I quite like using tags on my blog, however I seem to be losing them. What’s happening here?

Tags are a great way to annotate posts to your blog and group them together to help visitors get a view of the different topics your blog is about. They’re also more flexible that categories as you’re not really restricted to what tags you use.

My tag plugin of choice is one called Ultimate Tag Warrior. It’s a great tool that lets you add tag to posts, group by tags and my favourite feature of all, create a tag cloud for your readers to browse. However, the last time I upgraded WordPress, it all seemed to fall apart.

The problem was that every time I edited a post, my tags fell off. UTW was forgetting what tags posts had, and my tag cloud dwindled down to practically nothing. After I did some research, I found that the fix was relatively easy. This was a known bug with the plugin and the latest version fixed it. Solving the problem was simply a matter of heading to the download page, getting the most recent version of the plugin and upgrading my blog.

The underlying message here is that you always need to be aware of what plugins you’re using and whether new versions of these are available. Software changes from time to time and if you’re not using the most recent version, you’re open to flaws and exploits that may have been fixed in the new version. So, keep an eye on your plugins, it’s worth doing.