Tags In WordPress 2.3
September 25th, 2007If you’ve upgraded to the recently released WordPress 2.3, you may have noticed that the release brings official support for “native tags.” Tags are familiar to most people who use various social networking sites such as Flickr or Del.Icio.Us, but in the context of blogging it can be a bit confusing because there is often some semantic overlap between a blog server’s use of tags and categories.
In short, categories are typically used more conceptually for organization, while tags are used for identification by whatever keywords seem appropriate. For this reason there is usually a limited number of categories on a blog, while there may be an infinite number of tags.
Many people have asked me when MarsEdit will support the native tags in WordPress 2.3. For once, I’ve got good news that doesn’t require me to release a new version! Thanks to some thoughtful design by the WordPress developers, native tags are already supported.
How do you take advantage of the support? Just show the “Keywords” field for your WordPress 2.3 blog in MarsEdit. You do this by selecting it from the View menu in the main menu bar. Now you can enter tags as a comma-separated list of terms. These will be sent along with your post to the WordPress blog, and if it’s version 2.3 or later, the terms will automatically be incorporated as tags along with the post.
I hope this brings an “unexpected” feature to light for those of you running WordPress. There are obviously improvements I’d like to make in the way MarsEdit handles tags. Obvious things that come to mind are auto-completion and an improved UI for reinforcing the separation between tag terms. But for the short term I think this feature will be very appreciated.
September 26th, 2007 at 5:35 am
Cool!
September 26th, 2007 at 6:06 am
Fantastic Daniel (and Matt).
September 26th, 2007 at 6:37 am
Wonderful!! I installed the new version yesterday and I was just about to ask how we could deal with Wprdpress 2.3 Tags in ME :-)
September 26th, 2007 at 8:24 am
I used MarsEdit a couple of years ago, religiously. Then I added tags to my blog and I got tired of writing the post in MarsEdit, and then having to login via WordPress to add the appropriate tags, so I stopped using MarsEdit.
But now I can come back! Thanks…and thanks to the WordPress folks for making it so easy.
September 26th, 2007 at 12:50 pm
So I upgraded to WP 2.3 and now when I try to add keywords to a post I get the following error:
Can”™t do post for Targuman because the server reported an errorThe XML parser could not parse the data.: XML-RPC Response Parsing Failed.
Any ideas?
September 26th, 2007 at 2:23 pm
Chris – my first reaction when I see that kind of vague error is that a plugin in your WordPress installation is incompatible with WP 2.3. By any chance are you running the Google Sitemap Generator plugin? It’s one that has been identified by a few users as needing update after going to 2.3. See:
http://www.red-sweater.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=424
If you’re not running that, it could be another plugin. Generally the “XML-RPC Response Parsing Failed” happens when some plugin causes the entire fetch to fail, so WordPress just returns a blank response instead of an XML document.
September 27th, 2007 at 5:47 am
Daniel – Thanks! I just realized this morning that ALL posts were throwing that error. And that did it! Wonderful, thanks for replying!
October 5th, 2007 at 9:30 am
Awesome! Ask one of the “askers” I’m glad to see this feature already smartly supported.
I’ll look forward to improvements in that UI, specifically to match Yojimbo’s tag behavior.
October 11th, 2007 at 12:19 am
sweet!