Creating and Editing Tags
In Book IV, Chapter 1, you can find out all about publishing your posts in WordPress and how you can assign different tags to your content. This section takes you through the steps of managing tags, which is similar to the way you manage categories. To create a new tag, follow these steps:
- Click Post Tags in the Posts drop-down list.
The Post Tags page opens, as shown in Figure 7-6.
Unlike categories and links, WordPress doesn't create a default tag for you, so when you visit the Post Tags page for the first time, no tags are listed on the right side of the page. - The left side of the Post Tags page displays the Add New Tag section (refer to Figure 7-6).
- Type the name of your new tag in the Name text box.
Suppose that you want to create a tag in which you file all your posts about the books you read. In the Name text box, type something like Fictional Books.
Figure 7-6: The Post Tags page in the Dashboard.
- Type a name in the Slug text box.
The slug is the permalink of the tag and can help identify tag archives on your site by giving them their own URL, such as http://yourdomain.com/tag/fictional-books. By default, the tag slug adopts the words from the tag name.
- (Optional) Type a description of the tag in the Description text box.
Some WordPress templates are set up to actually display the tag description directly beneath the tag name. Providing a description further defines the category intent for your readers. The description can be as short or as long as you want.
- Click the Add New Tag button.
That's it! You've added a new tag to your blog. The Add New Tag page refreshes in your browser window with blank fields, ready for you to add another tag to your site.
- Repeat Steps 2 through 7 to add an unlimited number of tags to your blog.
You use the Tags and the Categories pages in your Dashboard to manage, edit, and create new tags and categories to which you assign your posts when you publish them. Book IV, Chapter 1 contains a lot of information about how to go about assigning tags and categories to your posts, as well as a few good tips on how you can create new categories and tags right on the Edit Posts page itself.
Many WordPress Web sites have a cool feature called a tag cloud, which is a unique way to display a list of tags used on your site to give your readers navigation options to view your content. Figure 7-7 shows the tag cloud displayed on the sidebar of Lisa's design blog.
Figure 7-7: A tag cloud on Lisa's design blog.
At the top of the right sidebar in Figure 7-7, the tag cloud gives you an at-a-glance peek at the topics Lisa writes about. You can tell the topic she writes about most often because that tag appears in the largest text; likewise, the topics displayed in small text aren't written about quite as often. You can tell by her tag cloud that Lisa's quite a fan of WordPress.