Upgrading to Wordpress 2.3

I finally made the switch to Wordpress 2.3 after pondering for a little while if I should upgrade this early or wait until I was sure that everything would be still working after the switch. The major problem that I saw was the new tagging system that was build into Wordpress 2.3 which was incompatible with the tagging system of the prior versions and especially with the plugin that I have been using for over a year: Simple Tagging.

After a few days the author of Simple Tagging renamed it into Simple Tags making it fully compatible to Wordpress 2.3. I still hoped that it would be easy to import the 6500 tags that I added throughout the year. I did a test upgrade on a local version of Ghacks to make sure the upgrade would be without serious consequences.

It turned out that I only needed to change the tag related function calls in the Wordpress theme folder. Everything else was working as intended. I disabled the Simple Tagging plugin, made the upgrade to Wordpress 2.3, edited the function calls in single.php and index.php, upped the Simple Tags plugin and enabled it.

Importing tags was easier than thought as well. The import function is a little bit hidden in the Manage > Import tab. Simple Tagging as well as other major tagging plugins like Ultimate Tag Warrior have their own import function there.

Not all tags were imported during the first import but the script started from where it stopped the previous run. So, with only minor issues that could be fixed in a couple of minutes I was able to upgrade to Wordpress 2.3.