Well, I’ve done it. I finally overhauled this blog to be able to run Ultimate Tag Warrior. Now I can have both Tags and Categories. I’ve still got some clean up to do. I’ll be going through each post and re categorizing them. There will be a half dozen or so categories with scads of descriptive tags available on the blog once the cleanup is complete.

Turns out it took a lot longer to accomplish than it should have. You see UTW simply refused to play correctly. And because of the way I was doing things previously I though I had killed this blog for a while.

Back when UTW first came out I donwloaded it and loved the concept, but it didn’t do everything I wanted. There was no integrated way to have tag pages with a real WordPress Loop in them. You had to hack code up, and for me the results were just not good enough.

So what I chose to do at the time was sacrifice categories altogether and have a strictly tag based blog. I hacked away at some core functions and messed with things I probably shouldn’t have messed with. Upgrades have been interesting at times.

So the first thing I had to do today was undo the hacks I had done quite a while ago. Of course I didn’t comment them well enough, and of course I didn’t take notes on what I did. Not I!

Then with the blog restored to a more orriginal state I installed UTW and clicked through to discover that nothing was working. I hacked some more. I deactivated plugins, I upgraded plugins, I upgraded WordPress, I hacked some more. I dug into the UTW code. I searched forums and search engines. I printed code out.

It made no sense!

I have this plugin installed on other blogs and it works. I printed out more code and compared it. I printed out config screens and compared them side by side. Everything suggested that it should work, but it simply did not.

Then, finally I printed out the code for the tag.php pages from one site that was working and from this blog. And there it was. I had created each tag page by simply duplicating the category page from the theme installed on the blog. And this theme, believe it or not began it’s life as Gespaa v2, a WordPress 1.4 or 1.5 theme. And the way it called the loop apparantly still works for WordPress Core functions, bt it was choking the UTW functions. A quick change to four or five lines in the tag.php to call the loop a little differently and it all fell into place and hummed like a fine tooled blogging machine.

The Nightmares are all in the little details.

 

Note that this post has only one category, but has several tags, unlike the previous posts in this blog. Though with any luck you won’t be able to check out that difference in a week.

Now if I can just figure out how to limit the number of related posts UTW returns. You reading this Andy?

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Dane Morgan wrote this in the late evening: