• Read more about Acts As Taggable On Grows Up

Acts As Taggable On (original post here), the tagging plugin with custom tag contexts, has gathered up some great new features over the past weeks thanks to the efforts of the community as well as fellow Intrideans Pradeep Elankumaran and Brendan Lim. I just wanted to take this opportunity to go over some of what’s new and interesting in the world of acts_as_taggable_on.

Community Fixes

First, Peter Cooper was kind enough to submit a patch that allows acts_as_taggable_on to work with Rails 2.1’s named_scope when using find_options_for_tag_counts.

Secondly, the much requested support for Single Table Inheritance is finally in! It was just a matter of using a class inheritable attribute instead of a class instance variable, and big thanks to slainer68 for hunting that down and taking the time to submit a patch.

If there’s anything you’ve hacked on to Acts As Taggable On, I urge you to submit a patch to the Lighthouse Project. I try to get new patches integrated into the codebase as quickly as possible, so please do submit anything!

During the Community Code Drive at RailsConf two great features were added: taggers and related objects.

Taggers

Tags can now have ownership, allowing for such things as User-tracked tags and more. This was a requested feature and something that I’d been looking forward to myself. Here’s the usage:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base   acts_as_tagger end  class Photo < ActiveRecord::Base   acts_as_taggable_on :locations end  @some_user.tag(@some_photo, :with => "paris, normandy", :on => :locations) @some_user.owned_taggings @some_user.owned_tags @some_photo.locations_from(@some_user)

Find Related

Another request (and another great idea) is the ability to find related objects by similar tags. This is now available through the @object.find_related_on_tags syntax:

@bobby = User.find_by_name("Bobby") @bobby.skill_list # => ["jogging", "diving"]  @frankie = User.find_by_name("Frankie") @frankie.skill_list # => ["hacking"]  @tom = User.find_by_name("Tom") @tom.skill_list # => ["hacking", "jogging", "diving"]  @tom.find_related_on_skills # => [<User name="Bobby">,<User name="Frankie">] @bobby.find_related_on_skills # => [<User name="Tom">]  @frankie.find_related_on_skills # => [<User name="Tom">] 

Gemified!

Acts As Taggable On now works as a GemPlugin in Rails. This is a new way (as of Rails 2.1) of distributing plugins as gems and having them still automatically link up and do their magic. To use it as a gem, add it to your config/environment.rb like so:

config.gem "mbleigh-acts-as-taggable-on", :source => "http://gems.github.com", :lib => "acts-as-taggable-on"

Now you should be able to get the latest version of the plugin just by running rake gems:install. However, this hasn’t been working for me so the alternative is just to install the gem directly:

gem install mbleigh-acts-as-taggable-on --source http://gems.github.com/

Now when you run your Rails app, even though it’s not in vendor/plugins it should be running! To make sure, look for this line on startup:

** acts_as_taggable_on: initialized properly

There are still a couple of issues outstanding in Rails regarding GemPlugins (if you unpack it, it will not run the initialization properly for some reason), but I wanted to give everyone the latest and greatest way to install the plugin possible. It will still work fine using the conventional methods as well.

Community and Future

I’ve been really happy with the response and support of the community, and I would like to do everything possible to cultivate future participation. To that end, I have created an Acts As Community Project for acts_as_taggable_on that will hopefully provide some casual communication about the project. Feel free to post on the wall or in the forums, and look out for additions soon.

Finally, the area of the plugin that still needs some work is tag caching. This is not a particular area of my expertise, so I’m hoping that someone from the community will write up some specs that flesh out the caching functionality in new and interesting ways.

Thanks for all of the patches, and I hope you continue to enjoy using Acts As Taggable On!

UPDATE (6/10/08): The improvements keep on rolling! After writing the post, I went off on a tangent and decided to make the plugin work both traditionally and as a gem. See more details above in the “Gemified” section.

• Read more about Announcing 'acts_as_taggable_on'

For a number of applications, especially our Social Networking Platform I’ve found a need for advanced tagging functionality not offered by the acts_as_taggable_on_steroids plugin. Namely, there have been a number of times when I’ve wished a model could have multiple “sets” of tags that would function both independently and together. For example, a user might have tagged themselves, but they might also have skills, interests or sports that would also function like tags. That’s where acts_as_taggable_on comes in.

Installation

To install the plugin on Edge Rails or Rails 2.1 and greater:

script/plugin install git://github.com/mbleigh/acts-as-taggable-on.git

On previous versions of Rails:

git clone git://github.com/mbleigh/acts-as-taggable-on.git vendor/plugins/acts-as-taggable-on

Usage

Acts As Taggable On provides the same functionality of acts_as_taggable_on_steroids with the addition of the notion of “contexts,” or scoped areas in which taggings can live. For the user example listed above, I can now simply make a call like so:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base   acts_as_taggable_on :tags, :skills, :interests, :sports end

By taking the same one-liner tack as previous implementations, we are now able to set, find, retrieve, and calculate information based on tags within a context as well as as a whole. With the user model we just created:

@user = User.new(:name => "Bobby") @user.tag_list = "awesome, slick, hefty"      # this should be familiar @user.skill_list = "joking, clowning, boxing" # but you can do it for any context! @user.skill_list # => ["joking","clowning","boxing"] as TagList @user.save  @user.tags # => [<Tag name:"awesome">,<Tag name:"slick">,<Tag name:"hefty">] @user.skills # => [<Tag name:"joking">,<Tag name:"clowning">,<Tag name:"boxing">]  User.find_tagged_with("awesome") # => [@user] User.find_tagged_with("joking") # => [@user] User.find_tagged_with("awesome", :on => :tags) # => [@user] User.find_tagged_with("awesome", :on => :skills) # => []  @frankie = User.create(:name => "Frankie", :skill_list => "joking, flying, eating") User.skill_counts # => [<Tag name="joking" count=2>,<Tag name="clowning" count=1>...]  @bobby.skill_counts @frankie.skill_counts

And that’s all there is to it! Now you can scope your tags to whatever arbitrary name you would like. The inflector is used to create the singular/plural methods, so be careful about making sure that your nomenclature uses plurals in the acts_as_taggable_on call.

As a side note, this is meant to be used in place of acts_as_taggable_on_steroids, and the acts_as_taggable method works in acts_as_taggable_on simply by calling acts_as_taggable_on :tags. Caching has been written into the implementation but is not yet tested or verified to be working. Stay tuned for additional improvements to this plugin, and feel free to submit any bugs or patches to the Lighthouse

UPDATE 5/3/07: Acts As Taggable on is now hosted on GitHub and has a public Lighthouse available for bug tracking. Information updated above.