Firstly, there are just so many tagging plugins out there, that I have a tough time deciding which ones are good, or even which ones have the features I want. (Or even what features I want!) Reading up on other people’s personal experiences, while useful, is also very time-consuming, but I’ve run into a few potential plugins.

Firstly, Ultimate Tag Warrior seems to be a feature-rich plugin that should have everything I’d ever need. Besides tagging support, it also offers support for weighted tag clouds, similar to what you have at del.icio.us. But, since it keeps tags separate from categories (not a bad thing), it uses its own table for tag storage, which could create problems when upgrading. But this is a minor problem, as I’m sure a writing a script for the upgrade conversion would be trivial. But, I’ve also heard some negativity about it, and from playing around with it for a bit, it seems to have almost too many features for me.

This category-tagging plugin also looks decent. In contrast to Ultimate Tag Warrior, it just uses the WordPress categories as tags, and thus shouldn’t have to rely on any other tables besides WordPress’ own. This plugin thus probably does the least modification, and this is good since less is often more. An additional benefit is that no more work would be required in order to display tags, since categories would become tags. It also includes nice functions such as a weighted tag cloud. Yet another plugin, Cat2Tag also seems to provide similar functionality to this one. These plugins would also probably be the best option in considering future versions of WordPress - I believe it’s likely that categories will be supplanted by tags in the next major version.

But maybe the main reason for my apprehension is my unnatural like of the structure of categories. You see, tags have become such a big thing because they are easy to use, and natural to most everyone. But for me, it seems to be the opposite. Despite not being able to deny the usefulness of tags, I would still like to have categories alongside them. For me, tags can be too open-ended, but perhaps this is just in the sematics of how tags are used - I suppose tags can be just as structured as categories. Perhaps a good compromise would be categories for the main subject and tagging for keywords; this would provide a good structure and still have the good metadata of tags. This would also eliminate the need for a nightmare hierarchy of categories and sub-categories. (Ultimate Tag Warrior could provide this functionality.)

But, maybe I’ll just have to learn to deal with a tags-only system if and when WordPress switches over to tags. In the meantime, I’ll probably be fence-sitting, undecided on what to do, and inevitably, stuck without tags.

Update

I’ve decided to go with the simple, but effective Category Tagging Plugin for WordPress, since it uses WordPress’ own categories as “tags”, and so integrates nicely while at the same time providing much-needed “Related Posts” and “Tag Cloud” functions. The fact that it doesn’t create another table for the tags makes it easy to switch out from using this plugin, should the need arise. Stay tuned for more details.

Del.icio.us changes all of that. Being a Google fanboy, I first tried out their bookmarks service, which was functional and tidy but very spartan at the same time. While it supports multiple tags, a crucial feature in my mind, and has some pretty neat browser plugins available, it lacks many of the features that del.icio.us has, such as bundles (will get to that later), and sharing/syndication of your links. So, after fully switching to del.icio.us and manually transferring the handful of links I’d accumulated on Google bookmarks, I’m fully in del.icio.us and loving it.

First of all, adding links is super-easy with the provided browser plugins, and accessing them is just as easy. Finding links is also a no-brainer, with a search tool easily visible. But perhaps the feature that really got me was the extensive support for tagging, bundling, and generally metadata stuff. You see, metadata is a huge topic on the Internet because with so much information, it’s hard to know how to find something unless there is information available about what that something is.

Del.icio.us makes it pretty easy, as each time you add a new bookmark you can tag it with a set of keywords that you define. You don’t have to make any categories or folders, as del.icio.us will automatically generate lists for you based on those keywords or “tags” that you enter for a bookmark. Another nice feature is “bundles”, which allow you to group together a certain set of tags under a common name, adding more to the organizational frenzy. Since I love organizing, I was definitely hooked on this. Furthermore, renaming an entire set of tags is easy and importing from your static set of bookmarks (from a browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox) is available as well. Kudos to the folks over there for making this service so easy and intuitive to use - a good online service is one thing, but one that has a good interface is another thing all together.

The service also has an extensive social networking component, with the main page displaying a hotlist of frequented links as a sort of “pulse” or trend-watch service. Sharing of bookmarks is also available and is good for bloggers who want to let others know what they’re reading, as this list can be syndicated or displayed on other sites easily.