A few weeks ago I started moving all plugin-related pages to this website. At the same time I began working on a new WordPress plugin: Tag Groups Premium, extending the free Tag Groups plugin.
The premium plugin adds many features that have been requested by users, but their implementation was simply too time-consuming for a free plugin.
My plan is to keep the Tag Groups plugin basically the way it is. I’ll be fixing errors and adding only the most basic new features. I think that over the past years it has developed into a good direction and reached a state where it is useful, reliable and fairly easy to operate.
The premium plugin adds two main tools, one of which appears on the backend and the other one on the frontend. You can think of them as input and output tools.
Taking your tags to a new level. Literally.
The first one is a Meta Box on the post edit screen that allows you to enter tags, utilizing the 2-layered structure with tag groups on the upper level. The second one is the Dynamic Post Filter, an Ajax-powered list of posts that corresponds to the selected groups and tags and automatically refreshes when ever you change a tag.
People who use my Tag Groups plugin already know that I offer all kinds of parameters. Here, for example, a logical operator that connects tags within a group with “IN” (OR) and the groups with “AND”. So, each post must have at least one tag from each group. This is, maybe surprisingly, one of the most common real-world search scenarios: Your search is segmented by several categories, and in each of them there are some equivalent options.
Let’s say you go shopping, and the size of your shirt should be M or L, and the color red or blue. As operators, this means “(A or B) and (C or D)”. And that is exactly the point, where tag groups become extremely useful. Without them you would have a hard time telling the website which properties are interchangeable and on which level a certain subset is mandatory.
The new plugin is basically working, and only some few things need to be polished or tested under various conditions. If you are curious about the final product, subscribe to the news below. Meanwhile you can check also the preview on the demo site. Stay tuned!