alogblog's MTy plugins: Tagging on the fly

Why do we bloggers insert Tag Link into our blog's entry? There are mainly two different purposes. The first is simply for advertising our blog/entry by means of Meta Tag sites like Technorati. We want to have much opportunities to publicize our entry as possible as we can. Tag is one of the ways for doing. We may call it external purpose.

The second is for internally managing tags(or keywords) of blog. In this case, we may consider tag as a subdivided category. With computer terms, category is like "Partition or Drive", tag is like "Folder". We use tag for categorizing our entries in more detail.

For the first purpose, the FCKeditor's "Tagging" plugin provided by Full Featured FCKeditor on Movable Type plugin is quite sufficient. For the second purpose, we need other tag-managing plugin like "Tags.App", "Tagwire", or MT's "Tags Plugin". These plugins use internally MT's category or external PuginData for managing tags. By using these we can display "Tag Cloud" or something.

They all commonly use the "Keywords" field of an entry in order to get Tags. So a user using a tag-managing plugin have to enter the tags of an entry into Keywords field by his or her hand. It's not a difficult work. However two steps of working is involved in that case. First, after finishing your entry (of course you can enter the tag in the middle of writing an entry. However, do you ?), you do think "Hmm, what will be tags of this entry?", so you may have to re-browse your entry in order to figure out some tag values. Secondly, you have to enter those found tags by hand.

If you are now using this "Tagging on the fly" plugin on the FCKeditor, you can reduce above works to just one-click work as you write.

Fig. Screenshot of "Tagging on the fly"

While you are writing an entry, you find a tag text. Then you drag and click "Tagging" toolbar menu. Then it is converted into "Tag Link" by virtue of Tagging plugin of FCKeditor. And if you installed this "Tagging on the fly" Movable Type plugin, that selected tag value will be automatically inserted into "Keywords" field of an entry.

This "Tagging on the fly" plugin is a not independent tag-managing plugin like "Tagwire". It's only small plugin helping other tag-managing plugins.

Requirement

Movable Type 3.2
Full Featured FCKeditor on Movable Type plugin

Installation

Download this plugin and untar it under (mt home) folder like $ tar xvfz TaggingOnTheFly-3.2.01.tar.gz.

Configuration

Tag Separation: In the System-wide plugin setting, you can check Tag Separation option. Some tag-managing MT plugins allow only "space" in multiple tag separation. Some allow even "comma" as a separaion. As your current tag-managing plugin's policy, you need to set it in here. If only space is used, one tag which has space in its value like "Tag cloud" is automatically converted into "tag_cloud".

Notes

This plugin inserts a selected tag into Keywords field, so you MUST display "Keywords" field of an entry by using "Customize the display of this page" menu.
Inserted Tag Link is also a Link, so you can remove tag link by normal "Remove Link" toolbar menu. However if you use that menu to remove tag link, the tag value in the Keywords field is not removed. So if you want to synchronizedly remove "Tag link in the entry body" and "Tag value in the Keywords field", you have to use "Tagging" toolbar menu. First drag the tag link you want to remove, then click "Tagging" menu, and click "the same tag site icon" as your tag link. Then the tag link and tag value(in the Keywords) will be removed.

License

Relased under the Creative Commons License.

Version History

3.2.01 : First release.

alogblog's MTy plugins

MT is empty. We can fill it with our imagination.

Tagging on the fly