Merge Tags

[hempsworth]

As mentioned in ​a support thread, tags can get cluttered over time with many different tags meaning basically the same thing. To clean up tagging the ability to merge tags would be a life saver.

The functionality I had in mind was being able to select two or more tags in edit-tags.php and select 'Merge' from the 'Actions' dropdown. When you click 'Apply' a lightbox would open with the following:

What should become the primary tag?
[Textfield]
The name is how the tag appears on your site.

What should become the primary tag slug?
[Textfield]
The “slug” is the URL-friendly version of the name. It is usually all lowercase and contains only letters, numbers, and hyphens.

Which slugs should continue to point to the new primary tag?
[Textarea automatically filled with the old slugs]
One slug per line.

Save | Cancel

The last textarea allows old slugs to still point to the new primary tag - meaning any old URL's will still work.

-~- Example -~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~

I've got the following tags which all mean the same thing:

TV, the box, telly

I select them all in edit-tags.php, select 'Merge' and 'Apply'. In the popup box I choose 'television' as the primary tag, 'television' as the slug, and list the old tags in the textarea.

I now have a tag called 'television' which has "television, TV, the box, telly" all pointing to it, so my old URL's still work. All of my posts which use the old tags have now magically swapped to using 'television'.

I love the idea. I actually just went through and merged some of my tags manually, which involves re-tagging posts with the correct one. I honestly don't have the need for old slugs to point to the new tag, but I'm sure some people do.

I see this becoming a little less necessary now with auto-completion on tag names, but it would still be nice.

The Taxonomy system currently has the ability to mark a tag as an alias of another doesnt it?

I believe the original intention was to allow for a plugin to come along and provide the UI/features and then to integrate it into WP if there was a good usecase selection...

Has any plugins come along to fill that gap in yet?

Replying to DD32:

Has any plugins come along to fill that gap in yet?

I've made one: ​Merge Tags

Is there traction for putting this into core? Or can we just leave it for scribu's handy plugin?

I was about to create a ticket requesting this feature. In my opinion the managing and merging of tags in this way is such basic functionality that should ideally be available as part of a core WordPress setup.