Taxonomies in MODx

This is a broad question, but what are you guys doing to handle taxonomies in MODx?

For those who are unfamiliar with this somewhat esoteric term, taxonomies offer a way to classify stuff, e.g. pages. Fequently CMS’s offer ways to associate "tags" or "categories" with a particular page. For example, you could tag every page on your site that had to do with Richard Nixon (no matter where it lived on the document tree). Template variables allow you to add extra fields to your pages, which can be similar, but they aren’t really doing the same thing.

A good example of a taxonomy might be "genres" of a film -- one movie or book might be classified into multiple genres even though they are different types of content (one page is a book the other is a movie).

Usually a taxonomy system requires a few extra database tables so you can associate a given taxonomy term with one or more pages. There are a few tables in the Revo database that use this type of relationship, but none of them are explicitly geared towards this purpose of allowing managers/admins/authors to classify their content.

Are there any good 3rd party solutions for this?

Thanks!

Why would the tagging input filter on a text TV not work for this?

That’s kinda what I was thinking... create a TV with a multi-select box that gets populated from a database query. To create a tag cloud, there would have to be a corresponding Snippet to generate links to content according to what they had been tagged with. Stuff like that has already been done (e.g. Ditto).

A more thorough solution would have to include a plugin to allow a type of combo box when editing a resource so a user could type in their own tags, which would then get saved. Some AJAX would be a slick way to go here... autocomplete etc.... thinking along WordPress lines here.

Another dimension to this would be hierarchical taxonomies... you could have simple tags by using a the multi-select box TV, but coming up with a hierarchical would be slightly trickier...

... and another dimension would be whether or not the tags should tie into the lexicon for easier localization support.

Am I overthinking this? I’m comparing this type of solution to what I know exists in Drupal and WordPress.

I use sections, categories (different from MODx categories) and tags on each piece of info.
That allows to find/identify/tag info in various ways... all of them are in TVs.
and use taglister, getResourcesTag, etc. to show info on different places...
are we talking the same thing?

Thanks Charliez...

Yeah, I think we are talking the same thing:
http://modxcms.com/extras/package/691
http://rtfm.modx.com/display/ADDON/tagLister

These look good... I’ll give them a try.

Quote from: Everett at Oct 13, 2010, 08:15 PM

A more thorough solution would have to include a plugin to allow a type of combo box when editing a resource so a user could type in their own tags, which would then get saved.

Again, isn’t this what the tag input widget does? It let’s you click on/off the existing tags, or type additional tags directly into the textbox (that become part of the available tags on the next load).

Another dimension to this would be hierarchical taxonomies... you could have simple tags by using a the multi-select box TV, but coming up with a hierarchical would be slightly trickier...

That’s definitely not part of the tag input TV type.

... and another dimension would be whether or not the tags should tie into the lexicon for easier localization support.

That’s a great point as well and definitely not handled currently.

Again, isn’t this what the tag input widget does?

Hard to tell from the docs... (sorry Shaun). At minimum, the docs need a start-to-finish use case.

Quote from: Everett at Oct 14, 2010, 12:45 PM

Hard to tell from the docs... (sorry Shaun). At minimum, the docs need a start-to-finish use case.

Oh, no offense. They definitely do need more elaboration. Am I hearing you volunteering?

Quote from: Everett at Oct 14, 2010, 12:45 PM

Again, isn’t this what the tag input widget does?

Hard to tell from the docs... (sorry Shaun). At minimum, the docs need a start-to-finish use case.

They behave just like the ManagerManager tagging widget from Evo. If you’ve not used it you should take 30-seconds and try it. I think you’ll like it a lot.

Am I hearing you volunteering?

Hahaha.... yes, I’m taking that on. I’ll work through the Snippets and I’ll update the docs with a start-to-finish example. Stay tuned...