[drupal-devel] A Folksonomy module

[Dries Buytaert]

Moshe Weitzman wrote:
>> Last year there was a post here suggesting a "system" type of taxonomy 
>> vocabulary that would use the taxonomy tables but provide no user 
>> interface.
> 
> I reently decided to reimplement folksonomy using system vocabularies. 
> As mentioned, these are successfully being used for image galleries in 
> the upcoming image.module and already being used for forum.module in 
> 4.6. My thought was to create a vocabulary for each user. The vocab 
> would be created the first time the user tagged an item. That way, we 
> don't unnecessarily create vocabs for every single user ... One 
> disadvantage about this approach is that you will only be able to tag 
> nodes. So the noption of tagging users would be gone (without reworking 
> taxonomy). One nice application of tagging users is in buddylists where 
> a given user can be a member of 'work', 'friends', etc. Think IM buddy 
> list groups ... But overall, thats my thinking.

I'm open for patches that extend or rework core's taxonomy module.  As 
explained in my previous e-mail, there is room for folksonomies (tags) 
in the taxonomy module.  It might take more thought and work to extend 
or refactor parts of the taxonomy module but it is going to pay off.

(Julian, if you decide to go with your own version of the folksonomy 
module, know that it might be difficult to upgrade later on.)

 > I've been looking at a similar idea to re-use the taxonomy module for 
 > a folksonomy. It looks to me like almost every function in taxonomy
 > would have to be modified or replaced. And I don't think taxonomy
 > would cope well with the target of 1000 tags in a folksonomy
 > vocabulary.

Why is that?  Can you provide us some examples?  It would certainly help 
us grasp the challenges.

-- 
Dries Buytaert  ::  http://www.buytaert.net/