Correction for Jerome’s Keywords plugin for WordPress

I use the Jerome’s Keywords plugin for WordPress to do tagging on my blogs. I love it, but it has one problem: if you search on a tag that is contained within another tag, you get the aggregate results of both tags. That’s because Jerome uses a SQL WHERE clause containing LIKE ‘%keyword%’ to match tags that are in a comma-delimited list in the metadata value field.

I left a comment on Jerome’s blog about this issue, but it looks like it never even made it past moderation. In fact, no new comments on this post since May. Where’s Jerome?

I mentioned this problem to Johannes Jarolim, author of the Jerome’s Keywords Manager plugin. Johannes came up with the correct WHERE sub-clause (value LIKE ‘keyword,%’ OR value LIKE ‘%,keyword’ OR value LIKE ‘%,keyword,%’ OR value = ‘keyword’) and implemented that in his plugin. But alas, that did not help my widget, which relies on the ?tag=keyword link operation provided by Jerome.

So, I felt like my best alternative would be to correct Jerome’s plugin and post it here. If Jerome adopts this correction (or something equivalent) and lets me know about it, I’ll take down this download and point over to his site instead.

UPDATE: I made yet another correction to this plugin, so head on over here for the latest and greatest.

UPDATE: Jerome released a 2.0 beta of the plugin that corrects this problem. Get the whole scoop.