Convert Tags to Taxonomy Tags

If any of you have a development site and would like to test an updated category/tag converter that includes custom taxonomies, you can grab it from my Trac ticket. In my tests it works on 3.0 and 3.1; I haven’t tried any older versions of WP.

Please, please back up your database first! And let me know how it goes.

Thanks for the update, Stephanie! I’ll give it a shot!

Hello,

I have been using it and it works pretty well but a couple of things:
* When converting many taxonomies at the same time it crash so I had to do it in groups of around 15 taxonomies at a time.
* When taxonomies are moved, in every single post you can correctly see the new taxonomy but in the list of categories you see a “0” so when you try to visualize the list of posts you don’t see any post.

I.e. /taxonomy1/item1 moved to /category/item1/, then in mysite.com/category/item1 there are no posts.

It is like if it is not updated in the database because when you edit a single post you can see that the new category is correctly checked but only when you save again that post, the post is added to the category count.

What I have done to solve this is installing Simple Tag plugin and going to the “Mass editor” > category and then “update all” so all the posts are “resaved”.

BR

Hi Stephanie,

Thank you so much for the modified version of the category/tag converter.

It really made my life easier.

Just ran into this problem and desperately trying to find a solution. It looks like this has gone on for almost a year with no resolution? Is there still no plugin that allows for mass conversion of tags to taxonomies for custom post types?

I am looking for a tool that does this too. Moves terms from one taxonomy to another.

This isn’t exactly what you all are looking for, and it’s kinda hackish, but here’s how I converted a group of my categories to a custom taxonomy.

1) Go into the database and rename everything in the term_taxonomy table that’s currently post_tag to a unique (but temporary) name, like post_tag_temp.
UPDATE wp_term_taxonomy SET taxonomy = 'post_tag_temp' WHERE taxonomy = 'post_tag'

2) Then, using the category to tag plugin, convert the categories you want to tags. Since you’ve temporarily renamed all the tags, what are now tags can be renamed to whatever you want.

3) In the database, convert all tags to whatever custom taxonomy you’ve registered.
UPDATE wp_term_taxonomy SET taxonomy = 'custom_taxonomy' WHERE taxonomy = 'post_tag_temp'

4) Finally, convert the original tags back to normal.
UPDATE wp_term_taxonomy SET taxonomy = 'post_tag' WHERE taxonomy = 'post_tag_temp'

Hope that helps. Oh, and don’t forget to backup your database before doing it.