WordPress has included the much-hyped tagging facility from version 2.3. Tagging is a much fancied feature, one that has been desired by bloggers for a long time.
WordPress has a fantastic developer community to support it, and they had created many plugins to add tagging functionality (at a time when WordPress did not have it). These include Ultimate Tag Warrior, Jerome’s Keywords and Simple Tags. Since WordPress added tagging functionality, these plugins have been out of business, but if you are running an older version of WordPress, you can use one of these plugins. Later, when you upgrade to the latest version of WordPress, you can convert the tags to WordPress native tags.
While the native tagging functionality in WordPress takes tagging plugins out of business (Christine, who developed Ultimate Tag Warrior, has now moved on and developed Tag Managing Thing, which is now famous), it creates a new opportunity for plugin authors. If you can’t beat them, join them, goes the old saying. Instead of rivalling native tagging, there are plugins that now enhance the native tagging ability.
Advanced Tag Entry
Advanced Tag Entry was developed by Poplarware. It adds a neat module similar to the ‘Upload’ section under the post area (see screenshot below).
There are options to add existing tags, remove tags, create new tags, edit new tags or remove unused tags – all without reloading the page (another WordPress admin dashboard design quirk, solved by a plugin).
Download Advanced Tag Entry
Tag Managing Thing
Tag Managing Thing was developed by Christine, who is the author of the Ultimate Tag Warrior Plugin also. The functionalities are mostly similar to Advanced Tag Entry, but important differences exist.
One, the options to modify tags exist in a separate page, under ‘Manage’. Secondly, the plugin includes options to modify both tags and categories.
How I use these plugins
I personally have both plugins uploaded, but usually use only Advanced Tag Entry. I activate Tag Managing Thing only for major tag/category modifications (usually during my spring-cleaning blog optimization).