I'm working with RoR and I was wondering how can I translate Acts As Taggable On tags without having to manually insert it every time I use a tag again?
Example:
I have a Post (title and body in English) and I create it with tags "shoes, dress, beauty".
I've title and body translated to Japanese in a text file, so I just need to copy/paste them (I'm using Globalize2 plugin to manage translations).
Then I need to add Japanese tags, so I search for translation and add it.
Now I know how to write these three words to Japanese, but I don't want to have to translate them every time I use the same tag.
Next time I create a post with the "shoes" tag, I want that the Japanese version already has the translated term.
What do you suggest? Abandon Acts As Taggable On and create a custom Tags model with a habtm relationship with Post? Subclass the Acts As Taggable On model?
Thanks in advance.
You should be able to simply create your own controller, views and routes and CRUD tags as you see fit by adding whatever fields you require to the db table with no need to subclass the tag model. Personally unless there's some fancy cloud calculation or so forth with this plugin I would roll your own as it's pretty basic. It would also be a good exercise to look through the plugin and gain an understanding of its functionality.
Related
I'm currently evaluating whether to use ActsAsTaggableOn or roll my own.
I can't have users create tags at random but want to define a list of allowed tags for a project model. Users associated with that project can only select the tags that are allowed for that project (through project and tag model where a project can have multiple tags).
The sane thing to do seems to use ActsAsTaggableOn, but after googling for more than one hour I can't find a lot of documentation on my use-case.
I haven't used ActsAsTaggableOn but if your only issue is retricting what tags can be selected, that should be easy.
Use a gem like chosen-rails to make a nice selector to choose tags from an array of allowed tags that you supply. The returned array of selected tags are assigned to your acts_as_taggable_on field.
If the ActsAsTaggableOn doesn't support array input (I'm not clear on that) make the array an attr_accessor field such as tag_array and then do
my_object.my_tags = tag_array.join(',')
I want to create a tagging system like seen here on Stack Overflow or on Quora. It'll be its own model, and I'm planning on using this autocomplete plugin to help users find tags. I have a couple of questions:
I want tags to be entirely user-generated. If a user inputs a new tag by typing it and pressing an "Add" button, then that tag is added to the db, but if a user types in an existing tag, then it uses that one. I'm thinking of using code like this:
def create
#video.tags = find_or_create_by_name(#video.tags.name)
end
Am I on the right track?
I'd like to implement something like on Stack Overflow or Quora such that when you click a tag from the suggested list or click an "Add" button, that tag gets added right above the text field with ajax. How would I go about implementing something like that?
I know this is kind of an open-ended question. I'm not really looking for the exact code as much as a general nudge in the right direction. Of course, code examples wouldn't hurt :)
Note I am NOT asking for help on how to set up the jQuery autocomplete plugin... I know how to do that. Rather, it seems like I'll have to modify the code in the plugin so that instead of the tags being added inside the text field, they are added above the text field. I'd appreciate any direction with this.
mbleigh's acts_as_taggable_on gem is a feature-complete solution that you should definitely look into a little more closely. The implementation is rock-solid and flexible to use. However, it is mostly concerned with attaching tags to objects, retrieving tags on objects, and searching for tagged items. This is all backend server stuff.
Most of the functionality you are looking to change (based on your comments) is actually related more to your front-end UI implementation, and the gem doesn't really do much for you there. I'll take your requests one-by-one.
If user inputs a new tag, that tag
gets added, if user inputs an
existing tag, the existing tag gets
used. acts_as_taggable_on does this.
Click a tag from suggested list to
add that tag. This is an
implementation issue - on the
back-end you'll need to collect the
suggested list of tags, then display
those in your presentation as links
to your processing function.
Autocomplete as user enters
potential tag. You'll use the jQuery
autocomplete plugin against a list
of items pulled off the tags table.
With additional jQuery, you can
capture when they've selected one of
the options, or completed entering
their new tag, and then call the
processing function.
Restrict users to entering only one
tag. This will be your UI
implementation - once they've
entered or selected a tag, you
process it. If they enter two words
separated by a comma, then before or
during processing you have to either
treat it as one tag, or take only
the text up to the first comma and
discard the rest.
When you process the addition of a
tag, you will have to do two things.
First, you'll need to handle the UI
display changes to reflect that a
tag has been entered/chosen. This
includes placing the tag in the
"seleted" area, removing it from the
"available" display, updating any
counters, etc. Second, you'll need
to send a request to the server to
actually add the tag to the object
and persist that fact to the
database (where the taggable gem will take over for you). You can either do this via
an individual AJAX request per tag,
or you can handle it when you submit
the form. If the latter, you'll need
a var to keep the running list of
tags that have been added/removed
and you'll need code to handle
adding/removing values to that var.
For an example of saving tags while editing but not sending to server/db until saving a form, you might take a look at the tagging functionality on Tumblr's new post page. You can add/remove tags at will while creating the post, but none of it goes to the database until you click save.
As you can see, most of this is on you to determine and code, but has very little to do with the backend part. The gem will take care of that for you quite nicely.
I hope this helps get you moving in the right direction.
The more I try to force the acts-as-taggable-on gem to work the more I think these are fundamentally different types of problems. Specifically because of aliases. The gem considers each tag to be its own special snowflake, making it difficult to create synonyms. In some cases it doesn't go far enough, if you want the Tag to have a description you'd need to edit the given migrations (which isn't hard to do).
Here's what I'm considering implementing, given the trouble I've had implementing via the gem. Let's assume you want to create a tagging system for Technologies.
Consider the following psuedo code, I haven't yet tested it.
rails g model Tech usage_count::integer description:text icon_url:string etc. Run the migration. Note the
Now in the controller you will need to increment usage_count each time something happens, the user submits a new question tagged with given text.
rails g model Name::Tech belongs_to:Tech name:string
Name::Tech model
belongs_to :tech
end
Then you could search via something like:
search = Name::Tech.where("name LIKE :prefix", prefix: "word_start%")
.joins(:tech)
.order(usage_count: desc)
.limit(5)
This is starting point. It's fundamentally different from the gem, as each tag is just a string on its own, but references a richer data table on the back end. I'll work on implementing and come back to update with a better solution.
I am in the process of building a super simple CMS to handle smaller "static" page type projects (e.g. - small sites for friends). I have different "page types" that I would like to add. I built something similar in Coldfusion previously. Looked something like this:
table content_type:
content_type_code varchar(10)
content_type_name
table content:
content_id
content_type_code varchar(10)
content_name
content_desc
content_url
I would create a content type called "blog" or "photo" and each time a content was added, it'd get assigned the content_type_code. Then in /blog/ I'd query for all content that had a content_type_code of "blog".
Now that I'm using Ruby/RoR I am trying to think about things differently. I was thinking a better way might be to use nested pages with awesome_nested_set (https://github.com/collectiveidea/awesome_nested_set). But I'm not sure if that's the best solution.
Then I could create a page called "blog" and add to that many pages. So essentially the top level would take place of the "content_type" from my previous example.
Can someone steer me in the right direction on what the best method would be? I'm a newb looking for a kick in the right direction.
EDIT
I should add that the only real thing that I would change between the different "types" of content would be the layout and where they are displayed ("photo" content at /photos/, "blog" content at /blog/).
I try to recap:
You want to build a CMS
Your CMS manages a single web site
A web site is made of content
There are differenti type of contents, and I am assuming every type of content has its own behaviour
Contents are organized in a tree
Here is the plan I suggest you:
Create the Content resource; use the scaffold to have something already working, adding few field (title and body in example)
Add validations to your new model
Write a couple of unit tests against your validation (quite useless, just to see how it works)
Install awesome_nested_set and manage to make it working with your model
Work on the UI to make it quite easy to create new content, move content around, edit a single content
Now its time to implement the content types; STI is the Rails way, but I have to warn you it can be really hard. I suggest you to reiterate 1, 2, 3, 5 to create new models for Photo and BlogPost
Once you will be there, you will have hundreds of ideas to implement. Have fun :)
Instead of using content_type I would rather let the user choose a model on a selection page, like "photo" or "blog" and load an editing page based on that selection. So the user wants a new 'blog'-entry they get redirected to blog/new or 'photo' for photo/new. It's the easiest way to go in terms of usability and your controlling backend and you don't have redundant data (for example an empty photo url which is not necessary in a blog-type) in your database.
Let's say I want to trend all comments posted on a site and create dynamic tags. For example, If there are x number of comments that contain the word iPad I would like to create automatically create a tag called "iPad" and put it in a tag cloud.
Is this possible? I checked out the acts_as_taggable gem but it requires one to specify a tag, I guess I am looking for a way to generate tags from content.
Well something like the yahoo term extraction service might do the trick and there is a plugin for it http://expressica.com/auto_tags/.
Though it is not for commercial use.
Sure, this is possible.
Just parse the content of each comment as it's passed in and attach the tags you're interested in.
This can either work on a whitelist - where you specify all the tags you're interested in and attach those if relevant.
Or it could work on a blacklist - where you specify all the words to ignore, e.g. "the", "on". This approach is probably a lot more time consuming, but would allow for more dynamic results.
I would probably work on a white list, then have an ability to add new tags to the whitelist and have it go back and retroactively add the tags where applicable.
Ok, so you know how you ask a question here, and in the "Tags" field you can enter several space-separated tags into a single text field?
I'm trying to replicate similar behavior in my Rails app. Except instead of questions, I'm doing a blog app (which has "posts"), and tagging those.
I'm using "form_for" to build the quick form. Inside of that I have the line:
f.text_field :tags
The problem I'm running into is, "tags" is not a field on my Post class. My Post class HABTM tags. So, somehow I need to parse the tags text field (using String.split), and pass the resulting tag Strings into my controller, so my controller can create and associated the tags along with the new blog post.
Is using "form_for" not going to work in this case? Is doing this sort of behavior beyond the design of the quick-and-dirty "form_for" functionality?
Thanks!
Unless you really want to reinvent the wheel, I would suggest using a plugin for this. ActsAsTaggableOnSteroids is a mature one. http://svn.viney.net.nz/things/rails/plugins/acts_as_taggable_on_steroids
Agree with Ben on this - there's lots of great plugins and features/helpers that make them simple to use. And you can learn a lot about how to do this in a well-designed way. Here's another good choice.
http://github.com/mbleigh/acts-as-taggable-on