WordPress 2.3 Release Candidate 1 will be released later today. Since I’m in Malaysia where it’s 13 hours ahead of the US, I will have to wait till tomorrow to read the official announcement.
There are quite a few changes being implemented into 2.3 that are concerning a lot of people especially in the plugin compatibility area . The biggest change has to be the addition of Taxonomy support and the DB schema changes that come with it.
Plugins that depend on categories are most likely to break. Life will be difficult for some but this is where the beta releases and release candidates come into play. Plugin developers will have sufficient time to play and test the latest release and update their plugins accordingly.
Rest assure that since WordPress has a large user base and great community support, updates for broken plugins will be released within a matter of hours if not days from the release date.
As an end user what can you do?
I would suggest getting comfortable with the new upcoming 2.3 release and understanding the changes. Test run the betas and release candidates to identify bugs or incompatibility issues with plugins.
Also think about contributing to the Community maintained WordPress 2.3 Plugin Compatibility List. The list is made up of plugins that work and break with the new release. The goal of the list is to ease the discovery of working plugins and those that need work.
I am certainly looking forward to 2.3. I get excited every time a new version of my favorite softwares get released. Boy’s toys effect I guess 😉
Source : WordPress 2.3 Plugin Compatibility List