes so tags are displayed…