Folksonomies in WordPress

I’d been using a “tag” plugin that was kind of a hack – it used its own table, and didn’t integrate with Categories, so it was double duty sometimes to properly tag stuff and categorize it.

I just stumbled across the Cat2Tag plugin, which provides a fully integrated folksonomy/tagging system that uses categories to store the tags. It creates new categories if necessary, and provides a tag cloud for tag entry – now it works almost exactly like del.icio.us does.

On top of that, I also found the WordPress Heat Map plugin, which provides a tag cloud for a set of categories in a WordPress blog. I’m using it in my “Archives” page now.

Very cool combination of plugins, making a much more dynamic and organic tagging system for my blog.

I’d been using a “tag” plugin that was kind of a hack – it used its own table, and didn’t integrate with Categories, so it was double duty sometimes to properly tag stuff and categorize it.

I just stumbled across the Cat2Tag plugin, which provides a fully integrated folksonomy/tagging system that uses categories to store the tags. It creates new categories if necessary, and provides a tag cloud for tag entry – now it works almost exactly like del.icio.us does.

On top of that, I also found the WordPress Heat Map plugin, which provides a tag cloud for a set of categories in a WordPress blog. I’m using it in my “Archives” page now.

Very cool combination of plugins, making a much more dynamic and organic tagging system for my blog.

12 thoughts on “Folksonomies in WordPress”

  1. Sure… I use a custom plugin hacked together from a couple of others I found to get the “this weblog has…” stats, then I use WP-Heat-Map for the tag and date clouds. The code on my archives.php page looks like this:


    <p>This weblog has <?php dndn_post_count(); ?> posts in <?php dndn_category_count(true); ?> categories, with <?php dndn_comments_count(); ?> comments.</p>

    <h2>Tag Cloud:</h2>
    <?php heatmap_categories(10, 36, 'pt', '00f', 'f00', '', '', ''); ?>

    <h2>Date Cloud:</h2>
    <?php heatmap_archives(10, 36, 'pt', '00f', 'f00', '', '', ''); ?>

  2. Jerome’s Keywords uses a separate table for tags, so they’re not shared with the native categories… That’s the same method my previous plugin (Bunny’s Technorati Tags) uses… I’m really liking the integration with Categories, since it means I’m not married to the tag plugin – if I switch to something else, or stop using it altogether, my tags are still there (and usable) as categories.

  3. oh, and I guess I’m not a huge fan of the auto-link-creator utilities… If I want to link to Flickr or del.icio.us, I will. If someone wants to search for a tag, they will. But, I won’t assume that the link is necessary or even wanted every single time. 🙂

  4. I understand about the categories v. tags and being locked in to one system. I decided against cat2tag’s creating categories on the fly when I realized I was going to have a lot of categories, and I didn’t want to have to scroll to find my categories if I abandoned it. So I basically abandoned categories.

    The auto-link feature is optional with Jerome’s plugin. It defaults to your local tag cosmos but can add the other links if you choose.

    Isn’t this the greatest thing about free software? Choice!

  5. Yeah, good points, Todd. And you’re right about free software and choice – I am so totally digging WordPress because of the community and options! 🙂

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