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We still need a sitewide tags solution? (121 posts)

  1. mrmumu
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    WPMU Search plugin Does it take alot of DB space?

  2. lunabyte
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    Works like a champ, Doc, at least on my local test box.

    I'm curious what will become of a fairly large posts table, but considering there's some pretty hefty blogs out there, it shouldn't be bad.

    Hell, the damn sploggers do it all the time, and you know they aren't paying for quality accounts.

    Shouldn't be a problem for us honest folks.

  3. zappoman
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    I am looking to implement site wide tags and search, and am debating between Dr. Mike's approach and the approach put together by deltakid (described here: http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=2397&replies=38).

    Which one do you guys recommend at this stage of the game?

    Looks like the Dr. Mike approach leaves WPMU core files alone, so that has a nice benefit, but the deltakid approach seems cleaner from a DB perspective because as far as I can tell it keeps the post data in the original blog/post tables as opposed to creating a second copy.

    I'm sort of leaning toward Dr. Mike's approach because it seems more "forward compatible" with new WPMU upgrades.

    Can I ask, how does wordpress.com do this? Is there a plan to release that implementation into wpmu eventually?

  4. lunabyte
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    I went with the Doc on this one. With some special additions of my own, it's all nicely integrated visually, and even a main tag list on my main site that's updated on a set schedule.

    Side benefit is the separate db actually. Mainly because it is a separate db. I can clean out anything older than X, at my choosing, so that it stays somewhat leaner than the main MU db. If your site is small, you may want to archive posts for 6 months. If it's large <cough>James</cough>, you may want to only archive stuff for a week or so.

    Pretty easy to blend it in, and make it "just another subdomain" on your mu site, really. Well, again, visually.

    As for what wp.com "does", there's just certain things that we're going to have to figure out on our own.

    Trying to think of it from their perspective, would you want to give out all your tricks so someone can build and offer the "exact" same thing, and compete against you? I wouldn't, really. To be honest, I'm thankful for the head start they've already shared.

    However, because of open source and the community here, we can come up with similar results in the end. Like tags, or what have you.

  5. zappoman
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    I guess I should have mentioned that Doc just sounds so much more authoritative... "Dr."-Mike, as opposed to delta-"Kid"... Jeez, I can't believe I fell for that. ;)

  6. lunabyte
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    LOL

    It was a decent solution at the time, but so was WP 1.5 in its day as well.

    Now there's 2.1, and now there's drmike's outside the box solution as well.

  7. zappoman
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    Ok, so I've taken the steps Doc described, and I have things working pretty well.

    Couple of things I did a little differently...

    1) I went ahead and installed these all in the same MySQL db, not really a big deal, I'm sure down the road when I need to deal with scalability, I'll have to move this tags db to a different DB.

    2) Using Michael Woehrer category tagging plugin... seems to be working pretty well... but I did hack it to use the sitewide DB instead of the "$wpdb->categories" db, this allows me to get tag clouds for either the sitewide db or the individual blogs on my WPMu setup. (see note 1 above, this would be a little more tricky had I run things in a different DB).

    Couple of things I am not 100% satisfied with...

    1) my sitewide tags URLs are... "http://www.mydomain.com/tags/category/cat_name" I really wish I could drop the extra "/category/" in the middle of this url... but that means tricking wordpress into supporting categories in the root. Is this doable? Any pointers?

    2) Update and Delete changes to tags don't get reflected in the sitewide DB. At least they don't appear to be propagating. I can also imagine that posts that get deleted or marked as private in the MU setup could get propagated to the "tags" install when they are first published, and then they are deleted or marked as private later in the MU setup. This seems like a little bit of a problem, does this make sense?

    Anyway, this is a great start... I'm curious if anyone else has considered the two issues I've described above and if there are easy solutions.

    Thanks in advance for any help.

  8. Ovidiu
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    regarding your issue #1 - you could use this plugin: http://fortes.com/projects/wordpress/toplevelcategories/ to allow categories in the root, but I use this as an mu-plugin, so each user can decide, its up to you to modify it to your purpose :-)

  9. lunabyte
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    With 1): Did you set your category base to /tags in your permalink options?

    $5, I bet you missed that one. ;)

    With 2): That's just the nature of the beast. If someone goes back and modifies the slug, or makes it private, that's just the way it is. The link will pop up a login, so it isn't "too" bad. Small price for saving the overhead in running tag queries against "everything" in the main MU db.

  10. zappoman
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    Lunabyte,

    If I set category base to "/tags" then the permalink structure becomes "www.mydomain.com/tags/tags/..." Not sure what you mean by $5, I did do Dr. Mike's step 5 related to other setup options on the wordpress-tags site.

    I am using domains for WPMU and I placed the Wordpress (tags) instance in a separate directory on the server and used standard apache settings to map it to the alias of "www.domain.com/tags". So it's root is there.

    Ovidiu, I will check out the toplevecategories plugin. Sounds useful.

    Thanks to all.

  11. lunabyte
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    You're using ate based permalinks, and the category base is (without quotes), "/tags"?

    It shouldn't be popping another /tags in there.

    You've missed some little something somewhere.

    Wait a sec, I noticed this when I posted the above.

    You've installed it in a subdirectory...

    I see the problem now.

    You need this:
    http://fortes.com/projects/wordpress/toplevelcategories/

  12. zappoman
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    Top Level Cats saves the day.

    Thanks folks... this is great.

    I'm still interested in the "cruft problem"... maybe I'll look into implementing a sweeper/gabage collector that runs through the "tags" blog and cleans up old entries that are either gone or changed from the mu db. But for now, things are working great.

    -Zappo

  13. drmike
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    *chuckle* 404s for me

    Actually it was discussed earlier today in the wp.org forums

    http://wordpress.org/support/topic/109849

  14. lunabyte
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    It sure does. Guess they changed their structure.

    http://fortes.com/2007/02/27/top-level-categories-plugin-01/

    Worked for me just now.

    As a note, this isn't an issue if you put your site on a subdomain, instead of in a subdirectory. ;)

    I put mine on tags.domain... and it was fine.

  15. zappoman
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    I guess I should have mentioned that the first URL was moved... I guess I was so focused on finding a solution that I didn't even notice the speed bump of the 404... I must have found it where Lunabyte did.

    Anyway, I looked at the code and it does essentially the same thing that Maxsat suggests doing in the wordpress.org forum post.

    Thanks again.

  16. lunabyte
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    Yeah. It does.

    As long as you don't make a page the same name as one of your categories, you're fine.

    It's mainly to prevent that rewrite collision, similar to MU where for the main site it adds /blog to the url.

  17. demonicume
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    sorry to ask a dumb question, but i've been checking this post everyday for a while now... do any of these solutions work for subdirectories? i tried the other solution by delta kid and i cant make it thru his instructions - he hasnt responded to any of my questions, so i'm stuck. at this point, there's no reason for my users to hit the front page of the site. i'm close to just paying someone to do it. i mean, i'd share the solution with everyone interested, but if there's a way i can set up sitewide tags/cats myself, i'd welcome any advice or hints.

  18. lunabyte
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    Yes, this works with subdirectories.

    It's "cheating" and using a standard WP install to read the sitewide feed plugin from MU. Then using a category plugin, it makes tags.

  19. demonicume
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    Luna: thanks. a moment of clarity is worth a lifetime struggle.

    is there a way to get the tags on this WP site displayed as, say, a tag cloud sidebar on my Mu site? what about a search field that would search the posts on the tag site?

    i'm kinda just throwing some ideas out. many thanks in advance for any response.

  20. drmike
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    I like cheating. :)

    Wait until you see my Hot Posts/ Hot Blogs solution. ;)

    search field: I would try just using a standard search form on your WPMu site but point it at the search function of the tag install. Should work.

    I wonder if an iframe somehow would work for the tag cloud. I want to do one on my own site but haven't worked it out yet.

  21. gumdrop
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    Hey drmike...just wanted to point out that your "Tags" link at the top of your main page points to:
    http://daria.be/sitewidetags/
    and gives a 404

  22. demonicume
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    before i discovered the forums here, i set up autoblog to pull posts from my site's feed. then i manually added the posts to categories so they could be searched (i only have like 20 bloggers and half arent daily bloggers). i wonder if some tag plugin could pull tags from these posts and display a cloud. i commented out the loop and added news feeds, so the posts get made, but they dont display on the front page. could this be another solution? the feed solutions i used left things behind like categories and such.

    oh, would adding the loop to a page template break my blog?

  23. gumdrop
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    I don't know if you are but it sure is driving me that way 8-/

  24. drmike
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    @gumdrop, thanks for the bugreport. The link's fixed. :)

  25. demonicume
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    oh never mind on the rss to tag thing. i just found it here: http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=329&replies=13

    i still dont see why it wouldnt work. i wouldnt want UTW to go thru the entire site, just the stuff on the main site.

  26. zappoman
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    Dr. Mike, can you ping me about top posts... I hacked something together and put it up here...

    http://heftagaub.wordpress.com

    But if you're working down a similar road then maybe we can focus our efforts.

    If the approach I took in my top posts plugin (from the link above) is somehow not wp culture appropriate, then please give me feedback so I can learn to code/design in a style more appropriate to the community.

  27. zappoman
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    I've implemented a simple plugin that allows you to use Dr. Mike's sitewide tag solution without making any core changes to your wordpress install. Namely this eliminates step 6 of Dr. Mike's instructions.

    You can read about the solution, and get the plugin from here... http://heftagaub.wordpress.com/2007/03/17/sitewide-tags-for-wpmu-without-core-changes/

  28. gumdrop
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    Nice, thanks zappo

  29. Konstan
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    Could someone upload the wp-autoblog plugin? Its been deleted from the site :(

  30. zappoman
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    Konstan,

    FWIW, I did this... google.com search for "wp-autoblog"

    The first link is...

    http://elliottback.com/wp/archives/2006/06/06/wp-autoblog-a-syndication-plugin/

    There is a download there.

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