The latest release of WordPress added native post tagging to the core.
The one great problem with the WP 2.3 release, though, is that it has no management tools to handle tagging. There’s an extra field in the Write Post screen, but that’s it.
What if you want to go back and retrospectively add tags? Is there any way to easily do that?
Well, no, not with 2.3 out of the box.
However, I’ve found two plugins that handle tag management in a pretty solid way.
Batch Categories adds some filtering tools. This is especially helpful if you’ve had WordPress convert categories to tags, because it gives you some bulk editing tools to add and delete tags to multiple posts.
The one I’m finding really helpful? Simple Tags. It has a panel that lists every untagged post. Of which, at present, I have 237, down from nearly double that a day ago. I’d gone through post by post in the spring, trying to retrospectively edit posts and add tags, but apparently I missed a lot. The really nifty feature this one has is that it can show a grouping of twenty to fifty unrelated posts and their attached tags, allowing bulk editing of tags across multiple posts.
Once I get the backlog tagged, I’ll probably disable both plug-ins. Simple tags does have a suggest-a-tag feature, but it’s a bit annoying, actually.
Why features like these weren’t built into the core installation, I can’t explain. Why add a feature and then do absolutely nothing with it? Oh, well, that’s why I’m not a programmer. :/