Alternative Way To Use WordPress Tags

WordPress tags, as you know, are usually used for adding specific labels to posts.

This basic usage is useful in some cases for example when you want to generate a navigation section for your blog based on a tag cloud. In my opinion, this kind of use of tags as simple descriptive labels is now obsolete: tag clouds are almost dead and there is no reason to continue to use them. So you can image to use WordPress tags in a different way to implement WordPress themes with complex behaviors based on tags. An interesting example is to use WordPress tags to provide a multi-language version of your posts. The only thing you have to do is to create a new post that contains a translated version of an article already published in your main language and add a tag describing the language of the translated post (in the following example I used “italian”).

Now, in the original post, add a custom field to create a link to the translated post (in this example I called the field “italian”). Than add this code (for example in single.php) to display the link to the translated post on your template:

<?php if (get_post_meta($post->ID, 'italian', true)){?>
<a href="<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, 'italian', true) ?>">Italian Version</a>
<?php } ?>

You can exclude all posts that aren’t in your main language from index.php, category.php, tag.php, search.php and so on, simply changing the basic WordPress Loop with the following code:

<?php
$paged = (get_query_var("paged")) ? get_query_var("paged") : 1;
$args =array(
"tag__not_in" => array('ID_TAG'),
"paged"=>$paged,
);
query_posts($args);
if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post();?>

where ''ID_TAG" contained into "tag__not_in" => array('ID_TAG'), represent the ID of the tag you want to exclude from the loop.

If you have other ideas, share your suggestions with a comment.

  • Reply
    Ashfame
    December 9, 2010 at 5:21 am

    I would suggest using Custom taxonomies for such a purpose.

  • Reply
    Michael
    December 9, 2010 at 6:08 am

    I already use costum fields with referending page id for teaser on a front page (teaser for pages). You can nearly do everything with wordpress, amazing! In fact with the new possibilities sinde version 3.0.

  • Reply
    justin
    December 15, 2010 at 11:54 am

    interesting idea. i wonder if something like this could work for Ning networks. any ideas about how one might accomplish this using ning tags?

  • Reply
    inerds
    December 19, 2010 at 5:30 am

    Good idea Antonio,

    I have been using tags to specify the location of the post on the front page, like in a news site, which posts to be listed on the top left div box.

  • Reply
    Amitash
    December 19, 2010 at 6:08 am

    Interesting and very useful for multilingual sites. Antonio, I saw some italian language in facebook as well on your profile! I could not understand though :D

  • Reply
    bfred.it
    December 19, 2010 at 9:10 am

    How about WPML and xTranslate? I’ve been trying the latter and it seems to work fairly well (better than WPML)

  • Reply
    Edy Pang
    January 3, 2011 at 3:20 pm

    Brilliant idea. I was trying some plugin to do this, but with this method I think I can stop considering the most suitable plugin because it’ll be good enough. Great, thanks Antonio.

  • Reply
    Jey keu
    May 7, 2011 at 12:05 am

    “Custom Fields” are actually for situations like this

  • Reply
    Ed
    June 2, 2011 at 1:45 pm

    Great post! – Life saver, was searching high and low for a solution like this.