If, like me, you had been using Ultimate Warrior Tags (UTW) to assign Technorati-compatible tags to your article, then you must have been as annoyed as I was when upgrading to Wordpress 2.3.2 or Wordpress 2.3.3. All of the sudden, Wordpress acquired tagging capabilities but disabled UTW along the way.
Don’t get me wrong, I love that Wordpress now knows tags natively, but I was pretty annoyed to discover that my previous ones had disappeared.
They didn’t, actually. As it turns out, importing the old UTW tags into the new Wordpress is an extremely simple built-in mechanism. All you have to do is open your Wordpress blog backend, log in as admin, go to the “Manage” menu, the “Import” page. There’s an “Import Ultimate Tag Warrior tags into the new native tagging structure” link in the bottom, that will start the 4-step no user action required process that worked perfectly for me.
Beware, though! The Wordpress builders give you the ferm warning: Don’t be stupid – backup your database before proceeding!.
In order to backup your Wordpress blog database, the simplest, easiest way, and the one I recommend, is to use WP’s built-in mechanism: just go to Manage->Export and click on “Download Export File“. This will save a pretty large xml file(1.3MB for a small blog, 6.8MB for a big blog) with data from WP’s tables – including custom fields set by plugins, but not the custom tables that some plugins create. Still, it’s the easiest, hassle-free backup procedure for your blog, so it would be a good idea to do it every once in a while, just in case.
