WordPress Blog By E-Mail Improving

Latest versions of WordPress have seemingly repaired the blog by email function. The wonderful folks who support WordPress, specifically Westi and Bobcat, always consider enhancement suggestions and respond promptly. I’ve almost overcome the anxiety of submitting tickets.

#5420 (Better exit for wp-mail.php) – WordPress Trac – Trac

Adding tags to posts

If you have a pre-2.3 WordPress blog and didn’t use tags, you may want to go back and tag the old posts. If you don’t want to do that, you may want to adjust your theme so that you don’t have an empty field when your theme calls for the tags and there are none associated with the post. The Codex recommends this snippet if you want to check for tags before you render them:
if (the_tags(', ', ', ', )) the_tags();
This part of the Codex was added after I had already decided on the following code to return a true if there are tags associated with the post:
if (get_the_tags()) the tags();
Not as efficient but it works. If you don’t care about having empty fields in your theme, don’t worry about this. I think it’s a cleaner presentation with this check.

Tag Cloud Tip

The Tag Cloud template tag does more than just generate a tag cloud in WordPress 2.3. You can easily configure it to generate a unordered list which can look like any other unordered date or archive list. Just configure it as follows:
wp_tag_cloud('smallest=10&largest=10&format=list')

You will get an unordered list that you can style using a class of wp-tag-cloud. I use it on my archives.php page so when you click on the archives, you get a date based list, category based list and a list of tags used.

Finally Updated to WP 2.3

Now that EventCalendar3 is updated and my theme is ready (thanks, Neil!), I updated from 2.2.3 to 2.3.1. It went without a single problem. I’ll have to go through the archives and put tags on the posts but so far, so good!

WordPress Upgrade Preflight Check

Install and run this plugin before you jump to WordPress 2.3. It only takes a minute.

Smiths R Us » WordPress Upgrade Preflight Check