It looks like the next version of WordPress, known as WordPress 2.3 is due to be released on September 24th, 2007. This is less than a couple of weeks away still, but the anticipation for the availability of tags has already begun.

Currently, all existing WordPress themes will not have support for the newest tag features, because it won’t technically exist for a few more weeks. Once the new version of WordPress is released, it is unlikely that to many theme owners will be adding the necessary code to their themes, meaning you will probably have to do it yourself if you want to take advantage of the new tagging features.

Aiming for Independence has posted an easy way on how to add tags to your WordPress 2.3 theme. This will also apply to adding tag clouds to your posts or within your sidebar. In order to display your tags for your posts, you’ll just want to paste this code wherever you want the tags to be displayed within your loop:

<?php the_tags(); ?>

I personally prefer tags over categories, so in my case, I would display my tags where my categories would normally be. Because I currently use Ultimate Tag Warrior, I will instead be replacing the UTW tag with this one above.

To see more about the new tagging process, or more about the new tag clouds available with WordPress 2.3, I recommend checking out the above post from Aiming for Independence.