WordPressGarage.com

Jerome’s Keywords broke during upgrade, now using Simple Tagging

I was using Jerome’s Keywords for tagging posts, and all was working fine until I finally upgraded from 2.1.1 to 2.1.2 (yes, I know, I should have done it a long time ago, but upgrades scare me).

The upgrade went fine, but I noticed that when you clicked on a tag, it takes you to a 404 error page. I searched the web to find out what was going on, and it seems that Jerome’s Keywords has a bug that makes it problematic with WP 2.1. He’s released a beta of this plugin that is compatible with WP 2.1, but I definitely don’t want to work anything unstable after this tagging fiasco. Ultimate Tag Warrior is also not an option, since it seems that the tagging breaks if you approve a comment. Yikes.

Addendum: Since I wrote this post, Chris from Solo Technology wrote a comment saying that Ultimate Tag Warrior works fine with WP 2.1. This is good to know since there are a lot of plugins for WordPress that are based on Ultimate Tag Warrior and add extra functionality to your blog. In the meantime, I’m still using Simple Tagging.

I found the solution: the Simple Tagging plugin. This is a brilliant plugin that does more than just tag, and has many great features that Jerome’s Keywords does not. Once you’ve activated the plugin, it creates a new toolbar called Tags, under which you have a few options: Tag Options, Manage Tags, Not Tagged Articles, and Import Tags. There are so many options on these pages, such as batch changing, adding, or deleting tags, feed options, meta options, tag cloud options, identifying articles that haven’t been tagged, and importing tags from Jerome’s Keywords or the Ultimate Tag Warrior Plugins.

Features:

First of all, this plugin displays the tags you’ve already used in Write>Post so that you can easily select tags for a post. It also auto-completes for you if you start typing a tag. You can set it up to add tags to the meta data on a page, and have related posts based on tags appear. This removes the need for two separate plugins for meta data and related posts.

It has an import function for importing tags from Jerome’s Keywords which works smoothly, and you can create a tag cloud.

How I installed it and tweaks I needed to make:

First I imported my tags from Jerome’s Keywords. This went smoothly, but I was still getting 404 error pages when I clicked on a tag. I fixed this by going to Tags>Tag Options, and under General Options changing the Tag search base from “tag” to “keywords” and then back to “tag” again. For some reason, this resolved the issue.

Then I pasted the code for displaying the tags in my home, index, search and archive page templates. I also pasted the code for displaying related posts. This worked fine.

Finally, I pasted the code for the tag cloud in my sidebar. This didn’t work quite so well, and needed some tweaking. First of all, if you want to style your tag cloud, make sure to paste the following into your template page:

<?php if (class_exists('SimpleTagging')) : ?>
<ul id ="tagcloud"><?php STP_Tagcloud(); ?></ul><?php endif; ?>

Then, you need to add styles to your stylesheet. There is available CSS on the Tag Cloud page of the plugin, which I used, but it created a list of tags rather than a cloud. So first I went into the WordPress administration, and went to Tags>Tag Options, and under Tag Cloud I changed the “Cloud tag link format” to

<a class="t%scale%" title="%tagname% (%count%)" href="%fulltaglink%">%tagname%</a> so that it wouldn’t be based on <li>. Then I changed the CSS to the following:

ul#tagcloud { padding:0; margin:0; text-align:center; list-style:none; }
ul#tagcloud { display:inline; color:#FF6600; background: none; padding: 0;}
ul#tagcloud a, ul#tagcloud a:link { text-decoration:none; }
ul#tagcloud a:hover { text-decoration:underline; }
ul#tagcloud a.t1 { font-size: 80%; }
ul#tagcloud a.t2 { font-size: 110%; }
ul#tagcloud a.t3 { font-size: 150%; }
ul#tagcloud a.t4 { font-size: 180%; }
ul#tagcloud a.t5 { font-size: 200%; }
ul#tagcloud a.t6 { font-size: 220%; }
ul#tagcloud a.t7 { font-size: 250%; }
ul#tagcloud a.t8 { font-size: 280%; }
ul#tagcloud a.t9 { font-size: 310%; }
ul#tagcloud a.t10 { font-size: 330%; }

These styles did the following: it made sure the text was the same orange as on this blog; and I changed the percentages so that they were more in line with what looked ok to me. Finally, to center the whole thing, I went into my sidebar template and wrapped the whole thing in a centered div, so that the code there looked as follows:

<h2>Tags</h2>
<div align="center">
<?php if (class_exists('SimpleTagging')) : ?>
<ul id ="tagcloud">
<?php STP_Tagcloud(); ?>
</ul>
<?php endif; ?>

This is a really handy plugin, and I recommend checking it out.

Simple Tagging plugin>>