On flags, tags and votes
Here I am coding when I should be in bed, resting for tomorrow’s WebCamp when for the nth time, this multilayered topic of user content is confronted to Drupal’s current limitation (but only in appearance, it turns out).
Here are three scenarios you’re probably familiar with already:
- 1) allow users to tag content
- Either each user gets his own set of tags for each piece of content or each piece of content has a single namespace for its tags.
- 2) allow users to vote on content
- Each user can vote on pieces of content through different axis or dimensions (relevance, quality, level of difficulty, etc.).
- 3) allow users to flag content
- Some content may be flagged as inappropriate for different reasons (personal attack, duplicate, etc.) or marked as a favorite.
Right now, I have to play with the voting api a bit more, hopefully get into v2 pretty soon to support Drupal 6. The Voting API seems flexible enough to handle a lot of this already. With a touch of free tagging taxonomy going on in parallel, I should be able to have something working in no time.
Why? Oh, just another project. Something useful for once *wink*
Seriously, I’m using Drupal to build a web service allowing site developpers and hopefully users to vote along any axis on anything with a URL representation. I was looking for a way to rate bookmarks in my del.icio.us collection for a bibligraphy for a Social Web class I’m helping Sébastien Paquet prepare with the help of Martin Lessard.
