Surfulater& Surfulater - Tech Info17 Jul 2008 12:02 pm
Tag Management - Live Example Page
In response to the great feedback we have received, we felt it was worthwhile to put up a live sample page of Tag Management. It can be accessed here:
http://www.surfulater.com/tagsamples/TagMgmt.html
When you get to the page, you have options on the left as to how the Tag Management form will behave on the right. Here are the options and behaviours.
- Whitespace Handling: Separator means whitespace acts as a separator, so “cat dog” will become two separate tags. Allowed means whitespace is just another character and part of a tag, so “cat dog” will become just one tag. Auto-Convert means whitespace is not allowed at all, and will automatically convert to an underbar ‘_’.
- Remove/Keep Column: Keep means that the checkbox determines which tags to keep, with unchecked ones being removed. Remove means that the checkbox determines which tags to removed, with unchecked ones left as they are. 3-way means that the checkbox for each tags has three states: checked (keep on or apply to all selected articles); unchecked (remove from all selected articles); dash-checked or semi-checked (currently applies to some of but not all the articles).
- New Tag Add: Text Only means that new tags in the “New tags” textfield are not shown as new tags in the rows below, but stay in the textfield until you click “Save.” Add to Rows means that as soon as you hit enter from within the “New tags” textfield, the new tags are immediately added to the rows below.
Set your options on the left, click the “Update” button, and try out the features in the Tag Management form on the right.
We look forward to more of your great feedback.
Avi
July 18th, 2008 at 12:39 am
The whitespace handling “allowed” option works just right. I could enter several multi-word tags separated by commas, and have them saved.
Would the tagging of single articles (in the article template) work the same way?
July 18th, 2008 at 12:40 am
That is certainly the intent. We would not want to confuse you by having it work one way in one window and another way in another (and imagine the support burden if we did!).
Avi
July 18th, 2008 at 12:44 am
Also noted… punctuation can be included in the tags. I tried “person: john, person: fred” and it made the correct two tags.
Is comma “,” the tag separator? And which punctuation characters are allowed in tags?
July 18th, 2008 at 12:47 am
Great about the plan for consistency (per #2).
One question - will it be possible to take a whole tag set or group of tags from one KB and copy it into another KB to use for tagging there?
July 18th, 2008 at 1:28 am
For the keep/remove options, the 3-way is clearest. Very similar to setting formats in MS Word when a selected mix of several formats is being changed.
Best to have the “use” column, which avoids remembering the context of changing process (keep or remove).
One issue, in 3-way, after making a change, the “-” indicator can never be restored. Makes sense, but the benefit of also having the other “in all” column to indicate initial state should be considered.
I tried the new 2.9.4 release, and didn’t see these “live example” options. Are they not included?
July 18th, 2008 at 1:59 am
@John,
We tried the 3-way on a number of testers, many were confused. Personally, we think it is great, because it provides three states in a single widget. Practically, the confusion level was too high. For now, we are likely to stick with the “Remove” option. The nice thing about this decision is that as we get a broad user base, we can always change it in the future.
These live examples are not in 2.94, but the correct ones will be in 3.0GA.
Avi
July 19th, 2008 at 1:27 am
When using the “new tags” feature “add to rows” seems most useful.
Two aspects that seem missing…
1. suppose a bunch of existing tags need to be added? How could multiple tags be selected in the “new tags” slot to be added in one step?
2. for the remove/keep operation, could an item be added to check or uncheck ALL, to avoid having to go down the list one-by-one?
Possibly a useful feature would be to have “Tag Groups” - named groups of tags, so that if a tag-group-name is used, all the member tags would be added. The groupnames could be identified with a special lead character in the name (e.g., “&”, like &groupname). These groups could be displayed in the tag panel too.
July 19th, 2008 at 7:58 am
@John,
We are leaving “add to rows” out for now, simply because of overhead, but will get it into 3.2, if the interest is there. To respond to your other questions:
1. You can type them in, comma-separated, and then they are added. The sample only does type-ahead for the first, as you probably noticed, but the live version in Surfulater does it for each tag.
2. That is a good idea. Usually, it is just a row on top. We will add that to the list, again, later release.
3. Tag-Groups: interesting idea, but would require more thought, such as how to make the management clean and easy.
Avi