New features in eZ Tags: tag reordering and tree menu

The eZ Tags extension by Netgen is a great solution to the problems of managing large or ad hoc taxonomies. It especially solves problems around editorial user experience. 

Recently, Mugo has added a bunch of improvements to the extension. This post talks about 2: allowing users to reorder tags by assigning priorities, and to select tags from a tree menu.

The eZ Tags project is hosted on GitHub. The project description there does not quite do it justice:

eZ Tags is an extension for eZ Publish, providing more functionality for tagging
content objects than ezkeyword datatype included in eZ Publish kernel.

Main advantages of eZ Tags extension over ezkeyword datatype are:
    - tree hierarchy of tags
    - easily managable through eZ Publish admin interface with adding, deleting
      and editing tags and their children
    - easy tagging in object edit interface with tags autocompletion, suggestion
      and in place addition of new tags
    - tags view interface, similar to content view, providing access to $tag
      variable (current tag viewed, that is)

We have used eZ Tags on several projects and it is one of those things that because clients actually use it a lot, they also have things they would like to see added to it. Naturally, we assume that our additions are worthy and work with Netgen to get them merged into the official codebase so that everyone can take advantage.

One new feature enables editors to specify a priority for each tag, making it possible to better control content filters based on the priority of each tag. To accomplish this, we added a tag drag and drop system in the content edit interface.

The other feature I'm mentioning enables editors to use a tree menu to select the tags. The advantage of this feature is that, before it, the users needed to type some characters or words to be able to select a tag. With the tree menu, it is possible to clearly see the existing tags, and also to browse through the tag tree hierarchy, which makes it easier to select the necessary tags.

We would like to extend our sincere thanks to Edi Modric of Netgen who collaborated with me to get the additions into the code base, and to Netgen for their great extension.