[drupal-devel] A Folksonomy module

[Julian Bond]

Boris Mann <borismann at gmail.com> Sun, 6 Mar 2005 01:18:10
>AFAIK, you've got it a bit wrong. The user doesn't *have* to select
>from a list, although the existing taxonomy terms are displayed.
>Anything the user enters is checked against existing terms (there is
>an option whether to be case sensitive or not) -- so, by suppressing
>the display of the term list, isn't this much like a folksonomy?

re taxonomy-otf
Just had a look and I don't think I agree. The user has to add a single 
term to a taxonomy vocab and then choose it in the refreshed page. 
del.icio.us style tagging is all about just typing a comma or space 
separated list.

I can easily imagine an active site having a tag vocabulary of 1000 or 
more terms. Taxonomy would get overwhelmed by this.

>But, one of the biggies that I have seen come up is personal vs.
>global tags. I don't see it as much of an issue, or rather, it just
>means that the user is a filter on the existing terms in some UI
>displays.

See all tags, my tags, all nodes for this tag, all my nodes for my tag 
are all likely navigation routes. I agree, this is mostly just a DBMS 
and UI problem.

>There is also the awtags.module --> http://www.autowitch.org. I
>haven't looked at this at all.

This wasn't in contrib so I didn't spot it. It's a good implementation 
and they've reached many of the same design decisions I did. Issues:-

- I don't think tags exist in their own table. It looks more normalised 
and makes it easier to edit tags later and apply the change globally, 
but it also introduces a lot of extra joins in the queries.

- I'd like to see nice URLs eg /tags/politics not tags/1

- I think realms are important and fit into the Drupal ethos. They've 
got a single vocabulary. It's pretty likely that most sites would only 
have one, but it would be nice to be able to have two vocabs on nodes 
for say keywords and location and a separate vocab for a specialised 
node type like "Listings".

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