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Plugin Launch!

Today my new WordPress Plugin Automatic Tags was officially approved by and launched in the WordPress Plugin Directory. The plugin, which provides a suggested category to bloggers as they write articles, is now publicly available for all, for free.

The Journey

This launch is a major milestone in a journey that began almost a year ago. I described part of that journey 4 months ago in this post, a post which also motivated why WordPress taxonomy automation is worthwhile.

This plugin relies on a machine learning model trained on a large corpus of blog articles. It required many computer-months of web scraping and many man-months of data analysis and modeling. It also required deploying the model behind an API and learning React to build the plugin UI. It has been a really fun project that has sharpened my skills on a wide range of topics.

The Roadmap

This plugin is being launched as version 0.0.1. While I feel confident it will be useful for some in its current state, there is a long road ahead to reach its full potential.

Here are some of the new features and improvements you can expect in the months ahead.

More granular category suggestions

The model currently used to deliver suggestions was trained to only suggest around 100 unique categories. You can expect to see suggestions like “Sports,” “Technology,” or “Beauty.”

This is useful for blogs that write about a wide variety of topics. It’s not so useful for blogs focused on a specific topic such as sports. Sticking with the sports example, a sports blog probably prefers to have suggestions like “Baseball,” “Football,” or “Basketball.” And a baseball blog might want even more granular suggestions such as “Red Sox,” “Pitchers,” or “Spring Training.”

Look for future model updates to yield more granular category suggestions that are tailored to your site’s specific topic.

Tag suggestions

No plugin named Automatic Tags is complete without suggestions for tags as well.

Tags are more like keywords, while categories are more like topics. So from a modeling perspective they are two different problems. But keyword extraction is a solved problem and will be straightforward to implement.

Look for future versions of the plugin to include tag suggestions for your posts.

Try It For Yourself

If you have a WordPress blog, give the Automatic Tags plugin a try today.

Feedback on the plugin and / or the model is welcome. Feel free to leave a comment below or connect with me on LinkedIn.

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