Mahara

Hi Nigel

Something you may want to consider is to have some sort of limit for the type of resources being displayed in the search results.

A user may want to limit the results to display only blog post, views, files, images, own content , etc that match the selected tags rather than everything.

Hi Nigel,

I'm happy if we can enable and disable "Tag cloud" block on "Configure site > Site options" page.

And a setting for the number of tags showing on  "Tag cloud" block, if we can have.

 Mits

I like the idea, but I would not abandon the good old search text box. Tag clouds are still an alien concept to a lot of customers we come across. I would prefer for the 2 to co-exit.

Alex - Synergy Learning

I would very much welcome the enabling of searching / aggregating by tags and tag cloud in Mahara.

These features will have far reaching benefits for education and training and would enable people to pull together information related around a particular topic (ie unit, module, subject), making tracking what you've done so much easier.

Tags are a great way of 'finding' and 'managing' information, and the Tag Cloud helps 'paint a picture' about a person.

I've been encouraging people to use the tag facility in Mahara, in hope that when it does work, they will have a powerful tool to search and share their information.

I'm wondering if it would also be possible to have an RSS function out of Mahara on these tags and/or an RSS function on tags into a 'view' to improve the way people share information (as a push technology).

Many thanks, Allison

Another problem is that we currently have tag input boxes on group views and files, but there is no way to search on group-owned things yet.  The "Search My Portfolio" box only looks in the user's personal portfolio.

I imagine it will take us some time to implement searching across group portfolios, so I think we should remove the tag input fields on group views/files until such time as the search works.

  Looks good with the filters - more filters could be added at some stage such as by person, blog.

Something that may be nice to have is to select the order the search results are displayed in. The following orders may be useful

• by date as the most  recent resources may be preferred to be found
  
• alphabetically - so easy scanning of resources can be done.
• by rating - probably out of scope at this stage but  maybe for the future.

Hi Kristina,

What does the "Edit Tags" page do? Is that a page where you can change the names of your tags?

Richard.

Hello,

Thank you for your feedback and further questions, Craig, Nigel, and Richard.

@Craig: The filter option to sort tags alphabetically is already hinted at in one of the mockups. Chronological sorting should not be too difficult to achieve and should be included. I don't know why I left it out because that is the primary display in Delicious.

@Nigel: "community tags" tab was not supposed to be there for Mahara. It was just a screenshot from Diigo and I did not rename it. However ;-) , I think we would need something like that when / if the tag search is expanded to groups. I may not yet have tagged something "ed_tech" in a group view, but if I see that somebody else tagged a resource with "ed_tech", I may be interested to take a look at that entry. 

Even in the case of searching for tags group or sitewide, I agree that you should not see everybody's tags as they are private. Diigo and Delicious are different because there you usually tag publicly. If the tag search is extended to include groups etc., would it then be possible to show all the tags of the artefacts to which a user has access (but maybe we should discuss that at a later point to not get confused with the individual tag search)?

@Richard: Correct. On the "Edit tag" page you can rename or delete your own tags easily.

Hi Kristina,

I noticed in your document that you say the tag clouds should be enabled/disabled by institutions rather than by the whole site.  We would prefer to keep the feature enabled/disabled at the site level, and I'm just wondering why you thought it should be done at the institution level, because it will lead to complications for users who belong to multiple institutions.

If we were to implement tag clouds on the institution level, then to decide whether a user should have their tag cloud displayed I guess we would search through all their institutions, and if the user belongs to any institution that has the tag cloud enabled, then they will see it.

Institutions could never be sure of turning tag clouds off for their users, but they could ensure that they were on I guess.  But if there is a good reason to enable the tag cloud for some users on the site, it doesn't do any harm to enable it for everyone, does it?