I’ve been monkeying with a Drupal site that looks like it could fulfill most (even all?) of the mythical Eduglu concept – a website that aggregates all feeds published by students in a class/department/institution, and helps contextualize them in the various groups/cohorts/courses each student participates in. It’s getting really close – it can currently suck in all kinds of feeds, auto-tagging items, and even lets students create their own groups and associate feeds with them. There are issues, to be sure, mostly with respect to honouring the original tags in the aggregated items, and with taking advantage of the social rating system added to the website, but it’s so close I can taste it.
At the moment, there are almost 1200 items aggregated from feeds published by 19 users. It’s only been running for a week, so that’s not a bad start…
One added bonus of using Drupal for this, is that I can drop the Tagadelic module into place to generate a tag cloud representing all aggregated items’ tags. Here’s the tag cloud from the current prototype site:
Just seeing that aggregate cloud makes me smile. I’ll have to work on things like adding a group-only tag cloud, and maybe a tag with date parameters (which could be REALLY useful to build a movie displaying the shifts in tag weights over the course of a semester or year…)
As an aside, I’m pretty sure that this is the first post that I’ve added to all of the main categories of my blog: General, Work, and Fun. I’m pretty sure there’s something to that…
When I switched from Drupal to WordPress as the software that runs my blog, one of the things I missed was tag autocompletion while writing posts. Drupal has a great freetext tag field, including an AJAX utility that automatically checks with the server for tags that match what you’ve started to type in the tags field.
And now, WordPress has that too! With the Simple Tags plugin. It has some other features, too (but I haven’t tried them yet) but the tag autocompletion is killer. Why isn’t that included in a stock WP install?
Here’s what the autocompletion offered as I entered the tags for this post:
I wanted to update my Archives page to display the total tag count, but didn’t see a built-in method in Ultimate Tag Warrior to do that. So, here’s the recipe I followed – mimicking how the other methods are set up, in case the changes get rolled into the main distro…
In ultimate-tag-warrior.php:
function UTW_ShowUniqueTagCount() {
global $utw;
echo $utw->GetUniqueTagCount();
}
In ultimate-tag-warrior-core.php:
function GetUniqueTagCount() {
global $wpdb, $tabletags;
$sql = "select count(*) from $tabletags";
return $wpdb->get_var($sql);
}
And, in K2‘s page-archives.php (or anywhere you want the count to show up):
tags
I’ve also hacked my copy of wp-db-backup.php to automatically back up the UTW tables, thusly, starting at line 407:
$wp_backup_default_tables = array ($table_prefix . categories,
$table_prefix . comments,
$table_prefix . linkcategories,
$table_prefix . links,
$table_prefix . options,
$table_prefix . post2cat,
$table_prefix . postmeta,
$table_prefix . posts,
$table_prefix . users,
$table_prefix . tags,
$table_prefix . post2tag,
$table_prefix . tag_synonyms);
I wanted to update my Archives page to display the total tag count, but didn’t see a built-in method in Ultimate Tag Warrior to do that. So, here’s the recipe I followed – mimicking how the other methods are set up, in case the changes get rolled into the main distro…
In ultimate-tag-warrior.php:
function UTW_ShowUniqueTagCount() {
global $utw;
echo $utw->GetUniqueTagCount();
}
In ultimate-tag-warrior-core.php:
function GetUniqueTagCount() {
global $wpdb, $tabletags;
$sql = "select count(*) from $tabletags";
return $wpdb->get_var($sql);
}
And, in K2‘s page-archives.php (or anywhere you want the count to show up):
tags
I’ve also hacked my copy of wp-db-backup.php to automatically back up the UTW tables, thusly, starting at line 407:
$wp_backup_default_tables = array ($table_prefix . categories,
$table_prefix . comments,
$table_prefix . linkcategories,
$table_prefix . links,
$table_prefix . options,
$table_prefix . post2cat,
$table_prefix . postmeta,
$table_prefix . posts,
$table_prefix . users,
$table_prefix . tags,
$table_prefix . post2tag,
$table_prefix . tag_synonyms);