I upgraded to WordPress 2.3 over the weekend and other than a few bumps it seemed to go relatively smoothly. The bumps were very curious and coupled with a melt-down of the server resulted in the site being out of action for a few hours. Eventually everything magically resolved itself, so I’m going to chalk it down to just ‘one of those things’.
One of the new features in WordPress 2.3 is tags, and I’m very happy with the way that they’ve been integrated. The developers have chosen a softly-softly approach, leaving the door open for others to take it further (as detailed by boren.nu). Being one of these others I’ve updated my HeadSpace plugin to make full use of the new 2.3 tagging facilities. HeadSpace takes the default tags further, adding many extra features, which I’ve decided to demonstrate in a short video.
Basically, HeadSpace adds a neat JavaScript tagging interface on top of the default tag field. When a post is edited, HeadSpace will automatically make tag suggestions based upon previous tags and the contents of the post (including the title). If you add new tags these will be made available in future suggestions.
It doesn’t stop there either. The suggestions are made using a smart ‘stemming’ algorithm. What this means is that HeadSpace looks at the root of a word and then looks for any variations. For example, if you previously tagged a post with ‘locale’, then HeadSpace will automatically suggest ‘locale’ for posts containing:
- locale
- locales
- localization
This is very useful not only in getting appropriate tags, but also in reducing duplication.
On top of this, HeadSpace adds a mass-editing page where you can edit tags across all posts. The auto-suggestion algorithm is integrated with this, making it very easy to add tags to all posts. I managed to tag everything on my site in five minutes!
Should you still be stumped for tags then you can also get suggestions from Yahoo’s tagging service.
The new HeadSpace features work do not depend on WordPress 2.3, and it allows you to have tagging in earlier versions of WordPress (although you miss out on the new tag display functions). An importer has been included in HeadSpace which allows you to convert existing HeadSpace tags into WordPress 2.3 tags.
Remember that HeadSpace allows tags on other pages (home page, pages, archives, categories), as well as managing most other aspects of meta-data.
Hi. Is there anyway to stop headspace from displaying tags on the posts? The Mandigo theme already includes the tags, so now they are showing up twice.
Thanks,
Rick
Hi Rick,
Yes, on the HeadSpace modules, you can click the edit button on the tags module and set the tag display to ‘never’.
Hi John – thanks for your post on upgrading to WP2.3!
I am currently using WP 2.2.3 and have been a little hesitant to upgrade. But, your post made it appear as though it was not as painful as I had thought.
Happy New Year,
Mark
Hi,John.
There is someting wrong with your headspace2 in the wordpress2.2.3.
It show the information HeadSpace Meta data panel,
Fatal error: Call to undefined function wp_filter_nohtml_kses() in /home/acedodo/domains/icedig.com/public_html/wp-content/plugins/headspace2/modules/page/tags/auto_suggest.php on line 61
Maybe the wordpress2.2.3 API was changed a little.But how to fix it.Thanks
The API hasn’t changed and that function should exist in WP 2.2. I’ve updated HeadSpace to check the function exists and this will stop the error appearing.
Hi, John!
Thanks for sharing! I definetely agree, WP 2.3 is the best blogging platform out there! It’s very nice they included tag system now.