Here are my notes related to my upgrade of our wedding cake blog to WordPress 2.3:

1. Custom Query String refers to the old wp_categories table. Had to edit line 252 to reflect the new terms table:

Note: Looks like Moshu made this change and added tagging support. Download it here. This means I can now throttle the number of cakes that appear in a tag archive page.

2. Ran importer for UTW and updated theme to use new native tag commands. Everything worked fine, although I did have to run the following query in the backend to remove the dashes from the old UTW tags:

3. Dropped old wp_tags and wp_tag_synonyms tables

4. Upgraded Headspace2. I noticed headspace 2 doesn’t expose the ability to use tag names in your meta tag descriptions (someone please correct me if i’m wrong) So I hacked inline_tags.php and added the following on line 54:

Update: John has already updated his headspace2 plugin to include a %%tag%%. I highly recommend checking this plugin out. John does a tremendous job supporting the tag – please help support his efforts by donating.

5. Tags associated with a post are not searched by default, so I created a plugin to do that. I also use this plugin to correct user search miss-spellings. For example, try searching for brithday cakes on our wedding cake blog.

Note: An even better alternative to my plugin is John’s Search Unleashed plugin.

6. Updated my linking structure so that I don’t use trailing slashes for categories or tag pages

I’m happy that wordpress developers included tagging as a core feature in their latest release. And I also appreciate their philosophy of including just the bare tagging essentials and relying on the plugin developer community to expand on those features.

With that being said, one of the features that is missing from the 2.3 tagging implementation is the ability to search for tags associated with a post. Christine’s UTW did this rather well and I found it was an essential feature for our wedding cake blog. We have several posts that have been tagged with words that don’t necessarily appear in the post – i.e. Wedding cupcake Stands, or Spring Themed wedding cakes

So I created a tag search plugin that will join against the appropriate tables to ensure you tags are searched. My hope is someone will take this search component and wrap it into a complete tag management plugin. (Similar to what Christine has started)

The highslide wordpress plugin has been updated to work with Torstein’s latest version of Highslide – 3.2.3.

The changes were as follows:

- There was a minor change to the graphics folder image structure
- There is no longer a need to use the windows.onload function

If you are upgrading from a previous version of the plugin, I recommend the following:
- Remove the highslide folder completely
- Download and install the latest version with the new folder structure
- Navigate to the options section and remove the following code:

I’m usually frustrated when an online search returns another set of search results. Back in March, Matt Cutts spoke about this on his blog, and I’ve been meaning to ensure to exclude our cake search results from all search engines.

At first I thought about adding an exclusion in my robots.txt, but because the search results are built off of index.php, I figured a theme modification would be better.

To do this I added the following in my header.php:

Short and simple…:)

Today my wife’s operating system crashed – the registry hive was corrupted. We went through a restore process and after running hard drive diagnostic (chkdsk) we found some corrupt sectors.

Since the laptop was still under warranty, I called Dell and reached a live person in record time. I only had to listen to one voice prompt, and a technician (Ashish) picked up after a couple rings.

After explaining the issue and giving him the error code from the DELL diagnostic utility, he immediately said they would be shipping me a new hard drive. This literally took 2 minutes. No second guessing on his part – it was painless.

To top it off, he sent a personal email with all his contact information and backup contact information in case he wasn’t available.

This is excellent customer service, I’m glad to see Dell is getting this right.

I have two fixes for users who are having trouble getting wordpress search to work correctly with the Ultimate Tag Warrior Plugin:

I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to modify my wordpress category template to display thumbnail images of each cake in a gallery format. Combining this with my highslide plugin provides a simple and easy to maintain gallery.

I recently upgraded one of our testing sites to WP 2.1 Here are some of the issues and fixes that I went through:

I’ve added more flexibility to the WordPress WP-HIGHSLIDE script. The new updates allow you to toggle the caption box, close window link, and next and previous links through global settings in WP-HIGHSLIDE options page.

If you want to override the global settings for a single image you can use one of the override settings in your <highslide>. More info in the FAQ section.

Note: I’m temporarily including the highslide.js script with the plugin. The script writer made an enhancement to highslide that makes it much easier to integrate with wordpress. I’ve included that fix in highslide.js, but it’s not yet available in his latest release 2.2.8. Once that fix makes his latest release, I will no longer include the script.

Looking for an easy way to use Highslide JS thumbnail viewer in your wordpress blog? My new plugin, WP-Highslide allows easy integration of Highslide JS using wordpress quicktags.

For documentation and download go here and for a demo check our wedding cake blog. Let me know if you find this useful.