WordPress 2.7 is out

WordPress 2.7 is out. While there are a lot of great new features, there are two that piqued my interest:

Comment threading is just that, comment threading. This is a useful feature that has always been provided by a plugin.
WordPress Upgrader “will give you the option of downloading, installing, and upgrading to the latest WordPress version from your Administration Panel.” This is particulary helpful as the WordPress developers are very proactive about addressing security risks and adding new (extensively tested) features. It can become a hassle to keep up with ugprades.
Most folks use a plugin to perform upgrades, but with my not-uncommon-set-up where the blog is installed in a sub-directory but served on the root, that plugin only worked 1/10th of the time. Consequently, all of my upgrades were manual, until now at least. Thanks WordPress team!

Managing tags in WordPress

WordPress lets you associate tags with your posts. Version 2.6 even provides a nice UI to manage them. If you are interested in working with them directly in the database, here is a query to help you along:

SELECT
	term.term_id,
	tax.count,
	term.name,
	term.slug
FROM
	wp_term_taxonomy tax,
	wp_terms term
WHERE
	tax.taxonomy = 'post_tag'
	AND
	tax.term_id = term.term_id
ORDER BY
	term.name ASC
LIMIT
	0, 200

wp-syntax-rettke

Out of the box, WP-Syntax colors code using the default GeSHi colors. Per the authors advice in the ‘Advanced Customization’ section of Other Notes, you can configure GeSHi yourself by handling the wp_syntax_init_geshi hook and configuring it programmatically.
Since I wanted to do just that, I decided to publish a generic plugin, called wp-syntax-rettke, for folks who wanted to configure GeSHi following this approach.