Can we now manage tags the way we managed categories?

  • I have categories instead of tags because before there was no way of managing tags unless you went to each tag on each post one by one editing or deleting what you wanted. With categories we can just manage it all from the dashboard. And I rather have had tags because then visitors can stay in your blog instead of going into the global tag page wandering off into someone else’s blog. But now since the upgrade I noticed I have 5 tags but I don’t use tags but they say they are all 0 in the manage area of the dashboard.

    Can tags be managed now like categories are? But most importantly, can all the categories I have, and I have many, be somehow easily exported and moved to tags?

  • Yes, under manage > tags. You might find some tags there that you have never used. I had never used tags, but I had three there.

  • click on the box at the left end of each line and then click on delete button at top left to get rid of them.

  • Apparently I have to do that 66 times. I wonder what the algorithm was they used to give them that?

  • I just checked now and see I have 264 categories. I so don’t feel like redoing those all into tags. But I just thought do tags have the drop down feature like the category drop down? And also the tag names at the footer of each blog post? because if not, I’ll just keep things as is.

  • And thank you thesacredpath for the help!

  • Wow, I feel slighted, I only had three. Of course my self-hosted blog had about 30, which would be a total of 33.

  • If I were you I would keep all the categories. It’s possible to convert categories to tags, but NOT the other way around. And they’re diverging as time goes on; I expect the effects of each to be quite a bit different in six months time. Wait and see what happens before you make any wholesale conversions.

    tsp, you don’t use as many categories as me.

  • What do you mean by diverging raincoaster? Did they initially have similar roles in one another and even know they are still similar in function excet for the differences in names and a few technical issues?

    What function do you think they will serve in the future (tags or categories?) in comparison to what they do now..?

  • The tags were initially indistinguishable in function from the categories. I don’t know what divergence may be in mind, but why would they make two choices available if they were only going to have one functionality? I would take a wild guess (and it IS wild) that the tags may end up not going to the Global Category Pages if you buy an upgrade. That’ll cause a stampede towards tags, but it would be bad for SEO, so I’m just not going there.

    Although it’s been many weeks since I got meaningful traffic via a Category Page on WP.com. Or Technorati; does anyone know if the Categories and/or Tags still function as Technorati tags? I think that’s important to know, but have no idea how to figure it out.

  • does anyone know if the Categories and/or Tags still function as Technorati tags?

    i don’t use tags in my blog cos they arrived sort of a long way after i started my blog.
    as for categories, yes, they do have the big T effect on them.
    i had a referrer from big T recently and saw that under the post my categories for that post are converted to big T tags.

    See here
    i hope this helps.

    lorelle did say this in her blog, i am too lazy to dig into it right now. her posts about tags and categories are enlightening. according to her, you should use both. please search her blog for proper explanations. :D

  • Great, thanks. You always know that kind of thing.

  • u r too kind!
    thanks for your compliments! :D

  • Before Automattic added tag support to WP.com, I was using categories the way bloggers on other platforms use tags. So I ended up with a ridiculous number of categories. Since they added tags to WordPress.com, I have been converting categories to tags, using the converter (at the end of the Categories section in the dashboard).
    It’s a painful process, I find. Some categories don’t show up in the converter page. If there’s already a tag of the same name as a category, conversion doesn’t work. In several cases, I’d like to “collapse” subcategories into a broad category and then convert the subcategories to tags. What’s worse is that I often have repeat categories and the only way to merge them is to edit every post with those categories.
    Sometimes I wish I could drag and drop categories and tags at will. Or “add this category/tag to this series of posts.” Search posts and manage categories and tags from the search results.
    And, sometimes, I think I should just start over. Start yet another new blog, import select posts with limited categories and posts, use it as a kind of anthology… But it sounds too self-serving for my taste.

  • Yeah, how do you create tags now that you have to go to some other page? IT is so inconvenient. Does anyone have any ideas? Why the heck did they change it anyway? It was fine with adding the tags individually before posting on the write page.

  • You can create tags on the fly. There is a panel below the test area in the write post page.

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