WordPress and Tags

One enhancement that you can make to your WordPress blog is to add the ability to “tag” posts. There are lots of tags plugins that are available for WordPress. Check out the WordPress wiki which lists plugins and the WordPress Plugin Database to see what plugin suits your needs. One possible solution is a very simple tagging plugin called “Bunny’s Technorati Tags”. This tool let’s you tag your posts and then add a link our to Technorati. However, if you want to be able to tag your posts and link out to other information sources like Flickr, Del.ico.us, as well as Technorati this plugin won’t work. To get this type of functionality the best plugin to install is called Ultimate Tag Warrior. This plugin allows you to add tags to your post and do really nifty things with those tags like generate a tag cloud, sort by tag and link out to Technorati and other tag oriented information source.

The great thing about this plug in is that is very simple to use. I discovered that I didn’t even need to alter my templates to get my tags to display. This could be configured in the under Options > Tags. Here you can import your previous tags if you were using another tagging plugin that used a custom field to store the data. You can also import your categories as tags. Most of the adjustments I’ve had to make have been to the tag archive which wasn’t formated quite the way I wanted when I started. I also had to tweak the Tags template which allows you to create a page with a tag cloud. The documentation for this plugin is quite extensive and worth spending some time looking at. You can use the template that the plugin supplies to create a tag cloud, tag search, and add tags to your posts or you can use the functions from the plugin to add tags to the templates in your existing theme. The plugin also provides ways to customize the format of your tags.