Reorganising categories and posts

With over 1200 posts from four years of blogging and 95% of these posts sitting in a single category titled “General Articles”, the task of reorganising these into meaningful types (categories) is by no means a simple nor a quick task.

Well the job has started and I’m probably about half way through!

My new set of categories are as follows:

The challenges I was confronted with to achieve the re-classifying were as follows:

• Deciding on the categories themselves. I had to come up with a number – not too few and not too many – but enough to satisfy the sorting criteria of all of my posts.
• Prior to WordPress 2.7 there were a couple of plugins that would have done the job just fine. “Batch Categories” and/or “WP-Cat” – unfortunately neither of these plugins are compatible with WordPress 2.7.
• Although WordPress 2.7 does come with a Batch Editing facility – in my view – it somes with some limitations – eg: one cannot batch delete/replace categories but only add categories to the post. The other limitation of 2.7 – again in my view – is the fact that one can only work with 15 posts at a time.

Despite the above restrictions I made a decision to push on regardless!

And here’s how I went about the job:

1. Created all my new categories as per the above list. Ensured the category slug and description were relevant to the type of posts that would eventually end up in there. Note that I did end up creating a category called “Tidbits” – for all those posts that don’t really fit in anywhere.
2. Created a temporary category called “Temp1″.
3. Made “Temp1″ the default category for all posts.
4. Deleted the “General Articles” category – all posts therefore got moved from “General Articles” to “Temp1″.
5. Used the new Batch Edit facility within WordPress 2.7 and mass added selected posts to their newly created categories. Although I am doing this 15 posts (or 1 page) at a time – I move on to the next page and do the same. I have tried to do batch changes to 3 or more posts at a time rather than just one.
6. You will now have posts sitting in two categories – the first one being “Temp1″ and the second one being it’s category of choice.
7. I now create a category called “Temp2″ and make it the default category for all new posts.
8. Now here’s the trick… I delete the original “Temp1″ category and posts that remain in just the “Temp1″ category will be moved to “Temp2″. Interestingly those posts that sat in two categories will not be moved to “Temp2″ but into their final category of choice.
9. Repeat this process of creating/deleting “Temp1″ and “Temp2″ categories and batch editing groups of posts.
10. Eventually I will get through the 1200 odd and I’ll be one helluva happy chappy. My theory is that with properly defined and meaningful categories my Google ranking will bump up a point or two! In fact since starting this process a couple of days ago – my home page ranking has jumped from a “2″ to a “3″!!

I really do hope that future releases of WordPress address the shortcomings of batch editing of posts for those bloggers in a similar situation to myself.

Got to push on folks… I’m about half way through the process!!