There are a lot of plugins for managing tags in WordPress, and the other day I ran across the recently released Merge Tags plugin. The plugin does one thing and only one thing — it lets you merge tags (duh!). So sometimes I tag new action figures as “Action Figure” and sometimes as “Action Figures”. Using this plugin I can easily merge the two together into a single “Action Figures” tag, so the ones mistakenly given the singular form will now have the plural.
But why do I have to install a plugin for such a basic function? It isn’t like WordPress just added tags and hasn’t had time to add management features — tags were integrated into WordPress with the release of WP 2.3 on September 23, 2007.
Two years later and if you want to do something basic like merge two tags together, you’ve got to go find a plugin to do it.
Instead of adding such basic functionality, the WordPress developers focus on things like the planned image editor for 2.9 that will allow you to resize and rotate images, presumably because of the well known dearth of image editing software available for purchase and the lack of free image editing sites on the Internet such as Picnik.
I understand that since no one else will make image editing software, WordPress has to do it themeslves and include it in WP, but couldn’t they take just a small bit of time to actually finish features like tagging so users don’t have to add Yet Another Plugin to perform basic functions?
Hey, thanks for mentioning the plugin. It was written in the ideea that it will be integrated into WordPress soon after. I haven’t gotten any complaints so far, so it’s looking good.
@scribu: that would be really nice if your plugin was integrated into WordPress…it is a function that is really needed, and you’ve accomplished the task in a very minimalist way.
just comment…