Simple Tags WordPress Plugin
The latest version of WordPress, (2.3), has tags built in to it. Many people think this will prompt a move away from categories to tags. For me I am not sure how it will play out in the end. I may keep only a few broad categories, using tags to really index my posts. I really thing of tags and categories as two very separate things. One issue I will have to figure out is how eliminating some of my categories might affect my existing permalinks and post titles. The custom permalink structure I use is: /%category%/%postname%/. If I eliminate a category, I might cause big trouble for posts published previous to the category change. I might have to leave existing categories as is and not display them. Or I could not display all the existing categories, only the ones that make the cut to my streamlined approach incorporating tags. Opinions and ideas on this issue are welcome in the comments. Thanks!
To help make better use of tags in WordPress 2.3, I am using a plugin called Simple Tags which was the only one I could find advertised as written specifically for WordPress 2.3. Simple Tags is the successor to the popular Simple Tagging plugin that was written for earlier versions of WordPress. I like the way Simple Tags makes adding tags to a post before you publish….. simple. But there are a few issues with the plugin that do cause me headaches.
I had posted a comment on the Simple Tags author’s page about a bug that arises when using Simple Tags to change the name of tags. I had noticed a few tags on my posts that had an initial capital letter even though I had entered the tags all lower case. When I used the Simple Tags option to “rename” a tag, I could not get the change to lower case to stick. Several people saw that comment and emailed me asking if I ever figured it out. I did and following is the explanation.
Simple Tags does not care how you capitalize, (or not), your tags. But for some reason if you have a category with the same name as a tag, AND that category name is capitalized, then the tag with the same name will always be capitalized, no matter what you do in Simple Tags. I have no clue why, code wise, but I like my tags to have all lower case and I like my categories to have an initial capital. So, I either have to make sure that I have no categories that are also tags, (I don’t like that option), OR I need to make my categories lower case also. For now I have compromised and, as you can see in my sidebar, I changed only the categories names that are also tags to lower case. I have not changed anything else in my categories and won’t until I find out how that might affect my permalinks. There are a few other issues in Simple Tags that are problems for me, but it is the only plugin I could find so far that plays nicely enough with WordPress 2.3.
My biggest problem with the plugin is the related posts function. It simply does not work as it is supposed to. If you try to use this function of the plugin, be careful not to be imbibing of your beverage of choice at the same time. The posts Simple Tags picks as related are often so unrelated that, when you see the results, it can cause you to blow the aforementioned beverage out your nose and on to your keyboard! So I don’t use that function. That is too bad because, for some blogs, relating posts is a very important navigation tool for readers. SK has posted on the Simple Tags thread a way that he hacked it to make it better. But, I am not sure even he has it working 100% as it should and I have not been able to follow his explanation well enough to make it work for me.
Amaury, the author of the Simple Tags plugin is not too active on the plugin’s home page comment thread, but he does drop in occasionally and has indicted that he does plan another release to try and address some of the issues. I am sure the problem for him is the one common to most Word Press plugins. They require a lot of work and time to develop and maintain and there is very little, if any, compensation to be had for the effort. There are a few plugins that are meticulously developed and maintained where their author’s might earn back a little from their efforts. When I run across a plugin like that, I make a point to make a donation to help fund the effort. Perhaps the best example of this is the All In One SEO plugin by uberdose. AIOSEO is continuously updated, sometimes daily! And uberdose is on his comment threads everyday, making it a point to politely answer every question. He is a real first class supporter of his plugin. If you want some SEO love for your site, I suggest checking out his site. I was one of the earlier users of the plugin and one of the first contributors via PayPal. His support has been so great, that I think I am ready to make a second contribution!
Sometimes, when determining relationships between things, appearances are not always what they seem. On the issue of a related posts plugin, what I would really like is the following. First and foremost, I would want to have the ability to choose what posts to show as related. The plugin would provide me with a list of suggestions based on my tags and I would choose from this list which post titles to display as links to related posts. Let the plugin generate a list using whatever logic it can on the tags, then let me choose from that list the 3 or 4 posts I actually want shown as related. Seems pretty simple, but then what do I know about php and coding! Not much, or I would do it myself. Oh well……………
I did receive a suggestion to check out the In Series WordPress plugin for related posts functionality. I have not been able to see how that plugin can do it, and am thinking it can not, but if I do discover it is possible, I’ll post a comment here explaining how.
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