Tagging elements and building a tag cloud is a common feature of modern web sites.
Nuage is a SharePoint solution which makes possible to tag items and display the tag cloud.
The project is an enhancement of CKS tagcloud, it improves performance dramatically
and offer more features.
Features
- The "Tags" column can be added on any list (including document libraries) by site administrators
- Items can have an illimited number of tags
- Users can tag any elements in these lists
- The tag cloud shows all tags used in the site collection
What's in the box?
This solution deploys:
- a new content type, similar to the traditional "text (one line)"; except that it's content will be considered as tags. As such, it can be used to filter elements in list views.
- a webpart "tag cloud" that displays all tags in the site collection
- a webpart "tagged items" which displays all items that belong to a given tag (basically, the one you clocked on the tag cloud) in a layout utterly similar to the results provided by the search engine
How to install this solution?
As a system administrator
set stsadm="%PROGRAMFILES%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN\stsadm.exe"
- Add the solution in the farm
%stsadm% -o addsolution -filename Nuage.wsp
- Deploy the solution on a webapp (use the correct site URL)
%stsadm% -o deploysolution \
-name Nuage.wsp \
-immediate –allowgacdeployment \
-url http://site
%stsadm% -o execadminsvcjobs
%stsadm% -o copyappbincontent
As a site collection administrator
- Activate the Feature. As a site collection administrator site actions > Parameters of the site ; Features of the site collection. Activate "Nuage"
- In version 1.2.0, you also need to go in Site paramaters > Galeries > Site columns and open the parameters for "Tags" (the shortcut is to go to /_layouts/FldEditEx.aspx?field=Tags). In the parameters, specify a delimiter, such as comma or semi-column.
- Optionaly, you can create customs columns to have several universes/contextes for the tags. Go to Site paramaters > Galeries > Site columns and select Create (the shorcut is to go to /_layouts/fldnew.aspx?Web=1). Create a column of type single line of text (with tags) and specify a delimiter.
As a site contributor
- On the web site, select Site Actions > Parameters. In category Galeries, select site columns. Select the Tags column (in group Nuage) and fill in the delimiter you want to use between tags.
- On a list or document library, select Actions > Parameters. In the "column" section, select add existing column and add the column Tags
- On a page, select Actions > Modify. Add the webpart Nuage-TagCloud and Nuage-TagBrowser. These two webparts can actually be on different pages, the page that holds the TagBrowser should be mentioned in the parameters of the TagCloud webpart.
Verfication
How to check the installation is successfull.
As a site member
- Create or edit a list item. Fill in any tags you want in the "Tags" column.
As a visitor
- You'll see all tags used in the site in the tag cloud
- Click on any tag to see in the tag browser all the elements tagged as such
Frequent issues (and solutions)
The webpart raises an exception
Our solution is a fork of CKS ; you cannot deploy both solutions at the same time.
I cannot see any tag in the tag browser
In order to optimize the speed, there is a cache. Please wait one hour.
I don't want to wait one hour!
Sure thing. If you want to test, you can reset the application pool.
For a daily use, if you want to reduce the cache, you can set its duration in the web.config
My custom types don't work
If you want to tag a custom type, you need to have a column named "Title".
Indeed, after clicking on a tag, the result webpart displays relevant elements, with their URL, all their tags, and their title. If no title exists, it will fail and show an
ArgumentException: Value does not fall within the expected range
FAQ
Why have you build yet another tagging webpart?
Don't reinvent the wheel, unless
- the existing wheel turns out to be slow, in particular with many elements and/or tags. We wanted a solution that can scale reasonably well.
- And the scope of the existing tagcloud was limited to the current site. We wanted to have a tag cloud for the whole site collection
- Plus it's not totally new, it's a form from CKS
What does nuage mean?
Nuage means cloud in French.
Where is the source code?
The source code is in the release, in a ZIP file, next to the WSP.
There is one exception: the initial version 1.0.0 was taggued as such in subversion; there is no zip file.
I want to help. What can I do?
- It sounds very basic, but you can simply install and test the latest beta release, and help debugging it, reporting new bugs in the issue tracker
- You can suggest enhancement in the issue tracker (type: Feature)
- You can read the discussion forum and answer questions there or open new discussions about Nuage.
- You can also help translating the solution in other languages. All relevant strings are externalized in resource files, that anyone can edit.
- If you're a developer, you can contribute to this project. But please get in touch with us first, in order to avoid redundant work.