Decentralized META tag management

Hi,

for many things central management is very useful. But in this case (META tags) I think it is very unhandy. Espacially if we’re talking about blogs or big pages with a large amount of (frequently added) articles.

If you want custom descriptions for articles and add tags to your blog entries there is (as far as I know) no other way than using the centralized META tags.

1. Bad work flow
I can only think of two ways to add articles using this system:
a) Add all the keywords, tags, description before you write the new artikle to have them available if actually writing it.
b) Write the article, save it, create the new META tags and descriptions and go back to edit the article and add the newly created tags

2. If you have more than one editor the list of tags, keywords will grow and grow und become very unclearly. And you end up with a large scrolling list you’ll have to go throught to find a matching tag for your article if you not want to just add another word to the META list.

3. Even you can add all the tags etc. in a central place this system still works per-page basis. If you add keywords you still need to edit each page/article you want it to be attached to. If you delete an article you have to go through the META tags and delete the old ones one by one to keep the list clean.

So why not completely decentralize it?

Instead of choosing words from a pre-defined list adding them individually might be the way to.

regards
Patrick

I never use the meta-tags management features in the manager. It’s awkward as you point out for more than a few pages. Set up a couple of textareas as TVs and assign them to templates and use those, or use the Description field or Introtext field as you see fit. Much simpler.

rthrash thanks for the tips. I’ll give them a try!

Because this is a wish list topic, I still keep my fingers crossed this will be available in the future by default

Quote from: pan!c at May 05, 2008, 04:53 AM

rthrash thanks for the tips. I’ll give them a try!

Because this is a wish list topic, I still keep my fingers crossed this will be available in the future by default

It is available in the future; I mean we’re not going to be removing your ability to use Template Variables. Now, the legacy Keywords and Metatags data will be removed eventually, but those will be replaced by a more generic feature similar to Template Variables (minus the relationship to a Template) that will simply be known as "Resource Elements".

As Jason said, the liklihood is that in the future even the built-in meta tag management will be deprecated for the reasons mentioned above. Honestly TVs are a much more effective way of dealing with this in the current production codebase, especially when combined with the @INHERIT binding. Someone could certainly create a module for managing them more directly I suppose, but I don’t think it would be part of the core distribution as it wouldn’t be universally used in all installs.