Wordpress Tags

Something I have been meaning to do for a while is go through my categories and clean them up because 70% of all my posts were in the general category and if anyone wanted to view by category they were in for a mess of hurt.
Recently tags have come into the main stream, with del.icio.us and flickr.com. Mainly due to the fact that tagging is extremely efficient and easy for categorizing both for the user and the admin. I had been looking for awhile and I came across this plugin last night and I had to implement it right away. The directions may be discouraging but it was extremely easy to setup. And for tagging posts it is much easier then I thought, all you have to do is type your tags in a field that is directly below the trackbacks field, separated by spaces just like flickr.com or del.icio.us; this field shows in both the press it bookmarklet and the main post page. It also includes an Admin interface to administer the tags (delete and rename). After the install you can create a link cloud, top 10 and/or an archive list. There are tons of features and fully recommend this plugin for every wp’er.
I do hope that the author will create some sort of sub tags interface. Del.icio.us has done this for a while and it makes tags so much more useful.

FYI: Tagging will not replace searching; only categorizing. Don’t get searching and tagging confused they are different. Because looking for a certain topic is different then looking for a certain term.

P.S. 455 more posts to tag.

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June 22

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About the Author, Dan Cameron:

I'm the owner and solution engineer at Sprout Venture, a web solutions company that specializes in web development including WordPress.

I started my first blog in 2003 and transitioned to WordPress in 2004. Since moving to WordPress I've written a few plugins and themes for public consumption. Lately I'm busy engineering/building/coding and have only been able to share a few code snippets.

If you're in need of some web development, web design or custom WordPress plugins and/or themes contact me, I'll be happy to discuss it with you.

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  • Tagging the posts is the hardest part (:
  • Dan
    Thanks Christine D., It finally works I don't know how but one of the revisions you gave me worked, no tinkering necessary.

    So now users can click on a tag and then click on a related tag to narrow down your search.

    Now all I need to do is tag all my posts.
  • Dan
    Yeah even after the theme change it still doesn't work.

    The plugin must have something it that breaks with me site.

    She said, she had no problem with her site. I wonder why?
  • Dan
    No I didn't change it at all. And I actually reinstalled WP just to make sure there wasn't anything I hacked recently that I forgot about.

    The template, I don't think has anything to do with it since I can change to an older theme and it still doesn't work. But I will install the WP default theme on that dev site and see if it still breaks.

    Thanks.
  • Did you modify your comment post page (wp-comments-post.php) or the comment section of your template?

    It is failing to redirect after the comment is posted. The post processing page tries to do a redirect (302) after it saves the comment, to either a location you specify in your comment form ('redirect_to') or the referring page if you have not specified, so you usually get redirected back to the page you were submitting the comment from.

    For whatever reason, your comments-post page is not sending this redirect header after it saves the comment. Hope this helps.
  • Dan
    First I want to thank you.

    I created a Dev site and copied everything over from my original site.

    I have deactivated all plugins, switched themes, updated my permalinks, reinstalled and just about everything else I could think of.

    Could you check it out.

    http://dev.dancameron.org

    Maybe JARED has an idea. :D
  • Dan
    It is weird. I figured it was the plugin because I changed all my template back to the way I had them before the plugin and it still occurred and then I just deactivated the plugin and my comments were back up.

    tag adder would solve the synonyms, text replace, and abbreviations.

    The sidebar thing was just a suggestion.

    Thanks.
  • Crapwagons.

    Posting a comment isn't something that I tested (And I'm still running 1.0 on my blog). It seems a like a slightly odd thing for the changes I made to cause. Did you change anything else?

    (Perhaps the need for shortnames would vanish if I did the list of tags on the tag-adder, thing?)
    (I'll have a look into that sidebar thing.)
  • Dan
    I actually had to go back to version 1.0 because it was breaking commenting.

    You might want to check it out.

    The problem I was getting was, after I submit a comment or delete a comment I was greeted with the white screen of death. The comment did post or deleted.
  • Dan
    Excellent. I love it.

    Text replace would be a great feature. It would *help* in synonyms and it would be great for shortnames and acronyms like you said.

    I updated my tags page and I was wondering, should your tag.php file include a get sidebar function rather then just putting the related tags and archives like I have. I had no problem editing it but I would imagine a lot of users wouldn't have a clue in creating a new sidebar for the tag file nor know how to add something to the tag side bar without them adding it to the universal sidebar..
  • I've released version 1.1 into the wild...

    The latest version of it lives here: http://dev.wp-plugins.org/file/ultimate-tag-war...

    Basically, if you drop ultimate_show_related_tags() into your tag.php file; a list of tags will be spat forth from the brink. (Each of the items are in li tags; but the whole list isn't in ul or ol tags.. If you want something different to li tags, ultimate_show_related_tags($prefix, $suffix) can help)

    - Christine
  • Dan: I'll do the related tags thing first, then I'll think about a lazy-tag-selecty-thing (;
    (Ugh. I've contemplated synonyms a little more, and come to the conclusion that it's something best left to my too-hard basket... Setting up acronyms or shortnames, though... that's just about crazy enough to work. When I say work, what I mean is, work without me pulling out the rest of my hair (: )

    JaredB: d:
  • Dan: you are probably right when you say I'll never get around to it. :)

    When you said "subtags" at first, I thought you were talking about a hierarchy.

    Re: your last comment (displaying your tag list on the post page) - that's why I think it would make sense just to use the existing WP categories - they're already there, and there's already an admin UI to manage them. You could easily add on the "related tag" functionality on top of that, rather than doing the whole thing from scratch.

    I don't see why you wouldn't want to base a tag system on top of what WP already has (categories) rather than build from the ground up.

    Christine, please don't take any of my comments as criticism of your plugin in any way, since I haven't even tried it myself. I just like to give Dan a hard time every now and then, and pretend that I'm an expert on a lot of subjects.
  • Dan
    I think you got my idea.

    What would also be cool is to have the tags you already have, displayed on the post page so you could select them to tag your post. That way you don't have to go off of memory in deciding relevant tags for a post. Similar to how Delicious does there tags.
  • Oh yup.

    What I'm thinking of is like the behaviour you see when you click the "add" links beside a related tag. Sortof. I was going to just include the tags of the current post, but it makes sense to grab the union of the tags of the posts that share the current tag (does that make sense? I know what I mean, but I'm fairly sure I've explained it badly (: ).
  • Dan
    Synonyms would be great. And if you could include that in the admin interface so you could administer them it would be even better. That way users could use abbreviations and/or word replacements, like WP for Wordpress.

    For the related tags, if you don't already use del.icio.us go to my links (found above) and click on a tag on the right then you will see the related tags in green (on the right) after.

    And again. Great Plugin, I just started using it last night so I have 1.0.
  • P.S. Writing a thing for marking tags as synonyms is also on my "intend to do list"; so that way it "just know" that plugin and plugins are equivalent tags.
  • I think I see whatcha mean. I might look into this when I get home from work (:

    My first thoughts on this, would be to write a "show tags for this post" function that instead of linking to the tag page, links to the tag page and the current tag. (Or something.)

    (If you were looking at /tag/monkey, the items on that page could have their tags linking to /tag/monkey+banana, /tag/monkey+primates... Then, if you were looking at /tag/monkey+primates, the tags would link to /tag/monkey+primates+monkeybusiness)

    [I'm not sure which version of UTW you're using, the first couple don't support tag intersections, 1.0 and beyond do]
  • Dan
    Actually since you will "probably" do it it won't happen. :D

    Nested categories? Why nested categories? It also defeats the purpose of a tag since nesting creates a hierarchy.

    It would be nice though to use the already included Categories WP uses but then there is the question, why?
  • Dan
    That will be the first plugin I don't use.
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