Testing Out Wordpress 2.5-RC1

After reading the sneak peek post on the next release of Wordpress, I decided to download the 2.5 Release Candidate to see what it would break on my site.

For the most part everything works as it should. What did break was anything related to the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin I had installed. Part of the reason I held off upgrading to 2.3 was Wordpress’s decision to support tagging and didn’t want to deal with migrating over. Since there were no other compelling features I left well enough alone and stayed with version 2.2.3. Now with all the goodies coming with 2.5 I’m feeling the urge to update. So I decided to try a local install on my computer, import my database and templates, and see if I could get tagging up in running with Wordpress instead of UTW.

It looks like UTW still functions properly but if you want WP to manage your tags you have to do an import. Luckily WP makes that super simple. Just go to Manage…Import…and pick the Ultimate Tag Warrior import option. Guides you through 5 simple steps and all of your tags are now in WP’s world. I’ll have to eventually clean them up since it added a bunch of hyphens to my tags, but that shouldn’t be that big of a deal.

With that part out of the way, the tricky stuff was next…what do I have to change in my templates to get tags to show up in my posts? Didn’t take much more than one php line in the single.php template, but familiarizing myself with templates I altered a year ago took a bit longer. Deactivating the UTW plugin had the negative side-effect of killing my related posts list after each posts so I had to install the Similiar Posts plugin to remedy that. An added bonus is it’s 2.5 compatible…yay!

The only other tag related things I had to fix were the tag cloud on the homepage (removed the UTW tag cloud code and turned on a widget. easy!) and add a line of php in my tag archive template.

With those tagging issues taken care of I decided to dig around and see what changed and what was new with 2.5. Some of the things that I think are great improvements are:

• New admin theme. The old blue one wasn’t bad but this orange and light blue theme is so refreshing. I likes!
• Media buttons for uploading images, video, and audio to your posts and pages. While older releases of Wordpress made it fairly easy to add media to your posts these buttons and the new upload interface really refine things.
• Plugin Management. I noticed that some of my plugins indicated that there were updated versions available and provided a link to download them or update automatically. Nice!

I’m really tempted to install 2.5-RC1 onto my live site and start working with it more, but I probably should wait until the official version drops. Which by the sounds of it could be any day now. I can’t wait!