Last night DLTJ was upgraded to WordPress 2.3. As far as I can tell, everything is working okay, but please let me know in the comments or the comment form if something doesn’t seem right. There were two tricky parts to the upgrade. (Well, three really, if you count the tasks necessary to extract the reminants of the Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) from the theme.) Fortunately, one of them was not the upgrade itself; after abandoning the Gentoo portage ebuild for WordPress, I switched to the Subversion update method. This was the first time I did an ‘svn switch‘ to get the new version, and it worked great.
The first is dealing with the new tag infrastructure in Worpress 2.3. For those that read DLTJ via the website (as opposed to reading it through the RSS feed exclusively), you know that at the bottom of each posting is a table of tags with links to postings in DLTJ as well as links to items with similar tags in Technorati, del.icio.us, and a search for the tag in the english Wikipedia. Previously I had hacked UTW to provide that format, but without UTW available I bit the bullet and created a simple plug-in to create the table. It was my first plug-in for WordPress and I was quite proud of myself right up to the point where I couldn’t figure out why the table wasn’t appearing when the plug-in was enabled. So I went into a recent post to verify the tags and saw that the problem wasn’t with my plug-in — the problem was that there were no tags in the posting! It seems that I had missed the step of importing the UTW tags into the new Wordpress 2.3 tag structure. I finally found out about it via the WordPress support forums, so here is a clue for those attempting the same thing — you’ll find utilities for importing tags in the…wait for it…import admin page. It would have been nice if the “/wp-admin/upgrade.php” utility saw that I was using a previous tagging system and pointed me in the direction of the import utility.
The second problem was easier to solve, and that was the missing functionality of Extended Live Archive on the DLTJ homepage. Fortunately, someone went through the effort of figuring out what needed to be changed in Extended Live Archive to accomodate the tag structure and published the results. I don’t like how the tag page doesn’t follow the common practice of font sizes based on popularity of the use of the tag, but I can get along without it. The built-in “tag cloud” functionality does a nice job of doing that.
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