ugh.

Back in February 2011 I moved PetLvr.com/blog/ “blog” and merged that into PetLvr.com “community blog and forum”. Because I’ve been blogging since 2005 and had almost 4,500 posts in the archives of PetLvr + the Community blog … I used a special export plugin and downloaded one month at a time. This assured me all of the posts were complete, as well as the images were moved/merged in tact.

Well .. after I looked at the merge, I had over 6,900 categories and about 8,000 tags. As an example, I had the category “.: Pet Health Care” 589 times in the category list, with slugs ranging from pet-health-care, pet-health-care-1, pet-health-care-2 etc etc to pet-health-care-589.

This has been quite painful, because at the time all I could find was one wordpress plugin that merged categories one at a time … it’s called Category Merge. It works fine, but from March 2011 to October 2011, in my spare time, it has taken me down to about 2,400 categories left to merge. Quite annoying, but hoping no one would notice.

But A New WordPress Plugin Worked Miracles For Me!

It’s a miracle ~

Term Management Tools

Search for “Term Management Tools” in your Add-A-New Plugin feature in your dashboard.

How this works: Got your Posts in your dashboard, and just edit categories like you would normally would, and select the categories you want merged by ticking the box. Then, at the top select from the drop menu “merge” and type in the display name of the category you want (or the same name in my case).

It took me 14 minutes to merge the remaining 2,400 categories into the final 260 or so categories that exist!

Now … if you know about this plugin already .. you’re a lot smarter than I am .. and *geeesh* why didn’t ya tell me about this 8 months ago!?!