Three Unique Uses Of WordPress Tags

Everyone knows you can use tags to help separate your posts and make it easier for your users to find exactly what they are looking for without creating a million categories. That is probably what tags were originally intended for, but they can be useful for other reasons as well:

Feeds For Software/Plugin Updates

WordPress automatically generates a feed for your categories. The URL is /categoryname/feed. It also does the same exact thing for tags. This can be useful for many reasons, but I tend to think it is especially helpful if you distribute software through your blog. You can use this built-in feature to create a feed that people can subscribe to so they get notified of updates immediately. You can even go as far as setting up a FeedBurner feed and e-mail subscription as well.

To see an example of this in action, click here to view the feed for my htaccess generator.

Heck, you could even use this to make a feed for a blog series.

Temporary Categories

A few days ago I did a bit of spring (well.. autumn) cleaning and got rid of categories that had few posts and/or were not updated for a while. Before I deleted them I went through each post in the category and set a tag for the post to the old category’s name. The reason I did that is so if I feel like writing a bunch of posts on the topic again I can quickly and easily get each post and add them back to the category, and there won’t be a bunch of categories with one or two posts on the sidebar. Although chances are I won’t be writing stuff for the categories again - it’s better to be prepared for the future, wouldn’t you agree? And it certainly didn’t take a while to do this either - only a few minutes.

“Best Of”/Hot Articles Lists

This is a relatively new feature here - and it was definitely needed. The reason to keep a “best of” or hot articles list is to showcase the best articles on your blog to new visitors. Doing so will hopefully coax them into subscribing, submitting stuff to social networks, etc. While there are plugins that automatically do this based on criteria like the number of comments and page views - I like keeping a bit of control over what appears. The way I implemented this is by creating a tag for the best posts and adding a quick theme hack to the sidebar:

<li><h2>Best Of Nusuni Dot Com</h2><ul>
	<?php
		query_posts('tag=best-of-nusuni-dot-com');

		if (have_posts()) {
			while (have_posts()) { the_post();
				echo("<li><a href='" . get_permalink() . "'>". the_title('','',false) . "</a>\n</li>");
			}
		}
	?>
</ul></li>

The ‘tag’ for query_posts() is in the same format as all other slugs. If you don’t feel like having to figure out what the slug is for a particular tag, just make your tag one word like “bestofposts”.

Well, that’s it. Do you use tags? Why or why not?

Please subscribe, or else I will cry. Do you really want to make a programmer cry?