If you’re like me, the only thing you look at on your WordPress dashboard is the right hand side that tells you how many comments are waiting for moderation and the sites that have linked to your blog recently. Of course, that means that you might miss announcements from WordPress and today that would have been the case if I weren’t so excited about this update. WordPress released a new version today (2.3) and here are the new features as explained by the WordPress blog:

I could write a blog post about each new feature, but I’ll try to be brief:

  1. Native tagging support allows you to use tags in addition to categories on your post, if you so choose. We’ve included importers for the Ultimate Tag Warrior, Jerome’s Keywords, Simple Tags, and Bunny’s Technorati Tag plugins so if you’ve already been using a tagging plugin you can bring your data into the new system. The tagging system is also wicked-fast, so your host won’t mind.
  2. Our new update notification lets you know when there is a new release of WordPress or when any of the plugins you use has an update available. It works by sending your blog URL, plugins, and version information to our new api.wordpress.org service which then compares it to the plugin database and tells you what the latest and greatest is you can use.
  3. We’ve cleaned up URLs a bunch in a feature we call canonical URLs which does things like enforce your no-www preference, redirect posts with changed slugs so a link never goes bad, redirect URLs that get cut off in emails on similar to the correct post, and much more. This helps your users, and it also helps your search engine optimization, as search engines like for each page to be available in one canonical location. More info here.
  4. Our new pending review feature will be great for multi-author blogs. It allows authors to submit a post for review by an editor or administrator, where before they would just have to save a draft and hope someone noticed it.
  5. There is new advanced WYSIWYG functionality (we call it the kitchen sink button) that allows you to access some features of TinyMCE that were previously hidden.

Now maybe I’m too much of a geek but I’m pretty stoked about a couple of these features in particular. Being an SEO, I absolutely LOVE the canonical issue fix. Not only will it enforce your URL preference (www or non-www) but it sounds like it’s going to solve the problem of including your categories in your URL. Up to this point, I’ve suggested that people avoid putting the category of a post in the URL because in my experience, that’s bound to change over time. Whether you decide you the post actually belongs in a different section or you decide you need to change the name of the category, it then becomes a BIG pain to fix it. Any time you change a URL you’re usually sacrificing something from the SEO perspective or you’re forced to create 301 redirects to compensate. Now I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather it take care of itself.

The other new feature that I’m excited about is the tagging option. I’ve had several people recommend a Technorati tag plugin to me recently but simply haven’t gotten around to installing it. Now it looks like I won’t even need to install a plugin to start using tags! I’m continually amazed at the number of features and improvements WordPress continually makes. If you’re not using this platform your blog, you really should give it a shot. If there’s something you want that it doesn’t have, wait a while and chances are they’ll be adding it soon.

Despite my excitement, I’m going to have to wait to upgrade to the new version for a day or two. It’s usually not a problem to upgrade but since my post yesterday hit the front page of Digg.com, I don’t want to risk losing that extra traffic. Once I do get a chance, I’ll let you know how it goes and if I encounter any problems or issues but if you get around to it before I do, please let the rest of us know how it goes. Thanks!

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