Mass Delete 3,636 Tags in WP 2.3

No, don’t downgrade.

And why do you want to delete them anyway? I don’t understand the problem here. I mean, I have thousands and thousands of tags, that’s sorta the whole point. It’s an on-the-fly organizational system, it only works properly when you make them up as you go along.

Think of them as keywords. You’ll be happier about them then.

Thanks for your reply. I don’t understand tags, even though I’ve read a lot about them. Must be a blind spot in my brain, but I’ve never understood the point of tags. I have a film review blog, and the tags on my blog comprise the cast and crew info. for each post. But I don’t use a tag cloud, so visitors never see these tags.

Well, if you don’t have any way to show the tags to the reader, then yeah, they’re sorta pointless.

You might have the tags for each post added after the post itself. That’s generally the most common way to display tags.

As for the point of tags, they’re an on-the-fly organizational system. If I write a post about, say, beer, then I add a tag of “beer”. Then people can click on it while viewing that post to see other posts that I tagged “beer”. Pretty simple, really. It’s just a keyword system that is clickable (always) and searchable (usually).

You could go into phpMyAdmin or whatever it is you’re using for your database and just update the table to set tag fields to empty. I don’t know the exact query you’d need, but it’s one way to do it. Take a backup first though!

If you really, really want to clear all the tags, you could do something like this, one time:

<?php
require('./wp-blog-header.php');
$post_ids = $wpdb->get_col("SELECT ID FROM $wpdb->posts");
foreach ($post_ids as $post_id) {
wp_set_post_tags( $post_id, '', false);
}
?>

That might take a while, but it’ll clear the tags from everything. Just save that to some new .php file, put it in the root directory, then run it one time using a browser. Then delete it, because that’s a dangerous thing to leave lying around.