Tag Systems

[Chris]

I'm trying to get a grasp on exactly how tag systems work since I've never coded or used one.

You can add a tag, a text indentifier (keywords more or less) to an item.

Others can add a tag to an item.

You can then use tags as a way of finding items, and either filter the input to your tags or anyone's tags?

But what about the internal programming. How do you weight, filter, and moderate such systems?

[MaxS]

Hi Chris,

I have a tag cloud on one of my websites. It's great, the users love it.

We use a PHP tagcloud class called Freetag (http://getluky.net/freetag/).

If you need help implementing it, I can post some of the code we use.

Good luck!

[Chris]

I'm more interested in discussing the concept of it rather than an actual script.

[AmbulanceBlues]

I have some questions too. I noticed most tag systems make each word a different tag, so that "Website Publisher" would be 2 different tags. Is this as common as it seems; and why don't tag systems account for this?

As a concept, I've always liked the idea of tags. For a community website, it seems like an easy way to categorize content and make it easier for users to access it. For a site with a whole lot of content, each item falling into multiple content areas, it is another way to easily categorize content without narrowing it too far.

[Todd W]

tbl1 = One with the "item" to be tagged, this could be your article table, etc.
tbl2 = One which assigns a tag to an item and counts how many time the item is tagged for that item.

So you can select * from tbl2 where item_name = item order randomly and then set the font size based on how many times the item was tagged.

This is off the top of my head so i'm probably overlooking something but hopefuly this gets the ideas flowing....

(This of course shows only tags for the viewed item... which would allow users to view other items tagged with the same tags thus showing related items. The items you show once a tag was clicked could be sorted by how many times the item was tagged for that term.)

[AndyH]

I'll be using a tagging system for videos with each tag being a link which will basically be a search for that keyword. It will also help pick "related" videos.

[michael_gersitz]

Basically a url like /tag/keyword/ will display the keyword on a given page. You can put a form on the page to add a tag, and say they all need to be approved and then thank them for helping you out. Have an admin panel where you approve them all... Like changing 1 row from 0 to 1. Then you can have the approved tags for a given article displayed.... Given you relevant keywords for each article. Have all those keywords links to whatever tag they are. < Simple way to do it.

[bassplaya]

IMHO conceptually tag=keyword, we just got some (still far from ideal) GUI support for it with penetration of web20 spirit.

[Chris]

What about for searching? Del.icio.us says to use tags to organize bookmarks instead of categories. What if you cannot remember how you tagged something?

[polspoel]

Tagging is used for categorization. It should not be used for searching, at least not in conjunction with also searching title/body fields. Del.icio.us also has a search functionality that does not offer the same results as the tagging functionality.

Del.icio.us also shows your own personal tag cloud, so you can see every tag you ever used (ordered by most used first).

[GeorgeB]

There are 2 free forum addons for this that I'm aware of. One by Zoints and one by vBSEO. Both fairly easy to install from what I've seen I plan to try teh vBSEO one this weekend.

There's also an independent one not tied to either organization. http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?threadid=136839

I am still going to use the vBSEO one because I don't want any mixups with my URLs