You may have noticed a few cosmetic changes to this blog since yesterday. That’s because I upgraded from 2.0 to 2.3. The makers of WordPress raved about a “kick ass taxonomy” system, which I’ll need to explore when I have more time. For now, I knew this blog was way overdue for an upgrade. So I performed that yesterday morning.

Then I came home and started experimenting with plug-ins. Some of the ones I had didn’t work, such as the Feedburner plugin. Thankfully, my image uploader did. That’s the risk when you upgrade, losing valued plug-ins. I also experimented with widgets because I’ve been frustrated with the clutter on my sidebar. I’ve been wanting to scrunch down the archives for a while, but couldn’t figure out how to do it without breaking the blog. After 2.5 years, the list of archives and the categories had grown very long. I’m hoping someone will develop a plug-in that will collapse the links, but that’s not as big of an issue as the other two.

I decided to test out the Admin Drop Down Menus plugin. It works great on 2.3, but I’m finding that it takes getting used to, as far as looks. I’m so used to seeing the blue navigation bar, which tended to get cluttered.

What do I think of WP 2.3? So far, the only difference I see in the main interface is the Tag insertion box below the post box. I like the idea of having tags versus categories. If you’re new to blogging and would like to know the difference between these two terms, read WordPress.com’s Tags and Categories article. At this point in time, I think I would prefer tags over categories because you don’t have to keep tags in a list in my sidebar. I don’t think I’m going to bother getting the Tag Cloud plugin because I think it’s overkill and it would defeat my goal of keeping my sidebar organized.

I liked the widget interface because I can add and remove items from my sidebar without having to mess with the code. My only gripe is that I wish they had widgets for headers. The list of formats you can import into your WordPress blog has grown to include tagging, such as the popular Ultimate Tag Warrior and Jerome’s Keywords.

Kudos to the WordPress team. :)

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