guff

Tag sale

Ok, sneaking back. Two posts today! I must have had too much caffeine or something.

The tagging phenomenon has been of little interest to me until recently. Or rather, I’ve been slow to come to appreciate the utility of tags as a blogging tool. And even though I’m admittedly a pretty lazy blogger (selecting categories for an entry sometimes leaves me thinking “what’s the point?!”), WordPress 2.3 has put tagging right in your face, so there’s no reason for me to hold off any longer. So, going forward I’ll try to be diligent about adding appropriate tags to posts here. In time I’ll make changes to guff’s layout to accommodate them. For now, just assume they’re here (…).

Anyway, the primary reason for this post is to pass along a little praise. The addition of tagging to WordPress causes changes to the back-end, which means it breaks things for a lot of folks. Ok, you have to break eggs to make great pancakes (or bad ones). Among other issues (merging of post categories, link categories and tags into a taxonomic mishmash is a whole other topic), the new built-in tagging features force into retirement a number of existing plugins, and this could be a bad thing considering the various ways tagging plugins have gone about retaining tags in WordPress.

The key point is that WordPress users need a way to transfer tags from their tagging plugin of choice to the new ‘official’ scheme. And it looks like the developers did some due diligence here, because 2.3 comes with five tag-related importers, four of which are dedicated to individual plugins. And that is a Pretty Good Thing^®.