[FLOSS Week]: is_taggable: Tagging That Isn't on Drugs

Posted by: Daniel Haran on 2009-02-18

This release announcement is part of FLOSS week.

At last! A simple tagging implementation.

There are several others — many far more featureful. If you absolutely need a tag cloud and writing one sounds scary, is_taggable may not be for you. At least, not yet.

is_taggable is just over 100 lines of code (plus tests). It's simple and well-tested. So, extending it is easy.

So, why did we write it? We needed support for tag 'kinds'. Let's take our polyglot user example:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  is_taggable :tags, :languages
end

User.new :tag_list => "rails, giraffesoft", :language_list => "english, french, spanish, latin, esperanto, tlhIngan Hol"

Of course, it also supports the simplest case:

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  is_taggable
end

Post.new :tag_list => 'simple, sane defaults'

Get it

 $ sudo gem install is_taggable 

As a rails gem dependency:

 config.gem 'is_taggable' 

Or get the source from github:

 $ git clone git://github.com/giraffesoft/is_taggable.git 

(or fork it at http://github.com/giraffesoft/is_taggable)

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