I’ve done some minor maintenance around here. Can you spot the differences? Probably not. What I’ve done is upgraded my old Sandbox 0.6.1 theme to the new 1.0 version, and made a few minor adjustments to my CSS to account for the differences. Visually, there’s not a whole heck of a lot of difference between the current theme and the previous version, other than the addition of tags to the post metadata.
Speaking of tags, I’ve mentioned before that I had been using the WordPress category system more like a tagging system, and that I regretted that decision. I’ve begun the process of undoing that choice by converting a large number of my old categories into tags. I’ve still got more categories than I want, but I’ll finish whittling them down later. I also want to experiment with cross-referencing my post tags with the tags in my Delicious bookmarks and my Flickr photostream.
11 Comments
Same here … so how are you re-shuffling things? Lots of SQL-fu, or is there a plugin out there that I’m missing?
I started with the “Categories to Tags Converter” importer (Manage/Import).
I also have a subset of posts that have ‘keywords’ post-meta data. I used the “Jerome’s Keywords” importer to convert those, but first I disabled the line in the importer that deletes the post-meta values after import. I wanted to keep that, despite the redundancy.
No SQL-fu required! Though, at some point, I might go in and convert all my tags to lowercase, just because I prefer them that way.
Hmmm got an error the first time I saw the site… but no other funkiness.
I guess I can delete the email, and also tell you personally thanks for the help on gl_tail.
I have never thought about cross referencing tags between Flickr and Wordpress, but that is a brilliant idea!
I don’t get the reference to converting tags to lower case. WP2.3 seems to insist on it, unless the tag was previously the name of a category–if I’m not mistaken. Who said consistency was the hobgoblin of foolish minds?
Your Pepys Project link is dead. There’s a link on my blogroll to an ongoing Pepys project.
I also started using WP categories as more of a tagging function a few years ago. Now I have tens of dozens of tags, some very closely related to each other. Once I get around to upgrading my WP, I might have to revisit this post. Let us know if you have any other tips or trouble in the process, please.
Great idea, to cross-reference tags: I do a similar thing with Gmail labels (upper case labels for blog categories, lower-case labels for tags) so I’m kicking myself for not thinking to expand the system to del.icio.us and such. Thanks for the tip!
I also have used the WordPress category system like a tagging system, but some of the categories have to stay categories while some of them have to be converted to tags. I hesitate to start converting because of the amount of work, but some of the suggestions here may be very helpfull
I thought you were adjusting your CSS? I think one of the most basic things is to know that you can only have one element per unique id. You seem to use id=”links” all over the place. Try validating to XHTML1.0 strict. I have been tearing wordpress and some themes apart and validating them completely. They work over IE6 / IE7 and firefox. I am also confident that the site will look fine in Opera and also on the mac. I’m happy to help if you need any advice. Thanks
How is it a new theme then? Wouldn’t it be the same thing v1.1?
Chess Guru: The importer can selectively convert just some of you categories to tags — you pick and choose which ones to convert, and which ones to leave as categories. That’s what I did.
Alex: I hadn’t noticed the duplicate ‘link’ ids. Those are generated by the standard Links widget. I’ll make a patch and file a bug on that. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
redwall: Previously, I was using Sandbox 0.6, plus some custom hacks I had made to the theme files. I’ve upgraded to Sandbox 1.0, and replaced my hacks with more standard API usage from my local plugins. The CSS only required a few minor tweaks here and there to adjust for some changes to the underlying HTML structure generated by the Sandbox theme. Does it justify calling my new theme “2.0″? Who cares? I’m eventually going to redo the whole site anyways.