As one of the more popular Content Management Systems (CMS) in use today, Joomla’s power lies in its versatility and extensibility. Whatever function or feature is not contained in its core set of capabilities, you can either find from the vast library of extensions both free and paid, or you can build your own. However, one might wonder why something as fundamental as tagging support was not natively incorporated into Joomla, and left to extension developers to implement on their own.
Well, as of 24th April 2013, the release date for version 3.1, Joomla now has support for tags baked into its master codebase. Support for several basic (and some more advanced) tag operations is now integrated and available to Joomla users (and extension developers) from the get-go. This article looks at how Joomla views, treats and works with tags.
Basic tag functions
Standard use cases for tags in other CMS include in blogs, where bloggers highlight key aspects of any specific blog post, as well as in news sites, content aggregation sites, essay sites and job hunting sites, amongst others. Tags are a simple and powerful way of adding – and searching – metadata to various types of content.
Previously, Joomla had a limited support of these scenarios with its category assignments. With Joomla 3.1, all of these use cases are catered for. Joomla allows its tag support to be used in any extension by the addition of a new field with the ‘tag’ type. In the default AJAX mode, end-users can create new (or custom) tags ‘on-the-fly’, or select from a list compiled as the users type it in. Alternatively, in the nested mode, users can select from a hierarchically-presented list of tags, which deny the creation of custom tags. Denying custom tag creation is available for the AJAX mode as well. What truly separates tags from categories in Joomla is that multiple tags can be associated with a single piece of content, any tag can be associated with multiple types of content, and of course, tags are not containers for other kinds of items.
In addition, searching for and sorting specified tag(s), and content associated with these tags, has been implemented. Joomla 3.1 now allows ‘most popular tags’ and ‘related articles’ (articles with similar tags) to be displayed to the users. And probably best of all, tags can be made as a menu item that works almost identically to categories.
Advanced tag functions
With the integration of the ajax-chosen plugin and the built-in tag support framework, site developers can now create their own custom-built tag system. You can implement your favoured tag system by building on and extending the basic tag field, providing all the necessary functions to go along with it.
The implications of this is that current extensions providing tagging support to earlier versions of Joomla can be updated to use Joomla 3.1’s native tagging system without any loss of functionality. In addition, future versions of Joomla itself will include a more complete feature set for dealing with tags, e.g. allowing the end user to create a new, custom nested tag tree.
Joomla 3.1’s new tagging system promises to make an already-good CMS even better, and is an answer to many user requests. Give it a go – you may never need any other tagging extension.