The wurster, the better

After upgrading to WP 2.3.1, tags are now a part of the core. I started populating the tag field since that time. However, since I had been using a Custom Field “keywords” for a year or more, I looked for a way of getting this data into the new structure. I eventually for some import scripts that come with WP. One was for Jerome’s Keywords, which I used successfully. I first backed up the database and then dumped out the custom field data into a spreadsheet which I used to validate the process. And everything did transfer over to the new tag structure.

So, I ran this script on my other blog.

Another aside, I activated the Peters Custom AntiSpam plugin on all my sites. It adds a captcha (visual and sound) to the adding of comments.

I finally took the leap to WP 2.2.1. First I did my local install. All worked pretty well as in past upgrades, with one exception. I have a small problem with the CategoryAccess plugin. I even upgraded to the latest 0.8.0 but still have the problem. It’s not a big problem but I sent the author an email for help. I can live with the problem and since my blog is really only for me, that’s not a show-stopper. I then did my newest blog without a hitch. And then I did this blog.

So, I am happy at least with this.

I’ve been reading the Vanilla forum discussions to see where I can help. The “tagging or keywords” discussion continues. It really means different things to different people. So, I got to think and wanted to re-look at the WP plugins that could help.

I found a couple of meta tag plugins which I hadn’t seen before. I looked at the 2 I foudn and then decided to give Kaf’s a try. I activated it and expected to see the keywords I had added to my posts. But I didn’t see them. What did I do wrong? Or was I misinterpreting something? It took me a while before I understood what the plugin did. It adds meta tags to the html page that is generated on your blog. This information is primarily used by Search Engines. To see if it was working, I looked at the source generated by my pages and found the meta information. Great! This was cool!

Then I decided to take another look at Jerome’s Keywords plugin. This uses a field you add to each post called keywords with the keywords added in the values field. This is also what the meta head plugin uses. After I looked at the plugin description again, I activated it and added the correct function to display the keywords at the bottom of each post. And it worked! Another success!

I’ve also been playing around with Vanilla extensions to try and do what people want. I was successful in modifying the CommentAuthorInfo extension to display the user’s full name.

Before this, I had modified the Categories List extension to make it “category cloud” like. This seems to work and I contacted the extension author to see if he wanted to add it to his extension.

I also took a WP Christmas theme and made it into a Vanilla style/theme. During this process, I was able to get the lightbox js to work. I added the old Christmas book we had made for Alicia back in 1993 into kind-of a lightbox2 slideshow. I got some help from another js person who has made a lightbox counterpart called highslide. I hope to get tis to work, too, as it has different image display features than lightbox or thickbox.

I also modified the Page Management extension to contain an option to make the Page tab visible or not. Then I modified my Panel Links extension to create links for those Pages set to invisible. I contacted the extension author to see if he thought it worth adding to his extension.