Nontrivial Exercises

Ultimate Tag Warrior WordPress Plugin and Ecto

Since moving to Wordpress, I’ve implemented just a few plugins so far. One of the essential ones is the Ultimate Tag Warrior, written by Christine Davis. UTW allows you to to tag your posts in a variety of ways, then lets you do a variety of things with those tags.

For example, UTW will recognize embedded tags in your posts. If you’re writing a post about Alaskan salmon fishing, you can simply use an html tag around the word “salmon” in one of your sentences in your post and it will recognize this as a tag:

In Alaska the water is cold. A lot of things are cold in Alaska.
Including the fish. This is why [ tag ]salmon[ /tag ] like Alaska -
because it is cold.

(spaces added around the square brackets to keep UTW from trying to tag my example)

Then, you can have UTW place the tags either before or at the end of your post and display various icons. You can see that my recent posts have the little Technorati icon and the a list of tags at the end of the post - this all thanks to UTW.

UTW also can create tagclouds based on your tags, and organize your URL’s canonically by tags - e.g. http://www.nontrivialexercises.com/tag/wordpress for all the posts tagged with “wordpress”.

Now, UTW was developed to be used from within the WordPress Write Post online web interface. If you use an external blogging client / editor like ecto (my favorite), then you have a problem. ecto has integrated tags and will automatically append a “Technorati tags” section at the end of your posts with your selected tags. However, it doesn’t talk to the UTW to make the nicer-looking taglist, or have the tags integrate into the tagcloud or your tag URL structure.

But the great thing about using an opensource, highly extensible blogging platform is that the community can figure out how to make things work the way we want them to. Robin Lu from China has experimented with WordPress’s xmlrpc file and has identified a few small modifications that will enable ecto tag integration with UTW. Be sure to see both part 1 and part 2 of Robin’s hack.

So, you can tag your posts in ecto like this:

and at the end of your post you’ll find this:


hmm, this is like, phychic…

Great stuff - check it out if you use WordPress and tags and ecto!