One of the plugin which I was very interested in using is the Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW). It is an excellent and very powerfull plugin which lets you to incorporate the trendy “tagging” in to WordPress. I did actually look around for other plugins that were a bit more simple, but in the end, I decided to go with UTW. Simply, I felt that as I am new to the WordPress, and not a PHP and MySql expert, I will go with the popular one which will likely to have more documents about it on the web. Just incase I bump into a problem. You could argue that complex and data base fiddling plugin like UTW, is not really something for novice to tackle, but I was willing to take that risk. If something really bad happens … that will teach me that taking backups often is a very very important thing to do!

It was all so well. Installation was very easy, just like any other WordPress plugins. After I switched off “Automatically add categories as tags” on the Tag Options pannel, I added few UTW tags there and there in the theme files. You can see it in the Archives page, Monthly Archive page, and single post page. But something I struggled was, how to display an archive page for a particular tag. A local tag link. So when a visitor clicks “wordpress” tag, it will show the list of all post on my site which are tagged with “wordpress” tag.

I have to say that I, as a relative novice, felt it was the most unhelpfull section of the both local and web help. Mainly because there were no example template, and rather short mention of is_tag() were confusing. Also, do I have to use tag.php, or can I use archive.php ?

The solution was very simple. This is how I did it, which may be useful for someone outhere who are stuck, like I was.

So how is it done ?

First of all, the template hierarchy for showing /tag/sometag is:

• 1. tag.php
• 2. index.php

Basically, UTW will look for tag.php first, then if doesn’t exist, index.php. Are happy with UTW using index.php, and generating the result page in the main index page fashion ? If you are not, then read on.

I nearly forgot to say; I think using tag.php only works with using fancy URLs for tags. If you are not using fancy URLs, UTW will always use index.php, I think.

You need to edit, so that tag.php is a template to how /tag/sometag page is shown. I wanted to generate the page to look like an archive page, so I made a copy of archive.php, and renamed it to tag.php. A required thing within tag.php is to conatain a WordPress Loop. No need for UTW template tags. I use Hemingway theme, and deleted unwanted stuff within the WordPress loop. Thats things like “if is monthly archive…” and “if is daily archive…”. The final tag.php for my Hemingway look something like:

[php]

[/php]

You can see the WordPress loop in the div class=primary.

You should edit your tag.php accordingly to how you want it to look. I will probably look different, if you are working on the deferent theme, but importat thing is that it have to contain The Loop. Throw this tag.php file into the theme folder which you use. This should work. No UTW template tag, and nothing special about it. Just an ordinary WordPress template file, with WordPress loop in it.

WordPress uses UTF-8 as a default, so you wouldn`t think that there aren’t any problems using Japanese. But the truth is that there are.

Ther are two main problems. When you use the excerpt tag, the WordPress will automatically show limited number of words, 120 words but default I think, with […] at the end. This is often used on the home index page, just like this Hemingway theme does. The problem is that when the content of the post is in Japanese, the whole of that content is shown. Not an excerpt. The other problem is that the “search” do not work. I type in some Japanese word, which I know it exists in my post, but does not return any result.

So. I searched around on the web, and I found the problems and solutions on Jam’s WordPress page. I am not a progmmer, so I am not sure of the detail, but the both problems seems to be associated with the different in context that the Asian languages use, and WordPress do not take in account of that possibility.

The bit I can understand, because its not to do with programming, is the context. Japanese language do not use whitespace to recognise “word”. I believe that this is also true for other Asian multi-byte language like Korean and Chinese. Apprantly, WordPress’@ excerpt count the words by recognising the whitespaces in between. If the content is in Japanese, it will recognise the whitespace at the end of the paragraph as end of the word. As a result, if the post contain five paragraphs, WordPress sees it as five words, and will looks like it is showing the full content.

The “Patch for WordPress 2.0.1 to support Asian text in its excerpt constructing functions” is in diff format, not as a plugin. Thats because the core files needs to be hacked. So thats a downside of applying this patch, especially for those who are not confortable with PHP. I have no experience with maintaining a UNIX system, so I struggled to appyl the patch at first.

For the solution of the search problem, apply the “Search excerpt plugin supporting Asian text”, which is a modified version of the ylsy_search_excerpt.

Some links:

• Jam’s WordPress page
• GnuWin32
• How to use the patch (sorry, its a Japanese link)
• Patch and How to for WordPressME

Note on the files that the patch hacks:

• wp-trackback.php
• ./wp-includes/comment-functions.php
• ./wp-includes/feed-functions.php
• ./wp-includes/functions-formatting.php
• ./wp-includes/functions-post.php
• ./wp-includes/functions.php

WordPressユーザになってまだ１ヶ月程度の新米ですが、その向こう側にあるもの・・・さんのトラックバック企画「WordPressユーザに聞きたい１０の質問」に参加させていただこうと思います。

WordPressを知ったきっかけを教えてください?

半年以上前に、WebDesignやCSS、Webstandardsに関係する情報やHowToを探していたころ、Myerwebにたどり着いたのがWordPressを知った最初です。MTが多い中「このサイトで使われているWordPressって何だろう？」から色々とWordPressについて調べ始めました。

WordPressを選んだ理由を教えてください?

実力はあるけど人気は２番手っぽかったから。以前CGIのブログを使っていたからPHPのを使いたかった（MTはCGI->PHPが面倒）。詳細なCODEXがあった。英語も日本語も大きな問題なく使えそうだった。 他のも試してみて一番気に入ったから。オフ会に参加した！

以前、使用していたブログツールはありますか?

とあるPCゲームのファンサイトを運営していて、sbのブログを組み込んでいた。今はNucleusになってる。他にはgooとDoblog、でも三日坊主。

WordPressの使い心地はどうですか?

全体的にはすごく良い。快適で満足しています。

WordPressで改善して欲しいところはありますか?

・・・とは言え、使用して１ヶ月で早速あります。やはりPHPコードむき出しのテーマは編集しづらい。特にNucleusなんかと比べたら。慣れて来るんだろうけど、PHPが分からないボクのようなユーザーにとっては最初にちょっとした勉強が必要。他には、テーマでも、WP本体でも、アップデートしたときに問題なく成功できたかどうかが分かりづらい。Dashboardでバージョンを表示するとか、テーマ一覧画面で「変更された・作成された」表示をしてほしい。JavaScriptを使ったやつだけでなく。本家のCODEXも整理してほしい。内容に不満は全然ないけど、無限ループの迷宮状態になっているのをどうにかしてくれ～！

知り合いのブロガーにWordPressを勧めたことはありますか?

ありません。

お勧めのWordPressプラグインを3つだけ上げるとしたら?

• ディフォルトで入っているデータバックアップのやつ
• WordPressのアジア圏テキスト対応パッチ
• Ultimate Tag Warrior – これからインストールするつもりです

その他色々と気になるのはある。ちょうどつぼに利くようなプラグインがWordPressにはたくさんありますね。

お勧めのWordPress情報サイトはありますか?

• 本家のCodex
• WordPress Japan
• 特定のサイトじゃないけど、del.icio.usとか、TechnoratiとかでWordPressを検索したらいっぱい引っかかる。大抵タグもある。

よく見に行くWordPressユーザのサイトを3つだけ上げるとしたら?

難しいですねぇ、３つに絞るってのは。

• detlog.org – 最初に出会った日本語のWordPressサイトでもあります
• Taste of Wind – ブログの内容もさることながら、なぜか妙に頭に残るブログタイトルです
  
• Warpspire – 今使っているHemingwayテーマを作っているとこです。まだまだベータ？アルファ？版の開発途中なので頻繁にチェックしてます。

最後に一言、どうぞ。

去年の大阪オフ会で出会った皆さんお元気でしょうか？・・・ってそんなんブログ見れば分かるやん！

スポーツ好きなんですけど、スポーツ・ジャーナリズムを放棄したような日本メディアのトリノ・オリンピック報道（毎回の事だけど）に辟易してる今日この頃です。

あっ、二言だ。

Yes. There was a much simpler solution to the problem from my last post. Type in the custom post slug for those with the Japanese title. I think I will go with that.

I have set that the Permalink to be date, then post-title. Howver, I realise that there might be a problem with that, when the title is in Japanese. It seems to link properly, but the link is like “…%e6%97%a5%e6%9c%ac%e8…”. Just like in Wikipedia. Probably its not a problem as such, but the point of using the title as a permalink is so that people can get the idea of the post contents from it. I cheked out some other Japanese blogs that uses WordPress2.0 ME. They all uses post IDs, and not post title.

May be there is a solution by fiddling with .htaccess and/or PHP files, but not an option for me, with my very limited knowledge of them. Writing all post titles in English, even with the Japanese posts, is another idea, but I am sure there will be times when I want to write in Japanese. Using ID is another solution of course.

I will have to search through on this topic I think.