Current State of the Tag Module

You can get a general overview of the tag module here.

Tags

The initial motivation behind tags was to help with SEO endeavours. There are two main use cases:

• You can tag any type of entity, and the entity can show the associated tags on its page.
• Tags are hyperlinked within publication content to let spiders crawl the site in a more efficient way.

Implementation

The tag module was implemented to support tagging virtually anything, including publications, courses, members, and more. However, the primary use case was to tag publications. Although the tagging functionality was also utilized for courses, a later discussion revealed that this system should primarily focus on publications.

Module Name

The module is referred to as "Tag module" because it was primarily planned to become a generic tagging system. Within the Publication module context, we commonly refer to tags as "topics." Since the publication system should be the primary (and possibly sole) use case for tags, it may be sensible to rename the module to "Topic module" or something similar.

Managing Tags

We have tags related to every important concept. Our topic definition pages cover topics such as UX Design, Interaction Design, etc.

• You can find an overview of our current topics here: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics
• You can add and manage tags in the Tag Control Panel

Naming Convention

When creating tags it is important to remember that we follow a certain naming convention:

• the exact name of a tag is the text that will be linked in the content, so 21st century design will be linked, but 21st. century design won’t be linked
• a tag name should NOT contain special characters such as ()!'$%&...
• capitalization is ignored, we always use lowercase tag names

Creating Aliases

Each tag can have multiple aliases. An alias is an alternative word or phrase related to any existing tag.

What are Tag Aliases?

Tagging Articles

We use tagging mostly for articles within the Publication module context. You can tag an article and those tags will appear on the article page.

Deleting Tags

Tags are currently not soft-deletable. When a tag is deleted, all related tag aliases are also deleted due to cascade delete on the database level.

Topic Definition Pages

A topic definition page shows a topic definition and all publications tagged with a specific tag.

Hyperlinking

If an article content contains words that match the tag name, they will be automatically hyperlinked. The links created in this way will lead to the topic definition page.

To hyperlink a tag within an article, the article doesn’t need to be tagged with it. However, we introduced limits to how many tags will be hyperlinked in a single article due to Google’s recommendations on how many links should appear on a single page.

What is Hyperlinking?

Linked Article

Apart from articles that are tagged with a certain tag, a tag can have a single special article attached to it.

Linked Course

A tag can also have a single special course attached to it.

Use Cases for Linked Articles and Courses

The linked article and course both appear on topic definition page.