Typo Administration: article tagging II...

Steve Longdo — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 23:31:00 +0000

Let's go through the the steps I have taken so far to add auto completion of the tagging capabilities of Typo.

Checked out a fresh copy of the trunk from svn://typosphere.org/typo/trunk
Ran it against my backup database of this site.
Fired up TextMate and started to work!

I made a decision right off to not use AJAX for this. Building the entire list of tags in use for an individual user's blog shouldn't be too much overhead to send down the wire once, versus pinging the server each time a key is typed. (Although Typo foils my effort to reduce roundtrips to the server, because live preview of Articles monitors the whole Article form not just the Title and Body fields...) I am sticking by my decision for now, if we want to add del.icio.us, technorati or even ma.gnolia.com tags in the future then AJAX will come back into the picture. For now we will Keep It Simple S...teve :-)
First off we will need to get the Tags down to the view code. So off to the admin controller code's new and edit methods to get our Tags included:

app/controllers/admin/content_controller.rb
def new
...
    @categories = Category.find(:all, :order => 'UPPER(name)')

    @tags = Tag.find_all_with_article_counters(666)
...
end

def edit
...
    @selected = @article.categories.collect { |cat| cat.id.to_i }

    @tags = Tag.find_all_with_article_counters(666)
    
    if request.post? 

...
end

The @tags = Tag.find_all_with_article_counters(666) is how we are accomplishing this. I could just get all the Tags with Tag.find(:all) but this little bit of premature optimization will come in handy if we want to show a count of how many articles are already tagged with a given tag. We can also limit our search to less than 666 records. I just like to tag things a lot.

I will post the next part later today as this post is getting a bit longish.

Musings of a Trained Monkey: Typo Administration: article tagging II...

Typo Administration: article tagging II...