[wp-hackers] Thoughts on Ultimate Tag Warrior

[Mark Jaquith]

On Sep 2, 2006, at 2:53 PM, Matt Mullenweg wrote:

> I'm curious about people's thoughts and opinions on the Ultimate  
> Tag Warrior plugin.
>
> In my experience, it can often be the source of pretty significant  
> performance problems when traffic and/or # of posts/tags goes up.

Performance might be a bit better now that UTW doesn't make any  
queries to get its tags (I told you about this in SF).  Now it caches  
them in a serialized postmeta array, so no additional queries are  
needed for regular WP views.  Tag views will still have to hit the  
DB, obviously.

> What's your favorite part of UTW?
>
> Is there functionality UTW provides that we could do in core?  
> (Clouds, etc.)

The problem that I see is that although WP's category system can be  
used as a tagging system (you just ignore hierarchy), it can't be  
used simultaneously as a tagging and categorization system.  It's  
hard to store a flat, gratuitously-added world of tags in conjunction  
with a more planned out hierarchical organizational category  
structure.  Some people want both.

There's also the issue of the category list.  For a pure tagging  
interface, you do away with the list altogether and just do Flickr- 
style tagging.  Text entry box, list of currently applied tags, and a  
way to remove an existing tag.

> As a community are there code fixes we could contribute to UTW to  
> help its performance for current users?

Hopefully my "cache in postmeta" patch helped... it certainly sped my  
site up.

--
Mark Jaquith
http://txfx.net/