With new versions available for the popular and powerful WordPress theme K2, I should be making the updgrade, right?

Well, no. First of all, I already converted my diary blog over to 2.3, and I really like it–the Javascript seems to load much faster, it has URL improvements, the tagging is integrated–check this post by Matt from WordPress for more info about it. Overall, it’s a great product, the web 2.0 blog platform.

But for this blog, I’ve it, at least for now, on 2.2.3 because I can use Twitter tools, Ultimate Tag Warrior, and all sorts of other plug-ins that the new WordPress taxonomy system breaks. And when I tried the new K2 release candidate 1, it just wasn’t the same. Now, the theme uses a lot of Ajax so it can have problems depending on browser, and apparently lots of these issues have come up with IE as they move to the new version Not that I use IE, but some people don’t mind if the occasional user of that clunker stops by their blog. The sidebar widget system has been badly redesigned in 1.0, with a clunky interface, and other issues keep coming up too. That’s what I loved about K2 0.9.6–the really cool sidebar tools, much better than the default WordPress ones–and the new 1.0 doesn’t seem the same. (If you want to try 1.0 make sure the find the latest version, which as I write this is release candidate 3, because some of these issues might be fixed by then.)