Today, I thought naively that I’d try out WordPress’s newly added tag support. The natural thing to do is to convert one’s categories into tags. There’s a built in Category to Tag Converter exactly for this found under Manage->Import. So foolishly, I selected all my categories and clicked the big button. Big mistake. This tool managed to actually deleted the entire ‘categories’ table from the database. And my current theme doesn’t yet have tag support so all posts showed up as filed in “uncategorizedin” whatever that means.

Luckily though, I had a backup of my DB from a recent upgrade to 2.3.2 so I was able to restore the ‘categories’ table in its entirety. But I also had to edit the ‘term_taxonomy’ table and replace every occurence of ‘post_tag’ with ‘category’. They are using bloody VARCHAR for this, can you believe it? Thankfully, the ‘term_relationships’ table which links posts to categories was untouched and everything is now back to normal. After this experience, I’ll remain content in my use of categories to fake tags, at least until I can be bothered updating the theme.