Tagnificent plugin for WordPress
June 23rd, 2006 9:48:34 am pst by Sterling CamdenI just downloaded, uploaded, and activated Jerome’s keywords manager, v2, by Johannes Jarolim. This WordPress plugin lets you manage the keywords associated with the Jerome’s keywords plugin, which I use for tagging. The management plugin dovetails nicely with my tag cloud widget, because it lets you rename tags across all posts, among other features, as shown below:
One thing I’ve noticed about Jerome’s keywords, though. If you search for a tag that also happens to be the beginning of another tag, you get the union of the two sets. For instance, a search for “blog” includes “blogs” and “blogging”. That’s not so bad, but I happened to tag three posts with “c” to indicate the C programming language. Clicking on the “c” tag returned all posts tagged with any word that starts with a “C”, from “catholicism” to “cynicism” and everything in between.
I spent some time playing with the Jerome’s keywords plugin to see if I could straighten it out on this point. I found the culprit: a “LIKE” clause in a SQL SELECT statement. But I was unable to get any alternatives to work satisfactorily before I ran out of playtime.
Fortunately, even though the new Jerome’s keyword manager plugin also listed all of those aforementioned entries under “c” (it probably uses the original plugin’s API routine to generate the list), when I replaced the “c” tag with “c-language” it only replaced the tags that exactly matched “c”. So, this plugin has already paid for itself in terms of time spent downloading and installing versus time saved.
Nice work, Johannes.
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Thanks for your nice review for that puny plugin
Since all keywords are saved in a comma seperated list/post i don’t see an easy (in the meaning of cpu and programming time) way to replace the like clause – maybe it wasn’t a very clever db-design-idea to save tags like this in the first place… But that’s jerome’s problem. I’ll take a look – shouldn’t be that hard to solve it => v3
however – thanks for the review!
Johannes, thanks for clicking through and commenting. Sounds like maybe a simple preg_match could be applied to each of the results returned from the SQL SELECT to weed out the non-matches. As I said, I didn’t have time to finish playing with it. Let me know if you get to it first, and I’ll let you know if I do.
The search quirk also works the other way as well. If I have a post tagged “Johannes Jarolim, Jerome, WordPress” and another post “Jarolim”, the clicking on the “Jarolim” tag actually gives back both posts.
[...] I decided to finally get a tag cloud going on SOB. I don’t really think a tag cloud increases the usability of this site at all, but I’m sure it’ll help with search engine ranking. Because good ol’ Sterling has forged ahead in the world of site tagging, and even gone the extra mile by writing his own tag cloud widget for WordPress, I found that procrastination has again paid off in spades: the hard stuff has already been done for me. [...]
Mike, thanks for reading and commenting. Yes, the LIKE clause would do that. I think the only way to perfect this is to apply some additional filter in PHP on the returned results.
[...] This looks like a stable and mature plugin now – I don’t think it needs further enhancements *wink, wink*. Ok, ok – There’s still this ugly SQL-LIKE-Statement – I’ll soon release jeromes-keywords-manager – the final destination. [...]
[...] Finally – This should be it. After reports of bugs nearly to big for such a small plugin i’ve rewritten the original sql clause with a little bit better one. Now we should have Jerome’s Keywords Manager – Final Destination. [...]
[...] I use the Jerome’s Keywords plugin for WordPress to do tagging on my blogs. I love it, but it has one problem: if you search on a tag that is contained within another tag, you get the aggregate results of both tags. That’s because Jerome uses a SQL LIKE ‘%keyword%’ clause to match tags that are in a comma-delimited list in the metadata value field. [...]
[...] Recent Comments Correction for Jerome’s Keywords plugin for WordPress — Chip’s Tips for Developers on Tagnificent plugin for WordPresssterling on Guten Tag, Johannes!Johannes Jarolim on Guten Tag, Johannes!Johannes Jarolim on Guten Tag, Johannes!Joseph A Nagy Jr on links for 2006-07-14 Post Stats [...]
What I want to do on my blog, is every few hours take the oldest post and move it to the
front of the queue, all automatically. Anyone know if there is a plugin that can do this or
a simple way to set up another plugin to do this (use my own feed perhaps)?
Thanks.
Jaylon, your question is kind of off-topic here, and should probably be posted in the WordPress support forums. But it sounds like you just need something to change the timestamp.
A few questions from a blog idiot
How do you keep the spammers from eating you alive? i\’ve seen blogs with nothing but spam postings.
How do you keep some left wing extremist from posting racist or defamatory rhetoric? and if you cant stop them, what are you legally liabel when they do?
can viruses be posted to blogs?
Fundraiser:
Akismet works pretty well. It comes with WordPress, and can be adapted to other blogging platforms. The only thing I don’t like about Akismet is that it has no white-list capability.
A recent California decision held that in effect you’re only responsible for the content that you post, not that of your commenters. I hope that precedent will be followed elsewhere. So far, I have not had any problem with objectionable comments on my blogs, but if I did I would just remove the comment. WordPress notifies me via email of all new comments as they come in, and I usually read them right away.
I think it would take quite a bit of ingenuity to post a comment containing a virus. I think WordPress would filter out <object> tags and the like, so about the worst a commenter could do is to post a link to a site that contains a virus. Best to advise your readers to use safe browsing techniques such as to avoid using Internet Explorer (if they must, set security settings to High for the Internet zone), don’t enable ActiveX in Firefox, and don’t install or run anything unless you know it’s from a reputable source.
Thanks for reading and commenting.
Nice article. thanks
Thanks, Harry. The plugin has lost a lot of its usefulness now that tagging has been added to WordPress itself.