Rich Text Tag, Category, and Taxonomy Descriptions for WordPress

Rich Text Tags Plugin on WordPress.org

The Rich Text Tags plugin allows you to use the WYSIWYG TinyMCE text editor (the WordPress default editor) while editing Categories, Tags, and taxonomies (custom categorization created by the Yoast Simple Taxonomies plugin).

Adding Category & Tag descriptions

There’s plenty of information online on how to add category descriptions and tag descriptions to your theme. WordPress has built-in functionality for those:

• <?php echo category_description(); ?> – category_description() on WordPress.org
• <?php echo tag_description(); ?> – tag_description() on WordPress.org

How to add the taxonomy title & descriptions to your theme

Once you have the cool new rich text editor, you’ll feel pretty silly if you don’t put that great content in your theme.  So here’s what to do:  add the following snippet of code into your archive.php file.

<?php
if(isset($wp_taxonomies)) {
	// This is getting the friendly version of a taxonomy
	// - not the hyphenated get_yoast_term_title()
	$term = get_term_by( 'slug', get_query_var( 'term' ), get_query_var( 'taxonomy' ) );
	if($term) {
		echo '<h2 class="pagetitle">'.$term->name.'</h2>';
	}
	// If you have a taxonomy description, let'er rip!
	if(function_exists('get_yoast_term_description') && get_yoast_term_description()) {
		echo wptexturize(get_yoast_term_description());
	}
}
?>

Using this code, you can now have custom content on your taxonomy pages, like this one for Andersen Windows.

SEO Benefits of this plugin

Besides the obvious benefits of giving users more information on your archive pages, there are intrinsic SEO benefits to having tag, category, and taxonomy descriptions.

When you have tags and categories where posts overlap, it’s a good idea to try to create as much unique content on each page as possible, so that each page gets indexed by Google. Having custom content for each page will do that.

Help me help you!

Please leave any issues you have with the plugin in the comments below. I like to squash code bugs!

Known Plugin Incompatibilities

This plugin does not work with these plugins:

• Tylr Slidr

Related posts:

1. Add Custom Taxonomy Title Tags Support to All-In-One SEO Pack
2. Add Custom Titles for Tags and Categories in Wordpress
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4. How to tell if your WordPress Plugin or Widget is Activated in WordPress
5. Simple Taxonomies Formatting — Improve the Plugin’s Code Output

Tagged as: Categories, category, category description, custom taxonomies, custom taxonomy, default editor, description, editor, Functionality, rich text, rich text category, tag, tag description, tags, Taxonomies, Taxonomy, taxonomy description, Theme, TinyMCE, WordPress Plugins, WP Plugins, wysiwyg