@Jeffro - You say: "I wonder why earlier versions of WordPress provided this information upfront and in later versions, this information was taken away."

I say, after testing the usability of the product, that the main devs have decided that "almost nobody," as Michael Torbert said, needed the IDs. I develop my own themes and pass specific IDs to certain tags. It's tedious and it takes a minute out of my time, but improving WordPress the product means it has to be improved to the user.

For every theme and plugin dev out there, there are thousands upon thousands who would find this random sprinkling of numbers to be confusing. Maybe that's why they took it out. This is the product, growing up and expanding from being a developer-intensive app to one that cares most for its most basic of users.

That said, yes, this is the kind of thing for a plugin, in fact it would be nice if different plugin devs teamed up to produce a suite of "essential plugins" for devs and/or users. The better for-hire theme devs and admins drop in a package of essential plugins for their clients, why don't we all come together and do the same for ourselves?
.-= ´s last blog ..Site redesign: Richmond =-.