Ultimate Tag Warrior provided a really handy way to tag posts in WordPress, by just entering tags into a text field ala del.icio.us or Flickr.
But, it uses its own tags database, meaning external tools like Flock, MarsEdit, Ecto, etc… are unable to tag new posts. And I get to do some funkery each time I update the K2 theme to match the latest and greatest beta.
So, I just spent a couple of hours this evening manually migrating UTW tags to be stored in stock WordPress Categories. I would have played around with some SQL to do it, but would rather do some mindless copy/pastery in front of the tube.
Dropping UTW seems to have shaved almost 100 database queries from the generation of the front page of this blog. That ain’t half bad.
And, by using a combination of the Cat2Tag v 2.0 and WordPress Heat Map plugins, I wind up with a better solution anyway.
Ultimate Tag Warrior provided a really handy way to tag posts in WordPress, by just entering tags into a text field ala del.icio.us or Flickr.
But, it uses its own tags database, meaning external tools like Flock, MarsEdit, Ecto, etc… are unable to tag new posts. And I get to do some funkery each time I update the K2 theme to match the latest and greatest beta.
So, I just spent a couple of hours this evening manually migrating UTW tags to be stored in stock WordPress Categories. I would have played around with some SQL to do it, but would rather do some mindless copy/pastery in front of the tube.
Dropping UTW seems to have shaved almost 100 database queries from the generation of the front page of this blog. That ain’t half bad.
And, by using a combination of the Cat2Tag v 2.0 and WordPress Heat Map plugins, I wind up with a better solution anyway.
I decided to give the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin for WordPress a shot. It’s going to be supported natively in the K2 theme that I’m using, and UTW comes highly rated. I was a bit nervous about migrating from the Cat2Tag plugin I’m using now, because I wasn’t sure how it would handle ~900 posts that were already categorized. I didn’t want to have to re-tag all of those posts. I picked Cat2Tag because it used the Categories themselves to store tags – so if I decided to switch back to Categories, it was just a matter of turning off a plugin, and doing some housekeeping on the now-messy set of categories. I’ll assume there will be a magical “convert tags back to categories” function sometime in the future…
Turns out there is a handy dandy “convert categories to tags” function, making the migration to UTW trivial. Now, I’m just nervous about what happens when I want to migrate away from it. For now, I’ve got the “Automatically convert categories to tags” flag set, so when I add a new post, it takes the categories I enter (via Cat2Tag), and mirrors them in Tags. Duplication for now, but until I’m comfortable with UTW, it’s the only way to go 🙂
It does provide a nice heatmap of tags, as displayed in the “archives” section. Doesn’t provide the heatmap of dates, though, so I’ll still be using WP-Heatmap for that.
The compelling reason for looking at UTW is the ability to view boolean sets of tags. I could look at /tag/projects+rants to see all posts that were tagged both “projects” and “rants” – something that wasn’t readily possible using straight categories-as-tags.
Just thought of a cool feature to add to UTW – “copy tags from my del.icio.us account” – let me tag my blog posts with the same vocabulary I use to tag the rest of the world.
I did have some fun getting the clean URLs working with UTW, though. The automagic .htaccess updater didn’t want to work, so I had to manually add this to my .htaccess:
# Ultimate Tag Warrior
RewriteRule ^tag/(.+)$ /index.php?tag=$1 [QSA,L]
Update: Just tweaked the setup a bit… Posts will now be put into one of only 3 categories: “entry”, “link” or “aside”. I’ve removed category display from post listings, and replaced with the tag list. I’ll try this for awhile, and decide if I want to stick with it before the number of uncategorized entries gets too big.
Update 2: Looks like there’s a bug in UTW – if you add only one tag to a post, it generates invalid XHTML (no
I decided to give the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin for WordPress a shot. It’s going to be supported natively in the K2 theme that I’m using, and UTW comes highly rated. I was a bit nervous about migrating from the Cat2Tag plugin I’m using now, because I wasn’t sure how it would handle ~900 posts that were already categorized. I didn’t want to have to re-tag all of those posts. I picked Cat2Tag because it used the Categories themselves to store tags – so if I decided to switch back to Categories, it was just a matter of turning off a plugin, and doing some housekeeping on the now-messy set of categories. I’ll assume there will be a magical “convert tags back to categories” function sometime in the future…
Turns out there is a handy dandy “convert categories to tags” function, making the migration to UTW trivial. Now, I’m just nervous about what happens when I want to migrate away from it. For now, I’ve got the “Automatically convert categories to tags” flag set, so when I add a new post, it takes the categories I enter (via Cat2Tag), and mirrors them in Tags. Duplication for now, but until I’m comfortable with UTW, it’s the only way to go 🙂
It does provide a nice heatmap of tags, as displayed in the “archives” section. Doesn’t provide the heatmap of dates, though, so I’ll still be using WP-Heatmap for that.
The compelling reason for looking at UTW is the ability to view boolean sets of tags. I could look at /tag/projects+rants to see all posts that were tagged both “projects” and “rants” – something that wasn’t readily possible using straight categories-as-tags.
Just thought of a cool feature to add to UTW – “copy tags from my del.icio.us account” – let me tag my blog posts with the same vocabulary I use to tag the rest of the world.
I did have some fun getting the clean URLs working with UTW, though. The automagic .htaccess updater didn’t want to work, so I had to manually add this to my .htaccess:
# Ultimate Tag Warrior
RewriteRule ^tag/(.+)$ /index.php?tag=$1 [QSA,L]
Update: Just tweaked the setup a bit… Posts will now be put into one of only 3 categories: “entry”, “link” or “aside”. I’ve removed category display from post listings, and replaced with the tag list. I’ll try this for awhile, and decide if I want to stick with it before the number of uncategorized entries gets too big.
Update 2: Looks like there’s a bug in UTW – if you add only one tag to a post, it generates invalid XHTML (no