The tags definitely need work. The plan for Mahara 15.10 (unfortunately, we didn't get it in for 15.04) is to use auto-fill of tags like we have now for the sending of notifications: You start typing a word and the options start coming.
Embedding a tag cloud was not done initially as the question is which tags to display: Only the ones that you as viewer have access to in terms of content or all? According to our permissions framework, we'd go with the former which may be a bit tricky and everybody would see a different tag cloud.
If you use the Elasticsearch, you already see on which pages an artefact is used that has a specific tag. :-)
It would also be great to be able to display tags in groups...
Cheers
Kristina
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The Tag cloud is great! As far as I can see it is only available in the side bar of my personal content and portfolio pages view. Simply by making this block embeddable for users would making tags more accessible and sharing them a possibility.
One other feature I would like to see on Tags. When I tag an image or document the search should show the pages that that item is embedded on. Instead of having to re-enter all the tags from all the items on a page into the tags of that page.
I would love to hear what is in the works for Tag features!
Thanks, Simha
]]>You can tag Views, blogs & posts, files, folders and images, and you can choose how many tags to display in your cloud under Settings > Preferences.
There is still some more theming work to be done but the features described in Kristina's pdf are available. Bug reports and opinions welcome!
cheers
Richard
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The only compelling reason to turn on / off the tag cloud on the institution level was to give the institutions more freedom in deciding whether they want to show the tag search or not.
I have no idea how many people use the institution feature (we don't) and thus, if we would need to go into the trouble of finding a solution or whether it is enough to leave it at installation level. As a more elaborate search (not just for tags) will come one day, I guess, we could turn on / off the tag search on the installation level.
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?
]]>"Yes, let's keep the issue of seeing "tags you can access" separate - it's a tricky challenge, certainly surmountable"
Yep. As you will be developing the tag search for individuals and their own content first and we said we would leave the group tags for later, let's see how such group tags work once we have concquered the first mountain. :-)
Kristina
Yes, let's keep the issue of seeing "tags you can access" separate - it's a tricky challenge, certainly surmountable, but if we can keep to a smaller amount of work now to get much benefit, I say let's do that!
]]>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.
What does the "Edit Tags" page do? Is that a page where you can change the names of your tags?
Richard.
Something that may be nice to have is to select the order the search results are displayed in. The following orders may be useful
Please find a summary of this discussion plus a few mockups for the tag search here. I have submitted that document for Nigel's and Richard's further perusal and as basis for the development of the feature.
If you want to make any additions, please post them here in the forum.
Have a nice weekend
Kristina
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.
]]>Great suggestions!
@Alex: We (the funding party ) don't want to get rid of the search box completely. A tag cloud and a search would be great. However, as far as I understood it, creating the search is more difficult than developing the tag cloud. That's why the tag cloud came up. Better to have something to search the portfolio with than nothing at all. Currently, I am struggling to explain the search box that doesn't do anything (at least on our installation).
If somebody else wants to fund the search box development, that would be fantastic. We already have a few feature requests pending (I need to update that to include the tag cloud and developments on the improvement on the feedback) that we are discussing in more deteail with Nigel and Richard at the moment.
Kristina
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
Alex - Synergy Learning
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
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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.
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