Once I resolved some minor rewrite problems, Christine Davis’ brilliant plugin Ultimate Tag Warrior allowed me to add a tag cloud to my humble blog. I extended HJL’s workaround to fix problems I encountered with both tag feeds and traditional feeds.

First, the good news – Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) is amazing. Although WordPress Categories offer a flexible taxonomy, they are still rigid when compared to the free form nature of Tagging. UTW adds a tag box when writing posts – enter a list of comma-delimited tags, and UTW transparently offers a drop-in tag cloud as well as optional tag lists at the end of your posts.

In my environment – WordPress 2.0.2 and Ultimate Tag Warrior 3.1 – friendly URL rewrites were not working (e.g. /tag/TAGNAME vs. index.php?tag=TAGNAME). Apparently WordPress 2 added a PHP rewrite layer for new plugin flexibility, but this rewriting occasionaly breaks traditional .htaccess rewrites. For instance, WordPress now internally handles “/tag/TAGNAME” requests.

Building on the concept of HJL’s workaround, I created an .htaccess that offers friendly tag and feed rewrites. The in-line comments explain what each line does. Your mileage may vary.

Thanks in particular to Christine/UTW, and also to HJL, whose demo .htaccess was the first I found that was even close to what I wanted.