Simple Tagging Plugin
However, Amaury Balmer (Administrator WordPress France) will be maintaining the project in the future, the project website is available under simpletagging.herewithme.fr. He has released new versions of this plugin.
Compatibility: WordPress 2.0.x, WordPress 2.1
Table of Contents
- Purpose
- Download
- Installation
- Theme Integration
- Manage Tags
- Import Tags
- Limits, Known Issues
- To Do’s
- Feature Suggestions From Users
- Other Plugins That Make Use of Simple Tagging Plugin
- Version History and Changelog
- Donation
- Acknowledgements
Purpose
The two mostly used tagging plugins are the Ultimate Tag Worrior (UTW) and Jerome’s Keywords.
I think most people use UTW, however especially its performance has been criticized in the past. Also, it does not provide a auto-complete type-ahead dropdown menu when tagging posts but it always displays all tags of the entire WordPress installation which can be quite annoying if you have really many tags.
Jerome’s Keywords is unfortunately still in beta and it seems that the project will not be continued.
With Simple Tagging Plugin, I’ve coded another tagging plugin for WordPress which is based on Jerome’s Keywords plugin and can import all your tags from UTW or Jerome.
It provides you with everything you need for tagging, in the following a list of the features:
- Import your tags from UTW or Jerome’s Keywords:
- A field for tagging your posts easily incl. type-ahead feature:
- Display Tags of the current posts:
- A tag cloud with various options:
- Displaying a list of related posts:
- Related Tags feature when browsing your tags (idea stolen from del.icio.us):
- Adding tags (& categories if enabled in the options) as meta keywords in the header
- Adding tags as categories in the feed (this will index your tags with Technorati)
- Tag management: rename tags, delete tags, replace tags, convert categories to tags, etc.
- Support of embedded tags (
[tags]tag1, tag2, tag3[/tags]
): You can tag posts directly by entering the tags in the post using[tags]tag1, tag2, tag3[/tags]
. This makes it possible to tag posts when you use an external blogging application like BlogDesk.
Download
zip, 38k
Compatibility: WordPress 2.0.x, WordPress 2.1.
However, please do not use the plugin with an outdated version like WordPress 2.0.2 — in this case update to the latest version of the 2.0.x branch first (currently 2.0.9). I don’t support versions like 2.0.2.
Installation
The Simple Tagging Plugin can be installed in 4 easy steps:
- Decompress the downloaded .zip archive and put the files into your plugins directory (/wp-content/plugins/) or into a sub directory of the plugins directory (recommended).
- Enable the plugin in the WordPress Plugins admin page.
- Go to WordPress Admin > Tags > Tag Options, adjust the options and save.
- Go to WordPress Admin > Options > Permalinks and press the button to update the permalink structure.
Theme Integration
To display the tags of a post, a tag cloud, related posts etc. you need to add so-called template tags to your WordPress theme so that WordPress knows where to output the according information. In the following are all template tags described in detail:
- Tags of the Current Post
STP_PostTags()
- Tag Cloud
STP_Tagcloud()
- Related Posts
STP_RelatedPosts()
- Related Tags
STP_RelatedTags()
,STP_RelatedTagsRemoveTags()
- More Template Tags
Normally, you can just add the template tag without any options and you adjust its options under WordPress Admin > Tags > Tag Options:
However, if you want to use individual outputs, you also can pass individual parameters. If you pass parameters, then the options you’ve set under Tags > Tag Options will be overridden.
By the way, the download contains sample files for the WordPress 2.1 default theme (Kubrick) where related posts, related tags, post tags and tag cloud are already integrated. Just upload the files to your theme path (wp-content/themes/default/
) and you’re done. If you also want to see the tag cloud, create a new page (Write > Write Page) and select „Tag Cloud“ as ‚Page Template‘ in the options on the right hand side.
Manage Tags
You can manage your tags (rename tags, delete tags, replace tags) under WordPress Admin > Tags > Manage Tags.
Import Tags
Under WordPress Admin > Tags > Manage Tags. you can convert your categories to tags or import your tags from Ultimate Tag Worrior or Jerome’s Keyword’s Plugin. It will detect the according plugin data in the MySQL table automatically and will offer the import button only if valid data was found.
Limits, Known Issues
- I’ve successfully tested type-ahead dropdown menu with IE, Firefox and Opera browser, however I don’t know if it works in other modern browsers as well.
- Internet Explorer only: the type-ahead dropdown menu moves the list of tags downwards due to position:absolute issue of the IE. Any help to solve this CSS issue would be appreciated.
- WP 2.0.x: When using ‚related tags‘ and you are browsing more than one tag, the ‚Previous Posts‘ and ‚Next Posts‘ links do not work properly and are displayed although if there are no more posts. This problem does not occur in WordPress 2.1.
To Do’s
I’m still working on additional features that will be implemented in one of the next version of this plugin:
Support inline tags [tags]tag 1, tag 2, tag3[/tags] so that posts can also be tagged thru external blog applications.– implemented in version 1.4- Support search results for tags.
- Smarter ‚Related Posts‘, e.g. considering posts only that do have 2 or more same tags as the current post.
- Support for localizations. Ralph is going to work on that.
- Support of sorting umlauts in tag cloud: when umlauts (ä,ü,ö etc.) are being used as first char in tags, these tags are not sorted correctly acc. to German logic
Feature Suggestions From Users / Wish List
In the following I’m listing feature suggestions from users which I think would be useful and will or might be implemented in one of the next version of this plugin.
Maybe you could provide a possibility to display posts that are not tagged at all.– implemented in version 1.4- I’d like to have an option in template tag
STP_PostTags()
to output the number of posts that are tagged with each tag. - My wish: an option to limit the number of related tags when calling
STP_RelatedTags()
- A possibility to call/display the related posts outside a loop. I’d like to create a sidebar widget which displays the related posts when browsing a single post. For that purpose it would be cool to have a function
getRelatedPostsForPost($postid)
. Adding an option to use hyphens „-“ as space separator in the tag URL instead of underscore „_“.– implemented in version 1.4Add support of Simple Tagging Plugin to your other plugin Breadcrumb Navigation XT.Done (Thanks, Lutz)- I was wondering if you could implement tag feed? If people just want to subscribe to let’s say your rants tagged with ‘travel’, instead of all your rants.
- Support inline tags like
[tag]tag[/tag]
which will be converted to tag links while displaying the posts (like in UTW). - Is there a way to limit the age of what posts show up in the tag cloud so that if the newest post with a tag is say over a year old it would be excluded from the cloud? I want to show some new tags with only a few posts but I don’t want to show tags that have five posts from two years back.
- A way of limiting the tagcloud to work within categories: a bit like “child_of†when you list_categories… I simply drown in tags…..so if I could chop up the the tags into smaller sub-clouds that would make my site work much better.
- Could you add the ability to exclude specific categories from the related posts?
- I’d like to show a tag cloud of a category (for example cat id=5) or exclude specific categories from the cloud.
Other Plugins That Make Use of Simple Tagging Plugin
- Simple Tagging Widget: This is a Widget plugin to show a tag cloud generated by the WordPress plugin.
- Batch Categories supports mass tagging using Simple Tagging.
- SitemapTags integrates Simple Tagging tags into the Google Sitemap Generator plugin. Plugin is in German only.
Version History and Changelog
- 1.6 [2007-03-04]:
Bug fix: avoid error message „stristr(): Empty delimiter“ when writing posts.
Bug fix: replace commas when importing categories as tags. - 1.5 [2007-02-11]:
Bug fix: error message occurred under some circumstances when embedded tags were enabled but there were actually no embedded tags in the post.
Improvement: „.“ and „~“ can now be used as characters in tags (I’ve prohibited these so far) - 1.4 [2007-02-10]:
Bug fix: Tags have not been deleted from tags table when deleting posts.
New feature: embedded tags ([tags]tag1, tag2, tag3[/tags]
) are now supported so that you can tag your posts with an external blogging app.
New feature: new menu in WP Administration to display posts that are not tagged.
New feature: new option to use hyphens „-“ as space separator in the tag URL instead of underscore „_“. - 1.3 [2007-02-08]:
Bug fix: Adding categories as meta keywords didn’t work under WordPress 2.1 in single post views. - 1.2 [2007-02-06]:
Bug fix: error occurred under PHP4 when „Maximum number of tags to display“ was set to greater than zero.
Bug fix: Under some circumstances, post tags were not displayed.
Bug fix:STP_MetaKeywords()
was calling itself which caused an infinite loop and the website wasn’t loaded at all when using this template tag. - 1.1 [2007-02-05]:
Bug fix: Tags were deleted when comments where moderated under WordPress 2.1. I’ve implemented Mark’s solution.
Improvement: When enter is hit in the options, the options are saved instead of reset.
Improvement: Now you can adjust what kind of stringSTP_RelatedTagsRemoveTags()
displays if no tag is there. - 1.0 [2007-02-04]:
Initial release.
Donation
Do you like my work? Any donation would be highly appreciated.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Jerome Lavigne for his Keywords Plugin. Simple Tagging Plugin is based on Jerome’s Plugin 2.0 Beta 3, however heavily extended. Anyway, I think without Jerome’s great work I would have never started this project.
Also, many thanks to Christopher T. Holland for WICK („Web Input Completion Kit“) which I use for the type-ahead feature.