I saw the news, and I wanted to be the first to post about it (I was actually) but I was too tired to do it before I went to bed… That John guy has beaten me to the punch. So here’s my take on what is in the release:

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.

Ahem… Do I need another system for Google to find even more ‘duplicate’ posts…? I don’t think so.

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.

This could be seriously useful, as I do get behind with my plugins on the different blogs I manage.

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.

Ah… A link that never goes bad. Should be helpful when I change my options in permalinks (again!).

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.

While this is not relevant for my primary blog, I’m looking forward to that feature as an alternative to Role Manager. I’ll be using it on my business website, though, (probably along with Role Manager).

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.

Some of the features were already via a short cut on the keyboard, wonder if that is better than the short cut trick.

Interesting, but I think I will stave off the upgrade till version 2.3.1 comes out squatting the bugs. I may try the release on a minor site of mine, just to play with it.

Well, you’ve hopefully posted your first post by now. Perhaps you’ve even gone ahead and explored all the options in the window that we didn’t mention the first time. That’s fine. I’m planning to go over some more of the options as part of today’s lesson.

The joy of being able to post your first couple of posts has doubtless been rudely shattered by poor spelling, typos, incorrect URL, or the ceaseless drive of the writer to rewrite… whatever. How can you edit your posts?

Like most things, there’s more than one way. In fact, there are two easy ways. Let’s start with the easiest way. So login to the blog, and you’ll be taken to the Dashboard. Right at the top left of your dashboard page, next to your blog title, you’ll see the words ‘View Site’. This image should help you.

Click on this to go to the front page (where your first few posts likely are).

When you’re on the front page, you’ll likely see the words ‘edit’ or ‘edit post’, or a pencil (this all depends on the theme you chose). Click the word to take you to the edit screen.

The post will open as in Posting Your First Post, but this time the main area and title area will not be empty.

You can go about changing the title and the text as you wish now, don’t forget to save it when you are done, or every so often if you are taking a while to finish the editing work.

There are additional things you may wish to change as well, but I’ll only mention five things you might want to change. Almost all of the options can be found on the right of your ‘edit screen’.

1. the post slug – if you change the title of your post, since this automatically generates your post-slug (the part of the name that is used as the unique address). You should likely change this. The easiest way is to delete the text in the box, and hit ‘save’, ‘publish’ or whatever.

2. the date – if you decide that you want to publish this another day, you can do one of two things.

a. change the timestamp – simply change the publish date to a future date (like arranging an appointment), check the ‘edit timestamp’ box, then hit ‘save’ or ‘publish’. Once this is done, the system will publish the post automatically at the preset time. In fact, you can schedule a lot of posts way into the future!

All timestamps are in the 24-hour clock standard. Also, note that the server time may be different from your own time zone.

b. change the post status – You can do this manually, too. Look at the Post Status box on the right, above the previous box. There are typically three conditions: published, draft and private. Let’s not concern ourselves with ‘private’ right now. If you are editing a published post, you can simply click the ‘draft’ button here, and then hit ‘save’. The post will return to ‘unpublished’ status.

3. the categories – You may also wish to change or add categories to your posting from the original one. You can do this in the category box on the top right.

You can simply check the category you want if it is already there or type the name of a category in the top box, and click ‘add’. It will be autochecked when the box refreshes in a few seconds.

4. Comments and Pings – When you publish a post on your blog, there are two ways for people to interact with your publication. We’ll just look at comments, right now. In fact, the comments can be managed in the Options page, and individual comments can also be managed in the ‘Comments’ section. We’ll come back to this. If you are uncomfortable with commenting when you start out, you don’t need to worry about this and can simply uncheck any comments and pings at all, until you feel more confident. The comments and pings facilities in blogs are part of what make the blog much more interactive, communal, and so very web 2.0.

If you haven’t altered any of the settings for comments and pings, it’s likely that in a new blog, both of these boxes are checked. You can leave them as they are, or uncheck them (one or both).

In general, whatever you do when you edit your post, you will need to remember to hit ‘save’ or ‘save and continue’ or, in some cases, ‘publish’ to store the options and changes you made.

BTW, I did say there are two ways to manage your posts. We’ll also come back to that in a future post. Don’t worry, and DON’T be afraid to explore on your own!

WordPress 2.3 is now in Beta mode, if you don’t already know! And there have been a slurry of improvements, but one area that needs improvement in my books is… well, can you guess…

If you can’t guess, that’s my drafts folder with I don’t exactly know how many ideas I have in there for posts.

I thought I was bad until I saw this image. Then I read about a guy who regularly wrote …

I write a lot of content that isn’t time-sensitive so it tends to chill. I usually have about 100+ drafts lying around. I mucked around with the admin templates to break it down by category, but it is still tremendously awkward to work with. Powerful drafting functionality is right near the top of my list of desired improvements. (by Xander).

It’s quite clear that there are a number of ways that WordPress could improve its drafting tools as well as ideas generation. I wish I were a coder, because I could surely implement some of my ideas. Well it seems that, amongst other features, WordPress 2.3 which is in beta and coming soon has implemented some helpful features. Then I got wind that WordPress.com had already implemented some of the ideas, and sure enough, they had. Take a look!

You’ll see that Drafts, instead of being below the blue bar, now have their own separate filter/tag view. Click on the Status Dropdown menu, and hit ‘draft’. Quickly and conveniently your posts in draft mode appear listed below. Of course, you can filter further by ‘month’, ‘category’, and ‘search term’. This should help to keep drafts under control somewhat! Let’s hope that feature makes it to the Release Candidate.

I’d also suggest that we could separate drafts into ‘ideas’ (ideas for posts, with a few words and sentences only), ‘notes’ (for posts that have upto about 50 words or so, and can be grouped on one page conveniently) and ‘drafts’ for ideas or notes that have ‘grown’ and are being scheduled for publication. That would help me a lot, as many of my drafts are just ideas or tips or links that might one day become full posts, but I don’t have any way to write them now. Both ‘notes’ and ‘ideas’ could be displayed on one single page with little buttons underneath, saying something like ‘promote to notes/ideas’, ‘post to drafts’ or even ‘publish’…. That’d be nice.