Hello to WordPress 2.3, a tearful goodbye to Jerome’s Keywords

Today I upgraded both Chip’s Quips and Chip’s Tips to WordPress version 2.3 (after first trying it out on my test site).   Everything went relatively smoothly.  The Plugins page notified me of three plugins that had upgrades available, so I did that, too.

Shelley let me know about the new tagging support in WordPress 2.3.  Converting the Jerome’s Keywords tags over to the new WordPress tags was simple, using the built-in converter on the Manage/Import page in the Admin panel.  Shelley seems to like the WordPress implementation, but I find it not quite up to the combination of Jerome’s Keywords and my tag cloud widget in several ways:

1. The WordPress tag cloud widget has no options except for title.  The built-in wp_tag_cloud function (which the widget ultimately uses) can take many arguments to control the min/max size of font, what units to use when sizing, the maximum number of tags to display, the format for display, how they’re ordered, and what tags to include or exclude.  None of these options are available to the widget.  The widget ends up using all default settings, the only one of which that really gripes me is that only the top 45 tags get displayed.  You can vote for expanding the options here.
2. I can’t seem to find any place in the Admin panel to manage tags.  Jerome’s 2.0 had options for renaming and deleting tags wholesale, and that page also gave you quick stats on tag usage.  That was very handy when you could see that, for instance, you used the tag “widget” half the time and “widgets” the other half — you could easily rename all of one of them to the other.  Vote for this enhancement here.
3. In the tag cloud, the class name for each entry is differentiated only by the tag id, not by the tag’s frequency of usage, which defeats any custom styling based on frequency.  Granted, there is a “wp_tag_cloud” filter that you could hook into and add your own class names, but that means writing a plugin rather than a style sheet.  Vote for this suggestion here.

Naturally, all of the above (including a more robust widget) could be achieved via a plugin, and maybe I’ll write one.  But first I’d like to see how soon the WordPress team might get around to implementing these suggestions.