WordPress 2.3 and Tagging

WordPress 2.3 was released earlier this week.  One of the interesting features of this release is built-in tagging.  A nice feature to have built-in, but I’ve been a bit hesitant to switch over to it. Frankly, Ultimate Tag Warrior has spoiled me and 2.3 doesn’t come with near the features and functionality that UTW offers.

Alas, UTW is not going to be supported with 2.3.  However, Christine (UTW author) is offering some plugins to complement and augment the built-in stuff. Great news.

And like just about anything else associated with WordPress, tag related plugins as making rapid appearances. My hesitancy is leaving me — with haste.  I feel an upgrade coming on soon!

For tag management, I’m trying to decide between these three plugins:

1. Tag Managing Thing – from Christine. 
   

   Once a term has been selected you can perform the following tasks

   • Change the name and slug of the term
   • Delete a term
   • Split a term into multiple terms
   • Merge other terms into the selected term
   • Change a term to belong in a different taxonomy

2. Advanced Tag Entry – Poplar ProductivityWare
   

   • Add a tag to your post from a drop-down list of existing tags you have already defined on other posts (so you can make sure you are consistent).
   • Remove a tag from your post from a drop-down list of the tags you have already added to your post.
   • Create a new tag, by defining the tag name and tag slug.
   • Edit existing tag names and/or tag slugs.
   • Delete tags that are not actually being used, from the WordPress database.

3. Recommended Tags — CyberNetNews.  This one is all that and the kitchen sink!
   

   • Type-ahead tag completion will show a list of matching tags as you type them in the box.
     • The total number of times a tag has been used is also shown in parenthesis immediately after the tag name.
   • Intelligently recommended tags based on the content of the article:
     • Tags can be “exploded” so that the tag name is broken up into individual words. This will let a tag called “Windows Vista” be recommended even if you only mention “Vista” (note that it is without the “Windows”) in your article.
       • You can specify words to ignore that may appear in your tags, such as “the”.
     • Common plural/past endings can be trimmed off of the end of tag names. That way a tag called “downloads” will still be recommended even if you only mention “download” in the article.
       • On the Admin screen you can customize which endings are trimmed off.
     • HTML tags are stripped from the post so that things such as URL’s are not matched in your tags. That way linking to a Wikipedia article won’t necessarily recommend the “Wikipedia” tag, unless you’ve specified the tag name somewhere in the content of your article.
   • Complete list of all existing tags is shown below the upload box incase a desired tag is not recommended.
   • Completely customizable via the WordPress Admin screen
     • Display a list of existing tags
     • Display the recommended tags
     • Enable type-ahead auto-completion of tag names
     • And more

If anyone has any experience with any of those, I’m all ears. 

Another feature of UTW that I’m going to miss is “Related Posts”. In fact, I used the UTW function in my own now-deprecated Add Related Posts to Your Feed plugin. Fortunately, I just stumbled over the WP 2.3 Related Posts plugin.  Based on tags, it shows related posts — and adds it to the feed.  No extra plugin necessary. 

Are there any other great tagging plugins for 2.3+ that I’ve missed?  I suspect there are (please, leave a comment if you know of more) but these ought to get me rolling.

Now I just have a bit of testing and theme-tweaking to do before the upgrade — in my sandbox first, of course. 

Updated 10/4/2007

Andy left a comment mentioning Simple Tags.  This plugin is simply brilliant, I strongly encourage folks to give it a look.  Thank you Andy.

I never was able to get the auto-suggest feature working with “Recommended Tags”.  The author and I exchanged some emails, but… no luck.

I’ve currently disabled WP 2.3 Related Posts plugin. I had some database issues this week and I suspect it was involved (no proof yet and I’m still testing, so take this with a grain of salt).  Simple Tags does the related posts thing for posts and feed as well, so I’m using that for now.

Possibly Related posts:

1. WordPress 2.3 and My Plugins
2. First Release: Add Related Posts to Your Feed
3. Second Release: Add Related Posts to Your Feed
4. WordPress Plugin Directory
5. Testing New WordPress Versions Part 4: Upgrade!