Monday 3 May 2010

Strictly AutoTags Wordpress Plugin

Wordpress Plugin - Strictly AutoTags

I have been doing a lot of work with Wordpress lately and have been working on a number of custom plugins that I already use with my own Wordpress blogs. One of these plugins that I find very useful is AutoTags which automatically detects words within new posts to use as tags.

Unlike other smart tag plugins that add lots of functionality to manage existing tags this plugin only attempts to find relevant and useful words within posts to use as tags by utilising the power of regular expressions and some simple logic to determine which words and sentences are relevant to the post.

I have been using this plugin on a couple of my own blogs for a while now and as well as helping me build up a nice big list of taxonomies it's not overly complicated in what it does so it doesn't throw any curve balls my way very often.

My posts are usually quite lengthy so I choose to set my MaxTag option to five which means that only the five most relevant tags are added and single or double occurrences are usually skipped which helps make the tags that are added a lot more relevant to the content.

Keeping in the spirit of all things open source I thought I would release the code to the public. It's my first Wordpress plugin and I have only just learned PHP so I cannot claim it to be a work of perfection or anything but I would like to hear feedback from anyone who uses it.

Also if any PHP or Wordpress developers do take a look at the source code I would be interested to hear any advice on the format the plugin takes. I started using a template I downloaded from the web but it wasn't very encapsulated so I decided to put the whole thing in a class. I don't know if this is the best way or not so please share your experience.

You can check out the plugin either at my own site - Strictly AutoTags or at the plugin directory hosted by Wordpress.

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