Going back further, the free version of Tag Groups has been my first WordPress plugin. It went a long way from a quick patch on one of my websites to a complex data management tool. As it grew, I did as well: from a coder with no experience in front end development to an auto entrepreneur. This path entailed the need to do such diverse things as marketing, customer support and accountancy.

It has not been a light decision to give this very personal project into new hands. I moved to a new country and I felt it was time to benefit from comfort and security, and to meet people offline.

I am glad that Tag Groups has found a good home at PublishPress who has a genuine interest to foster and develop my work. I know their products from one of my former projects and I was always impressed by their work.

What this means for you

On a more practical note, this switch will not change anything for current customers. PublishPress will take my place at Freemius and at the WordPress.org repository. I apologize if there are some glitches during the transition period – we try to make it as smooth as possible.

I remember many inspiring meetings with customers and users, who made this project worthwhile. A big Thank You to all of you, it’s been a great time!

In the comings months and years I will continue developing Redirect URL to Post, but obviously only as a free time project.

How to apply the Black Friday & Cyber Monday coupon?

Simply continue to the Freemius checkout page and enter the promotional code FSBFCM2021 (if it’s not already pre-filled).

If you’re already using the free plan of the Tag Groups plugin, follow the upgrade link in the Tag Groups settings. Then enter the code on the Freemius checkout page.

If you want to start with a free trial, continue here and don’t forget to enter the same promotional code FSBFCM2021!

Additionally to the existing placeholders {count} (for the post count) and {description} (for the tag description) you can now use {name} to display the tag name. Example:

custom_title="Click on {name} and see {count} posts."

Now you may wonder how to write this text so that it also matches cases where {count} will be replaced with “1”. Previously you had to use a workaround like “We have {count} post(s)”, mixing singular and plural. Starting from this release, however, you can have three different versions: for a post count of zero (if your tag cloud shows “empty” tags), a post count of 1 (for singular) and a post count greater than 1 (for plural):

custom_title="Click on {name} and see 1 post." custom_title_zero="Sorry, no posts use {name}." custom_title_plural="Click on {name} and see {count} posts."

You may have noticed that the default parameter custom_title holds now the text for the singular version.

Further Information

• Tag Groups main page
• Tag Groups (premium) change log
• Tag Groups (free) change log
• How to update Tag Groups (premium)

Synchronize groups across translations of tags

On multilingual sites that use the WPML plugin you find a new option to synchronize the groups of tags across all translations. This feature runs only when you save a tag.

If you turn off this option in the Back End settings, you can set the groups independently for each language version of a tag.

Starting from this version, we also copy over the assigned groups when you create a translation of a tag by clicking on the “edit” link in WPML’s “Language” box on the tag edit screen.

This feature is available for all plans.

Improved timeout for the Toggle Post Filter

We try to avoid search requests each time a visitor toggles a button or types a letter in the text field because the search should be launched only when the visitor is done selecting tags and typing text. We achieve this through a timeout of inactivity before the request is sent to the server.

This timeout plays an important role in reducing database load. We avoid to run redundant queries because when they are done the visitor has already made further changes in the menu and we need a new query.

This timeout is by default 1000ms (= 1 second) and starting from version 1.40.1 we dynamically increase it (plus up to 2 seconds) when we notice that a visitor needs more time selecting menu options. We reset this increased timeout when the posts load.

Since version 1.40.1 you can also set your own timeout to find a good balance between user experience (with a responsive search) and database load. Factors to be considered are the habits and needs of your typical visitors, the number of people who search simultaneously, the size of your database (posts and tags) and the power of your database engine.

Feel free to test it on the Toggle Post Filter demos.

Further Information

• Tag Groups main page
• Tag Groups (premium) change log
• Tag Groups (free) change log
• How to update Tag Groups (premium)

Logic operators might sound a bit technical, but it’s them that make live post filters really powerful and customizable. You might say that they define the question you ask when searching for posts. The plugin then sends you the answer in the shape of a list of posts.

Until now you were able to use the logic operators OR (alias IN) and AND to connect tags within a group and then all groups. When we search for matching posts, we test each post if one or more of the selected tags appear in the correct group among the post tags. If all conditions are met, this post joins the queue for display.

Now, I added a third operator: EXACT. This operator means that all selected tags of a group must exactly match the post tags in that group. The same tags, not more and not less.

Example: Database of Countries

Imagine that our posts represent countries and their tags (in a language group) describe their official (or national) languages. One post is India with language tags Hindi and English, another one Ireland with language tags English, Irish, Ulster Scots and Shelta and a third one Australia with just English.

If we now search with the operator “OR” and select the English tag in the post filter, we naturally see India, Ireland and Australia popping up. No surprise here.

If we, however, use the new operator “EXACT” and select again English in the post filter, the list of posts shows only Australia. If we then add Hindi to the selection, Australia disappears from the list and India appears. That is because only India has both of these tags in its language group.

You can use the keyword “EXACT” as operator (which means that “EXACT” works on all group levels and then all groups are connected with “AND”) or you use the detailed format like

operator="all:and|1:or|2:or|3:exact"

The new operator “EXACT” is available both in the Gutenberg block and in the shortcode. The detailed per-group format works only with the shortcode.

New filters for the free and premium versions

If you are a developer you can utilize two new filters that let you modify the HTML segments that come before and after each tag in the plugin’s tag clouds. The filter will be called for each tag and we submit some additional useful data like post count and font size.

You find a description in the documentation.

Bug fixes and small improvements

Of course I also fixed some bugs and improved some styling in the post filters. You find it all in the change log.

Further Information

• Tag Groups main page
• Tag Groups (premium) change log
• Tag Groups (free) change log
• How to update Tag Groups (premium)

Photo by Christoph Amthor

One of the lesser known shortcodes lets you display group information such as one or more group names or the number of tags in a group. It is now possible to use all options of the info parameter for one or more groups. How many groups you display is set with the group_id parameter.

The premium version allows additionally to display the group name with a link on your site.

Premium version: hidden groups in the Meta Box

Sometimes users are confused about post tags that don’t appear in the Tag Meta Box. However, groups that you don’t show on the post edit screen may still contain tags.

A new notice seeks to remedy this confusion by displaying the number of hidden groups. If one or more tags seem to be missing, you can click over to the settings and activate the remaining groups. After that you need to reload the post edit page.

Reminder: If you don’t select any group in the Meta Box settings, all groups will be displayed. That way you can make sure that even if you later create new groups all of them appear.

Further Information

• Tag Groups main page
• Tag Groups (premium) change log
• Tag Groups (free) change log
• How to update Tag Groups (premium)

Photo by Christoph Amthor

For developers: REST API

While the plugin offers endpoints for the WordPress REST API already since April 2018, they have been read-only. Completing the remaining parts allows developers now to edit taxonomies, groups and post tags through an external application.

These additional functions are available with both premium and free plans. For increased security you need to enable them through a constant in your wp-config.php file. Authentication can be done through the application password feature of the new WordPress release 5.6.

The new methods are still experimental and not officially supported.

Learn more in the documentation.

New features for the Toggle Post Filter

I’m excited to share three new options that make this post filter extremely powerful and customizable.

1. Fine-grained logic operators

Until now, three logic operators were available for the Toggle Post Filter:

1. All tags across all groups are connected with “OR”.
2. All tags across all groups are connected with “AND”.
3. All tags inside each group are connected with “OR” and groups that contain tags are connected with “AND”.

For many projects that was insufficient and users needed a more flexible solution.

The parameter “operator” – available in the menu part or the Toggle Post Filter – now understands also a per-group definition of operators.((This is not yet available in the Gutenberg block, so if you are using a block you first need to transform it to a shortcode. All non-default settings will be preserved.))

Imagine the following search setup for a language school:

• Group 1: languages
• Group 2: levels
• Group 3: additional features

While clients may want to search a course in English OR French (group 1), for beginners OR intermediate learners (group 2), they additionally need day care for their children AND wheelchair-accessible rooms. That means, we have AND to connect all the groups, and within the groups we use OR, OR and AND.

The general format of the parameter is:

operator="all:OPERATOR|group ID:OPERATOR|group ID:OPERATOR| ..."

• You need at least one entry with the keyword “all”. The corresponding operator determines how the groups are connected.
• OPERATOR can be AND or OR (upper or lower case). IN works like OR.
• The order of groups doesn’t matter.
• If you use this format of the operator, all groups that you don’t specify will fall back to the operator OR.
• As usual, if you allow your visitors to select many tags, the database query will become increasingly complex. Although we are caching results, you may want to make sure that performance won’t become an issue.

For our example this translates to:

operator="all:and|1:or|2:or|3:and"

That’s as simple as it gets while giving you the full power of nested database queries.

And, of course, the past keywords AND, IN, OR and IN AND still work as before.

2. Only one tag per group

Another new option, available in shortcode and block, lets you determine groups where users should only be able to select one tag. When they select a second tag, the first one will be deactivated. The operator accepts a comma-separated list of group IDs. All of these groups must of course be available in the filter.

one_only_groups="3,6"

Please note that more tags might still be selected if this selection is carried over by the persistent filter setting from another page.

3. Multiple text search fields

The way how text search fields work has changed so that you can now show more than one on a page. The typed letters are synchronized across all text fields. The setting how to trigger the search (1: on enter, 2: on enter or stop typing) will use the highest number among all parameters. That means, if you want to search “on enter” only, all text search fields must use the setting 1.

[tag_groups_tpf_text_search placeholder="type here" search_trigger=1]

Further Information

• Tag Groups main page
• Tag Groups (premium) change log
• Tag Groups (free) change log
• How to update Tag Groups (premium)

Photo by Christoph Amthor

The latest release of the Tag Groups WordPress plugin lets you set a threshold – a minimum post count – that is required for tags to appear in tag clouds and tag lists. That way you can use only the most relevant tags and still apply any other sort order, rather than having to use orderby=count and order=desc.

The threshold parameter is available for the following features:

• premium plans: Shuffle Box, Table Tag Cloud, Simple Tag Cloud
• all plans: Tabbed Tag Cloud, Accordion Tag Cloud, Alphabetical Index, Alphabetical Tag Cloud, Tag List

Example for a shortcode:

[tag_groups_cloud threshold=3]

The number behind the parameter sets the minimum of how many published posts each tag should be used with.

In the Gutenberg block this option can be found in the “Tags” section as “Minimum post count for tags to appear”.

Please note that we check the total number of published posts of each tag, not the number of published posts per group.

Further Information

• Tag Groups main page
• Tag Groups (premium) change log
• Tag Groups (free) change log
• How to update Tag Groups (premium)

Photo by Christoph Amthor

Now you can choose between two types of pagers for the post filters and the post list (all available with the premium plan): One just shows links to the previous and next page, while the new one allows also to click on the first and last page, to go in 2-page steps and to see which page you are on. You activate it in the shortcode with pager=2 or in the block with the pager menu.

In the Toggle Post Filter you use the parameter pager_position (or the corresponding menu in the Gutenberg block) to show the pager on the top, the bottom, or both.

As additional handy feature you can now flip through the pages with the cursor keys.

Demo

Check out the new pager on this page.

Custom tag order

Tag Groups can now use a custom tag order. This feature is available with all plans.

In order to set up a tag order you will need the plugin Simple Custom Post Order or Custom Taxonomy Order.((Any plugin that writes the order as a number in a term_order column in the terms table of the database should do the job.)) Then use orderby=term_order in the shortcode or select “Term Order” in the block menu. In the case of the Toggle Post Filter, you use term_orderby=term_order to order the tag buttons.

Read more about it in the documentation.

Other

Other notable changes are the much improved display of the masonry post layout with smoother transitions and improved accessibility (e.g. for screen readers).

Further Information

• Tag Groups main page
• Tag Groups (premium) change log
• Tag Groups (free) change log
• How to update Tag Groups (premium)

Photo by Christoph Amthor