In a way, tags in WordPress are like categories. They are meant to group similar topics together in a way that makes them easily accessible (i.e. by clicking on a tag link and seeing all the posts marked with that descriptor).
The problem a lot of people run into is that they end up assigning too many tags to their posts. This defeats the purpose of tags. If you only end up with one or two posts with that tag, it hardly deserves its own “category.”
There are plenty of posts out there with tips for WordPress newbies, which is pretty damned handy, it has to be said.
After all, we were all beginners once. When you first fire it up, WordPress can be pretty overwhelming — such a depth of functionality is not easily presented in an immediately intuitive manner. Having said that, it only takes a few nudges in the right direction to get on your way. Install a theme here, a plugin there, have a fiddle with the visual editor, and you’re on your way.
For some sites, tags are hugely important. They’re so important that simply having a tag cloud in the sidebar isn’t enough. They require a whole page dedicated to the site’s tags. In short, they need a WordPress Tag Page.
As a novice WordPress user you might be confused about the function of categories and tags. They work in similar ways and they’re both used to classify and arrange your posts. But a category and a tag has its own specific function, and learning to use each one correctly can help better organize your site and make it easier to read.
Categories
Categories are a way to classify and order your posts. They are hierarchical, which means they can be arranged with a parent-child structure. For example, a blog that produces automobile reviews might have categories that take this structure:
(Note: See comments on this post for other options. Also, see this post.)
If you’ve ever wanted to show only posts from a single WordPress category somewhere, such as on your homepage or in a template file that your create, then it’s pretty easy to do; however, it does take a little digging into your theme’s files.
Editing Your Theme’s Files
In order to display posts from one category, you’ll want to find “The Loop” in the file where you want those posts to display. In the examples below, we’re going to be putting our code into our homepage.
We are self-confessed tag addicts here at WPMU. Tagaholics, if you will. We tag with wild abandon.
However, I don’t touch tags on my own blog. Given that tagging is fairly widespread in the blogging world and I appear to be missing out on all of the fun, I thought it would be interesting to take a closer look at why tags may be useful – and in contrast, why they may be useless.
What is a Tag?
If you’re looking for a way to easily tag your site’s media with a Creative Commons license, then the Creative Commons Media Tagger plugin will allow you to set up your licensing and automatically apply it to all you media – even media that’s already on your site. In addition, you can override any preset license on an individual piece of media.
Setting Up the Plugin
After uploading and activating the plugin, you will find your settings automatically added to the bottom of your Media Settings page (Settings > Media).
Now if this feature is common knowledge then feel free to call me out, but I have been a WordPress user for some time and had no idea that it existed. Not only that, I could have saved myself a fair bit of time on occasion if I had known about it.
How often do you get the temptation to change the permalink of a post after you have published it? There are a few different reasons why you might – here are some of mine:
Please note: this tutorial assumes that you are using WordPress 3.3.1 with the default Twenty Eleven theme installed.
When you first see WordPress, it can be difficult to know where to start. Whilst the feature-laden Graphical User Interface (GUI) can be somewhat overwhelming at first glance, a fresh WordPress install actually creates a functional blog design and layout, straight out of the box. If you want to get stuck straight in with producing content, you can!
We talked before about styling a sticky post with CSS to make it stand out. We also talked about giving categories their own icons.
However, in both of those situations, you are tied to either making the post a sticky or having it in a certain category in order to make it stand out.
But what if you had non-sticky posts in various categories that you wanted to stand out?
The solution is to add a special tag to the post, and then style all posts with that tag.
An Example
