"Tag" naming

[BrendonKoz]

So, just like naming variables, trying to come up with how to properly create tags that would be understandable, usable, and not "one unique tag per every item", how do you all go about creating your tagging system(s)? Do you give access to creating tags for your customers? If so, have you come up with instructions or ways to help them satisfy their desires without overloading the website visitors with unusable overabundance of named tags?

I'm reviewing a secondary site for my current employer that I have not had control over, and with free reign, there are over 800 tags on about 200 pages (and many pages don't even have any tags assigned). Some tags are full sentences. I'll obviously need to describe what a tag is to my coworkers, but even I'm having a hard time coming up with proper ideas for tags, and how best to determine what would be good and what wouldn't. (We're a library and therefore deal in education, so topics can be extremely wide-ranging on any number of subject areas.)

[rick]

As far as I know, Processwire has single-word tags only -- Unless someone else can jump in to explain how you can achieve multi-word tags.

You do not need to restrict your tags to 'unique' items. Multiple items may have the same tag. As far as defining tags, that depends on your content. Education tag examples could be a subset of the course sub-category, eg, Category=Science, Subcategory="Astronomy", Tags="Telescopes","Planetary Nebula" (Notice the multiple word tag), and other astronomy related stuff.

You can also define tags on the fly, rather than creating an initial listing.

Hope this helps

[BrendonKoz]

Thanks for the feedback, Rick! In this case, I'm planning on allowing tags on every page that contains content. Although education-related, we're a public library, so we don't actually teach per-se, but the actual content has no limit. I hadn't yet attempted implementation yet so I wasn't aware ProcessWire doesn't allow multi-word tags, but that could potentially be solved with hyphenation.

I'm mostly wondering what people have come up with in terms of rules or procedures on best-case scenarios for instructing users on how to take advantage of tags. I do realize, however, that this may be dependent upon implementation, though I'm curious of first-hand scenarios of others, to maybe apply to my own. (You kind of touched on an idea with the course category subset.) ? Thank you!

[BitPoet]

6 hours ago, BrendonKoz said:

I'm mostly wondering what people have come up with in terms of rules or procedures on best-case scenarios for instructing users on how to take advantage of tags.

The word "tag" is very a technical thing. Call them "keywords" instead, and more than half of your users' questions will evaporate instantly. That's what I learned at my current job when I trained colleagues and heard the relieved insight, "Oh, you're talking about keywords!" rather often.

The other half you'll only catch with real-life examples. Depending on the number of pages and content editors, it might make sense to moderate keywords for a while until everybody got their footing. Just a small Pages::published hook that sends a backend link to the new page to the tags moderator so they can give the chosen tags a once over and clarify with the editor what makes sense and what doesn't. I did that with a small knowledge base section for our technical sales managers when they went into a new market area, and we used the direct feedback to fill the tags (later keywords) FAQ with examples and explanations that made sense to them.

7 hours ago, BrendonKoz said:

I hadn't yet attempted implementation yet so I wasn't aware ProcessWire doesn't allow multi-word tags, but that could potentially be solved with hyphenation.

Actually, that's no longer the case. Since 3.0.177, you can use the new InputfieldTextTags, and choosing a delimiter other than space will allow multi word tags.