No doubt there are at least one or two other WordPress bloggers out there who will be interested in this breathtaking bit of news.
While playing with my test blog and experimenting with new themes (oh yes, I’m always thinking of new presentations to wow you with, or with which to wow you), I discovered that at some point those sneaky WordPress guys slipped in the ability to convert tags to categories! Wowie zowie! Aren’t you thrilled? Or maybe I’m the only one who didn’t see the announcement.
Anyway, it used to be you couldn’t do that. You could convert categories to tags, but not the reverse. If you do the tags to categories conversion and are into hierarchies and parent categories, you’ll still have to go to your categories list to assign them. But at least you won’t be forced into the laborious post-by-post editing previously necessary.
You’ll find this handy dandy feature under Dashboard > Tools > Available Tools > Categories and Tags Converter.
Now if only I could break the habit of assigning tags …
I don’t know if you’ve ever taken a look at my Read Me page, but it explains a little of what I had to resort to to get around WP’s limitations. I had to use these converters, which were both there but much harder to find than they are now, back when I decided to make those changes. Now that WP has made it easier to do at least some of what I originally wanted, I wonder sometimes if it might be worth it to switch back to the “normal” way people use categories and tags.
The problem (and you know there’s always a problem) is that it’s so hard to figure out what the actual capabilities of this platform are. So much of what I’ve learned has come by accident, either by experimenting on my own or from stumbling across a reference to something I wasn’t looking for but sounded cool. A great example of this is the ridiculous “Posts With Music” drop-down list on my themes “custom” menu bar. I chose to add the names of bands whose music I’ve posted as children of the “performers” category because I thought the hierarchical nature of categories would cause that list to be automatically updated whenever I added a new performer. Instead, I have to manually add and drag into the correct alphabetic order every new performer I add!
Hell, I actually just remembered one I forgot to add! I wonder how many others I’ve forgotten?
Yes, I ran into that same problem with the menus. No way I could put all my categories into drop-downs. I’d be dragging those bars around and up and down a very long list to get everything properly ordered and alphabetized. Maybe they’ll fix that eventually, like they did the tags/categories converter. On the other hand, I love playing with all the themes, the possibilities, the options … as I’m sure you’ve noticed. I can’t go two weeks without trying something new.
You guys. You guys are so far ahead of anything I’ve even considered. I’m lucky to be able to eavesdrop. I learn something new every time either of you talk WordPress.
Well, we’ve been at it a lot longer than you have. If you have questions, just ask. Always happy to help.