Being a newbie in this noble art of blogging, I discover useful tricks - and not so useful pitfalls - all the time.

WordPress is a well-written system for assisting the blogger in his adventures. As all well-written systems, it is written in PHP. Like its remote cousin, Drupal, it comes with an extensive set of plugins. Some of them deal with tags, such as Ultimate Tag Warrior.

By default, tags look ugly in WordPress:

Most tag plugins allow the author to change this appearance, if he is using Apache and has mod_rewrite enabled. This is also the case for any post URL, they can be made pretty.

I have noticed that a lot of residents in the Blogosphere have problems with getting WordPress to handle pretty tags, no matter how many times they check and uncheck that Use pretty tags checkbox. Some even resort to manually alter the .htaccess file.

There is an easier way: because of the interplay between the permalink and tag modules in WordPress, the former plugin has to be tricked in to believing that something has chaged so it can traverse the necessary structures, setting up the required mapping from a (rewritten form of...) pretty tag path to the ugly internal one. The only way I have found to trigger this traversal is to change the permalink path pattern to something else and then back again. Then you will enjoy:

So, do a Ctrl-X Ctrl-Z on that .htaccess file now and relax