I’ll start off by saying that I’m not out to rub anyone up the wrong way, and I’d like this to be a constructive discussion.
Now with that out of the way...
I’ve never quite understood why the keywords are the way they are in MODx (Evo, not looked at them in Revo) and I imagine they can be used in several different ways if the fancy took you:
1) To add keywords to your <head> section for each page to aid external serching on Google etc
2) To categorise content for a blog
3) To aid in searching internally as I imagine AjaxSearch checks these or can at least be configured to
4) A combination of 1 & 3 above
The bit that always felt a little clunky to me was essentially having to go to a different part of the CMS and think about your keywords usually
before writing your page. The fact that you can’t add a new keyword to the list whilst you’re creating a page also irked me slightly as you would have to save your page, add more keywords and re-edit your page to add the keywords in.
That’s as far as I got with keywords really on smaller sites - for larger sites I just added a text box template variable and typed them in as a list as it seemed quicker somehow. I realise it does greatly depend on the site and the amount of people you have plugging in the content, and the rate at which new content is added - all sorts of things affect how you do this side of things.
I know it’s all a case of different strokes for different folks, and there’s a million and one ways to do things in MODx, and I’m happy with the TV solution I currently use for meta keywords on larger sites, but I’d like to kick off a discussion where folks chip in and answer the following questions:
1) Do you actually use MODx’s built-in meta tag and keyword system?
2) In what way do you use it (see my examples above)?
3) If you author multiple sites, what percentage do you use it on?
4) What improvements do you think could be made to this part of the system (assume unlimited budget and man hours if you like - this is just an idea-generation topic really
).
For question 1 above, I’d personally have to say I’ve used it in one of ten projects. Some sites were so small and the keywords were going to be identical for the 2-3 pages in the site so I just wrote them straight into the template. (Maybe it’s wrong to use the same keywords on each page even on a site this small, but they were some of my earlier attempts and seem to be serving their purpose well
).
In terms of improvements to the system I think I’d like to be able to pick keywords off a list as it works currently when creating a page, and for every one I select a bit of Javascript adds it to a normal input field, comma separated. Then I can type others into that field that aren’t in the list, and when the page is saved they get added to the list.
That’s just my thoughts, you may have other interesting ideas that I’d love to read before filing suggestions in Jira or anything like that.
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MODX Staff
