Within the engine, tags are only stored once. A lot of the functionality within the tag class provides methods that check for existing identical tags before registering new ones, and conversely check for existing identical tags when removing one. The engine also generates a tag cloud and performs the searching by tag functionality.

You are right in thinking that we have implemented an AJAX driven suggest tool in the admin area, which allows the administrator to not only see existing tags for possible ideas but also to simply click any relevant tag in order to assign it to a particular product or dynamic category.

When we introduced our client to the back-end of the platform we informed them that for uniformity tags should be entered in all lowercase, and this is a principal that they have adhered to.

As the tags were going to a highly visible navigation tool for customers, and that for certain attributes and customer situations couldn’t be described in just 1 word, it was imperative that the tags could be multi-word, such as ‘ebay seller’, ’surface protection’, ‘printed adhesive tapes’ etc. Additionally when entering multiple different tags to a individual product the tags needed to be comma separated rather than space separated.

By using commas between each tag, this ensured that multi word tags didn’t need to have hyphens between each word, which ensures on the front end the tags are displayed as natural phrases and not hyphen-separated-tags.

Moving into user generated tags, this presents its own challenges in terms of what access level ie. registered visitor, existing customer etc, a user needs to have in order to be able to create their own tags, along with policing the user generated tags.

I will provide more insight into our methodology for this when we launch a platform which allows for user generated tags.

I hope this has been a useful insight into our approach.

Paul

I know in systems I’ve been involved with, I’ve seen problems with users entering tags in different cases and spellings, with or without white space. Often you see AJAX powered ’suggest’ tools. Is this something you guys have done or have you found a different solution to managing tags in the back-end?

Do you force users into sticking with upper/lower-case input or save all as lower-case for consistency? Do you allow for multi-word tags or (like del.icio.us) have to make these into a single tags (no spaces)?

Always interesting to see different approaches and understand the reasoning behind them

May seem like common sense, but you’d be surprised how many people don’t do it this way.