I took the opportunity to install the latest changes to the WordPress software we all know and love. Right now, the Administration Panel footer says I’m using 2.4-Bleeding – - it is the latest build as of 2.12.08. There are some things I just love about – - other things? Not so much. I do understand the design work on it is not completed yet. With a release date of sometime the middle to the end of March.. I would say WP has a ways to go.

The Dashboard. Have a look:

While I am not in love with the design… the colors or the layout – - what I am in love with is the ability to edit certain sections of the dashboard.. mainly the RSS Feeds that are fed into the Dashboard:

With the release of the latest version of WordPress 2.3 came the added functionality of tagging. I’ve recieved several emails and questions from client to clarify what tagging is, exactly. The most popular question by far:

Why use tags when I can use categories? Aren’t they, essentially, the same thing?

Yes…. and no. I look at it this way – I can use tags to further describe and archive my posts by topic, but I don’t have to have a super huge long category/subcategory listing mucking up my theme and the tag clouds are trendy at the moment – so what the heck? Tags also get indexed with the rel=”tag” attribute, making them attractive to tag crawling services like Technorati and search engines, like Google, because tags are treated like keywords (because of the rel=”tag attribute).

There are several Widget Plugins that community members have developed for WordPress MU – here’s a rundown on some of the nicer ones:

BlogRush Widget for WordPress MU
Developer: Elad Salomons
The plugin gets extracted into the mu-plugins directory on your web server. Each time the widget is shown, the blogger earns one credit point and for each credit point earned, one of the bloggers posts is shown on some other blog. One can also earn points by referring bloggers to the program (like a pyramid scam but no money is exchanged). Don’t know what BlogRush is? Watch this instructional video to learn all about it.

WidgetBox Widget for WordPress MU
Developer:Incsub and Ring of Blogs
allows your users to use up to 9 Widgetbox widgets in their sidebars… just drop it into mu-plugins and watch as your blogs start to become populated with Tetris, PacMan, radio stations and glittertext, and more!