Ultimate Tag Warrior 2.8.3: Help

Table of Contents

The Ultimate Tag Warrior is a tagging plugin for WordPress, designed by the rockin' Christine Davis. The source page for updated information on this plugin is found at Ultimate Tag Warrior.

The Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) is designed for WordPress sites to increase the possibilities and functions for tagging posts and expanding site navigation through the creation of lists of tags. It allows storing a set of keywords (current slang calls these "tags") against posts that behave like categories - the tags can be displayed on a post as links, and when clicked, the visitor is taken to an archive page for that tag. There are also RSS/atom feeds available for each tag. Unlike categories, for example, you can also view archive pages and feeds for sets of tags such as the posts which are tagged with both "photograph" and "food".

Beyond the category-like behaviour, Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin provides ways of getting an overview of your tags through tag clouds and graphic representation such as a long tail graph and/or weighted bar arrangement. UTW can also be coaxed into linking to other tag-savvy websites such as del.icio.us, Flickr and Technorati.

To add tags to posts, a menu is created listing all the tags in use on the site right in the Write Post panel. Click a tag in the list and it will be instantly added to your tag list. One of the more splendid things that it can do, is use the Yahoo! content analysis bits and pieces tagyu.com to look at the text of the current post, and make suggestions for the tags.

The Ultimate Tag Warrior is not for the timid. While it can be used by anyone to add tags to your posts and site, it has a wide variety of features that allow for a wide range of customization. I'll do my best to showcase the most common usages here, but for more graphic detail, check out the Ultimate Tag Warrior main page on my site.

Installation

Currently, this plugin works for WordPress v1.5 and up, though it does not currently work with v1.6.

Wordpress v1.5:
  1. Copy the Ultimate Tag Warrior files into your plugin directory
  2. Open ultimate-tag-warrior-actions.php in a text only editor
  3. Change $install_directory value "/".
  4. Save the file.
Wordpress v1.5.1 and above
Copy the files to wp-content/plugins/UltimateTagWarrior.
Activate the Plugin:
Go to the Plugins Panel and you will see three plugins listed under UltimateTagWarrior.
Set Options:
From the WordPress Administration Panels, choose Manage > Tags. Set the options to meet your needs..

Administration

Ultimate Tag Warrior offers a wide range of customization options.

Help!

If you need access to this file for reference or help, or the link to the main Ultimate Tag Warrior page, I've provided two links under Help at the top of the screen to guide you.

Configuration

base url
This is the location of the tag "folder" relative to your WordPress site root. It should have both leading and trailing slashes. If you change this, either click the Update Permalinks button or manually change your .htaccess file to reflect the change.
Include trailing slash on tag URLs
This will append rewritten URLs with a slash, so instead of /tags/tag, URLs are /tags/tag/.
Automatically include Technorati and local links
These options allow specifying whether Technorati and/or local tag links should be included in the post text automatically. By default, Technorati tags are included, but local tags are not. The included tags will appear at the bottom of your post text. To customize their appearance, see customizing post tags.
Automatically add categories as tags
This will add the names of any categories selected to the list of tags. They will appear in the post and in the tag cloud or lists.
Use URL rewriting
Enabling this will use the base URL and trailing slash options to render links to local tag pages as /tags/tagname instead of index.php?tag=tagname. Usage of this requires enabling Permalinks and making sure your .htaccess file is writable.
Always display tag links on edit post page
You have three choices here for the method to display the list of links to existing tags on the Write Post panel. None will not display anything. Tag List will display a list of all the existing tags. Dropdown will display the list in a dropdown menu.
Tag Cloud Colors
This is the section that sets the font colors and sizes for displaying a tag cloud on your site. The colors must be full six digit hexadecimal values (e.g. #FFFFFF or #8F5B2L). Font sizes can be set for the most and least popular tags. Use only positive values for these. At the bottom of the list you can choose the font size unit as percentage, px (pixel, pt (point), or em. Both values use the same units.
Save
To save the changes you've made within this section, click the Save button.

Edit Tags

The Edit Tags section allows renaming, replacing and deleting tags. If you add more than one tag, then each of the tags will be associated with each of the posts that were tagged with the original tag. For example, if you rename the bananas category to "fruit, yellow", then any post that was tagged with banana will become tagged with both fruit and yellow instead.

If you Rename to a tag that is already in use, then the two tags will merge together.

Deleting deletes a tag. You cannot undo this. There is a pesky dialog box that pops up to confirm deletions, so you better be sure about your choice.

Assign Synonyms

The Assign Synonyms section allows associating synonyms with tags. It's a way of having multiple words map on to a single tag. For example, if you had a photography tag; you might add photo and photograph as synonyms. Presently, the only place where synonyms are used is in the urls of tag pages - with the photo and photograph synonyms in place, if I go to the /tags/photo page, then the posts tagged with photography will display.

Tidy Tags

Use this at your own risk. Backup your database first, including the tag and post2tag tables in your backup.

While Tidy Tags seems to work okay, it does have the potential to mangle your tags. Use this function if you have a lot of orphaned tags or duplicate tags. Tidy Tags will go through the tags table and clean out orphaned or duplicate tags and sort everything out.

Convert Categories to Tags

Use this at your own risk. Backup your database first, including the tag and post2tag tables in your backup.

Once this is done, it cannot easily be undone. Clicking this button will add your site's Categories for all of your posts as tags and include them in the post tags, tag lists, and tag cloud.

Custom Fields

If you are currently using another plugin or custom fields for keywords or tags, you can import these into Ultimate Tag Warrior. In order to work, the keywords or tags must use the Custom Fields as seen on the Advanced Editing view of the Write Post panel.

Type in the custom field name into the custom field to import from. In the box for the delimiter, enter the character(s) used to separate each tag in the option field value area. This is usually spaces, commas, semi-colons, or pipe ( | ).