Tags are coming to WordPress soon as part of the core. This, to me, is both a good thing and a potential complication. It’s good because suddenly WP users won’t have to rely on plugins to tag their entries. The potential complication that could make things a bit more… sticky is whether or not the native WP tagging system will accommodate an import of tags from other plugins. For instance, I’ve been using Ultimate Tag Warrior to tag my entries and make a pseudo-site index from the resultant tag cloud. I spent a number of hours cataloguing my entire blog with UTW and the _last_ thing I want to do is have to repeat the process with the native tag system in WP. And believe me, I’ll likely prefer the WP tag system exactly _because_ it’s native. My philosophy has always been that the more you can do natively, the better, easier, and more efficient things will be because there will be less likelihood of coding conflicts to break functionality. I’m really, truly hoping that WP will allow for some sort of tagging import for the most popular tag plugins because otherwise things are likely to become a bit of a headache again for a while as I transfer things over and manually go through and tag every single entry again. We’ll just have to wait and see how the WP developers handle this new feature. I’m always excited by new toys being added to the core WP files, but there’s always a bit of trepidation to go along with it, since there’s always the risk that many of my favorite plugins will break. I’ve already lost one with the upgrade to 2.1.3; I hate to lose too many more.
