Comments on: Converting Tags To Categories In WordPress

By: Ankur Banerjee

Ankur Banerjee — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 14:08:19 +0000

Nice tip, hadn’t heard of that plugin.

By: Suthnautr

Suthnautr — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 22:56:47 +0000

Yeap, it sucks big time. FORTUNATELY for me I set it up on a brand new blog with no posts – I had just spent about an hour nesting a whole bunch of subcategories and ran it thinking it would “copy” (duh, it *says* “convert” – what was *I* thinking?) the categories to tags. So most fortunately I only lost only about fifteen minutes of work because I could convert them *back* only they are no longer nested (which is the 15 minutes I’ll have to spend re-doing them). If it had been one of my older blogs I would have definitely been pissed off.

My advice for anyone not SQL geeky enough to deal directly with databases – get the WP-DBManager plugin. It’s the lazy man’s Swiss Army Knife of WP Database Management.

By: Suthnautr

Suthnautr — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 22:48:32 +0000

“Generally, the username could be the same as your database name. In case it isn’t, you should’ve written it down, dum dum. :p”

IF it isn’t the same as the username then install the WP Plugin WP-DBManager (used to backup and manage WP Databases) and it will tell you the name of the Database.

Signed,
Chief Dum Dum

By: Dave

Dave — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 02:03:34 +0000

Thanks Ankur, I knew there had to be an easy way to convert some wordpress tags to categories.

Much Appreciated
Dave

By: Alcides Soares

Alcides Soares — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 01:16:56 +0000

You can run the SQL:

UPDATE `yourdbname`.`wp_term_taxonomy` SET `taxonomy` = ‘category’ WHERE `wp_term_taxonomy`.`taxonomy` =’post_tag’

Please not that you will have to reconstruct the hierarchy;

By: directory

directory — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:58:33 +0000

that conversion tool sucks :(

By: Duncan

Duncan — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 20:36:12 +0000

Thanks for this. You just saved me!

By: MommyGeek

MommyGeek — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 01:20:00 +0000

Perfect — thank you so much for posting this solution.

By: Ankur

Ankur — Sun, 03 May 2009 15:30:39 +0000

As far as I remember, I wrote this post when I was using 2.6. Even if it wasn't 2.6 (I doubt that), basic things such as wp_term_taxonomy aren't changed between versions. If it's a mission-critical thing then take a backup of the database you're working on, then make the changes. If anything goes wrong, then you can use phpMyAdmin to import the backup and restore everything to its original state. WP-DB-Backup is an excellent plugin for this task.

By: Zygotti

Zygotti — Sun, 03 May 2009 14:21:50 +0000

Thanks Ankur.
A client wants to turn categories into tags and visa-versa (for reasons too complicated to go into here) and I suspected it was as simple as swapping the taxonomy values in wp_term_taxonomy… It’s good to have confirmation;-) I’ll be doing this in WP 2.6 but I’ve an idea things might be different in 2.7