The final release of WordPress 2.3 with its native tagging functions is right around the corner, and there are already a few plugins floating around that will enhance tagging in WordPress 2.3. Here are two I’ve run across today: Advanced Tag Entry lets you choose tags from a drop-down list to your posts, remove tags you’ve already added to your posts, create new tags, edit tags, and delete unused tags from the database. Click Tags adds a clickable list of existing tags above the native tag field on the Write screen. This is a great plugin if you have only a handful of tags you use.

AskApache RewriteRules Viewer is a simple plugin that makes it easy for developers and code hackers to view the current WordPress RewriteRules at any time. Futures Contract Plugin will display this month’s futures contract price on the sidebar of your blog. Prices are updated from the Chicago Board of Trade. PicasaWebShow will display all or part of your Picasa album on your blog. EDITED for content, NSFW Sub-page Links creates an automatic index of all sub-page (child, parent and sibling) links through a template tag in the page template. Upcoming Events can receive iCalendar feeds from third party sites and display aggregated upcoming events from multiple feeds.

How to Maintain Your WordPress Plugin from a Windows Workstation using Subversion: A step by step, illustrated set of instructions painstakingly put together by Roland on how to use Subversion on a Windows machine and use it to add your plugin(s) to the WordPress Extend section. I love tutorials like this. Thanks Roland.

Many different sites and blogs have documented what they thought were their most desired features in WordPress 2.3. Since I am as excited about this release as I was about WordPress 2.0 (I consider 2.0 to be a significant milestone), I am collating them here with each discussed feature bulleted under each of the links. Design Adaptations Update Alerts for WordPress Inherent Tag Support More SEO Friendliness, better URI redirection Ryans’ Blog Database changes Taxonomy changes, Taxonomy API Plugin Compatibility Aiming for Independence Tagging Adding new tags to your own theme Adding a tag cloud More on Tagging in themes and tag importers from Small Potato UTW Importer Version 3 Template tags for Tags (yes, I know) Michael’s Blog (mdwaffe) Better Post and Page management Sam Ruby Atom Publishing Protocol support Plugin update notification Directly from WordPress Plugin Directory Better, faster, quicker, safer Faster javascript and wp-admin code and styles […]

WordPress vs Drupal: Todd Zeigler’s opinions on whether to use Drupal or WordPress to accomplish various publishing tasks depending on the relative ability of each software to excel in particular tasks. Though I agree with some of the premises, saying WordPress Mu is not quite ready for prime time is a very bad generalization and dependent on Todd’s experiences with a very particular need (developing a network of blogs that share content and is centrally managed) that he tried to fill with Mu.

Blue Sky is a 3-column, widget-ready theme available in both AJAX and non-AJAX versions. The Morning After is a 3-column, widget-ready theme with a magazine-style layout. Sixtyfour is a single-column theme for WordPress with a Tumblr-like layout.

Broken Images is designed to fight broken images on your WordPress powered site by allowing you to hide, style, or replace them. Click Tracking can monitor visitors’ clicks on your blog. Cross References lets you insert cross-references between posts or pages. Role Manager 2.0 lets you manage, create and delete roles and capabilities. VR Visitas allows you to take a record of the visits to your page.

Admin Drop-Down Menus provides one-click selection of admin options via proper drop down menus. Different Posts Per Page allows you to modify the number of posts shown in home, category, archive or search page. Download Counter Lite is a simple tracking system to keep a watch on how many downloads your files get. Download Counter Advanced is a more versatile version than the ‘Lite’ version which still tracks downloads and keep counts but can also download virtually any file type. Gallina 4 allows you to publish the starred email from your Gmail to your blog. Link Uploaded Files shows and links the uploaded files of a post. openWallet is a login system for websites, which replaces user names and passwords with digital keys and a password. Page Category Organizer allows for categories to be assigned to WP pages. Post/Page Update Notification lets users subscribe to a WordPress ‘Page’ so that […]