1. BlogDesk, a free stand-alone application, lets you comfortably write and effortlessly publish new entries to your blog. It features an ImageWizard that lets you crop, resize and rotate images. It also has a Technorati Tags Generator that lets you easily define and insert tags instead of retyping them over and over again.
2. Qumana is a free, easy-to-use stand-alone desktop blog editor, enabling you to write, edit and post to one or more blogs. You can use Qumana even when you are offline. Save your blog posts to your hard drive and upload whenever you like. Great for bloggers on the move.
3. TinyMCE Advanced adds 16 plugins to TinyMCE: Advanced hr, Advanced Image, Advanced Link, Context Menu, Emotions (Smilies), Full Screen, IESpell, Layer, Media, Nonbreaking, Print, Search and Replace, Style, Table, Visual Characters and XHTML Extras. Its free and packs quite a punch when it comes to adding extra functions to the editor.
4. WP Super Edit is a free WordPress plugin designed to give some control over the visual / WYSIWYG editor and add some functionality without modifying the WordPress source code.
5. Monsters Editor for WP Super Edit brings the magic of Fckeditor back to TinyMCE. So if you prefer TinyMCE as its concision, but used to Fckeditor’s powerful functions, then MsE is your good choice. Please do note that this is a free addon plugin to WP Super Edit described above.
6. Windows Live Writer is a free desktop application that makes it easier to compose compelling blog posts. It includes a lot of features such as WYSIWYG Authoring, Photo Publishing, Map Publishing and a Writer SDK. The Writer is a great client for Windows Live Spaces but also works with other weblogs including Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress (and many others).
7. FCKEditor is a free, full featured web based WYSIWYG html editor, it’s lightweight and is compatible with most internet browsers which include: IE 5.5+ (Windows), Firefox 1.0+, Mozilla 1.3+ and Netscape 7+. Its strong points are the excellent interface and built-in File and Upload Managers.
8. Mudbomb’s free WYSIWYG Plugin for Wordpress gives you a lot of control over your images, letting you choose the thumbnail size, the compression quality, et al. It also supports emoticons and features dictionary support.
9. BlogJet is a Windows blog client for managing multiple blogs that supports file attachments among other regular features such as an Image Manager, Youtube and Flickr support. There are both free and paid versions of BlogJet available.
10. ScribeFire (previously Performancing for Firefox) is a full-featured free blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog. You can drag and drop formatted text from pages you are browsing, take notes, and post to your blog.
11. RocketPost is a paid WYSIWYG editor that lets you edit and upload multiple posts at the same time. It features built-in photo editing, instant photo albums, automatic linking to related posts, quote tracking, quick linking, drop caps, pull quotes and a running word count.
12. Advanced TinyMCE Editor is a free plugin that turns your existing WordPress editor into a WYSIWYG powerhouse.

If none of the above editors are to your liking, there’s one software that you are sure to be familiar with – Microsoft Word. Yes, unknown to many, Microsoft Word 2007 has native support for publishing posts to blogs running on WordPress, TypePad, Blogger and Live Spaces. Sahas explains how to setup your blog in Microsoft Word 2007 here.

Its a fairly simple process to update your theme and requires the addition of only a single line of PHP code, Wordpress couldn’t have made it easier although I have to admit I had considerable help from Rich. Here are step-by-step instructions on how to do it:

1. Open /wp-content/themes/YOUR_THEME_ NAME/index.php
2. If you would like to display the tags immediately after the post,

   Add

   <?php the_tags(‘before’, ’separator’, ‘after’); ?>

   After

   <?php the_content(“Continue Reading…”); ?>

3. Replace the words “before”, “separator” and “after” appropriately. For example, my code to display the tags that you see below this post is
   

   <?php the_tags(‘Read similar posts on ’, ’,’, ‘.’); ?>

   Essentially, it means that the tags are preceded by the words “Read similar posts on”, separated by a comma and succeeded by a period.

4. Open /wp-content/themes/YOUR_THEME_ NAME/single.php
5. Repeat steps 2 and 3, and relax.

Adding a tag cloud is all the more simpler if your theme is widgetized, a widget aptly called Tag Cloud will be waiting for you in your ACP. Just add it like you normally would add a widget and you are good to go.

Do note that you need to have added tags for them to be displayed, you can test it by making a new post or editing an existing post and adding tags to them. Over time though, managing your tags could get rather cumbersome, that’s why Christine (of Ultimate Tag Warrior fame) has come up with a new plugin called the Tag Managing Thing. Quoting her, this plugin will allow you to

• Change the name and slug of the term
• Delete a term
• Split a term into multiple terms
• Merge other terms into the selected term
• Change a term to belong in a different taxonomy

That pretty much covers everything I’ll want to do with tags, for now at least.

Now comes the big question – should you use them at all? It depends.

On the plus side, tags are a boon to increase the number of pages in your blog. Since each tag gets its own page, if you have 100 posts in your blog and you were to tag each of that post with a different tag, you’d end up generating 100 new pages. Realistically though, the 100 posts may be tagged by, say 15-20 tags. Still, they would be generating as many pages. And search engines love more pages – they simply can’t have enough of them. So you will get indexed more, which in turn will give you more of a search engine presence, which eventually means more readers. Now, we all want readers, don’t we?

Then why did I say that using tags may not be ideal? Simply because the use of it depends on two things,

1. whether your theme displays excerpts rather than the entire post on Category and Archive pages.
2. if it doesn’t, it depends on whether you use the All-in-One-SEO-Pack to set the meta tags of the Category, Archive and Tag pages to “noindex, follow”

This will help you avoid the Duplicate Content Penalty which will otherwise affect you since your Category/ Archive/ Tag pages would just be a copy of your individual post page. Without adding tags, you would be having 6 copies of the same post, with the tagging feature, search engines will probably index countless copies of the same content – which is why using either step 1 or 2 is vital. Personally, I follow step 1 and set my Category/ Archive/ Tag pages to display only the post excerpts for the simple fact that I stated above – search engines love more pages. If you set them to “noindex, follow”, those pages will not be indexed and only the links on the pages will be followed, thus depriving you of an additional page – and tags introduce many more pages than Category and Archive pages ever will, which is why you would want those pages to count.

If you have any conflicting opinions, feel free to let me know about them in the comments.

I could really get used to the automatic notifications of plugin updates, it was one of the cumbersome procedures involved in maintaining Wordpress. That statement really does detract from the simple upgrade process though and I fully appreciate the Wordpress team for getting together such an awesome software chock full of features.

There are five features that really stand out in 2.3, the hyped tagging feature, the not-so-hyped automatic plugin update notifications, better permalinks handling, an improved post editor and the replacement of Technorati by Google Blog Search for displaying the number of links to your blog. I’ll leave you with a few snapshots in a final bid to get you to update your blog if you haven’t already done so.

As a final note, the tagging and a few other additional features will not be available to you unless your theme is updated to work with the latest version.

I’ve been playing the waiting game all along, waiting for the early birds to try it out and spot the bugs (sorry if you were one of them!) and to let some of the plugin authors update their plugins to be compatible with WP2.3, it seems its pretty stable now and I’m looking to upgrade to the new version too. I’ll be making the upgrade today/tomorrow, and I’ll post how it went. If you haven’t yet upgraded, I suggest you do – its a major upgrade and you shouldn’t be missing it. Do check if your plugins are compatible with it before you upgrade!

Here’s a meme out to Steven to update it from 2.0.7 (gasp!) to 2.3! And congratulations to The Writer’s Manifesto for having upgraded to 2.3.

Thanks for the heads up by Sumesh about the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade Plugin, should make the upgrade process really simple.

Have you made the switch to the newer version? Did you run into any hitches? Do let me know in the comments.

Update: I’m having some teething problems upgrading with the Automatic Upgrade Plugin. It seems it conflicts with the Who Sees Ads plugin. I’ll make a detailed post after I upgrade the normal way. It seems the trouble is with the latest version of Who Sees Ads and had nothing to do with the Automatic Upgrade Plugin.