Cameron Senior

Tagging content is an integral part of running a blog these days. The ability to easily organize and publish collections of content through the use of tags has benefits for both the publisher and the visitor. Whilst there are a number of tagging solutions for ExpressionEngine this Express Bite will focus on the Simple Tags extension from Utilitees

The Simple Tags extension/module combo has just been updated to version 1.6.3 on February 22 2009. The whole concept behind the extension was to provide ExpressionEngine users with a simple but powerful means to tag their weblog content. The extension doesn't get in the way of your publishing process like you could understand some would, with a large amount of retrofitting and additional steps to prevent the flow of publishing content to your website.

From the author:

There really are no bells & whistles or shiny interfaces. Any custom field can be designated as a field containing comma-separated tags. When posting, updating or deleting an entry the tagging database table is updated accordingly.

Features:

• Tag weblog entries
• Retrieve weblog entries based on their tag(s)
• Tagcloud
• Related tags
• Related entries (that have x number of tags in common)
• Recently used tags
• AJAX auto-suggest when entering tags (Control Panel and SAEF)
• Any custom field with comma-separated keywords can become a tagging field
• thus Tags may be searchable with EE’‘s built-in search
• the data remains even if you uninstall the module
• existing data can easily be adopted without manual re-tagging of older entries
• importing entries from other sources works with normal import utilities

Recommendation

I've used the Simple Tags extension on 5 websites built in ExpressionEngine now and it is a quick and easy way to get a full featured tagging solution into your website. Further, clients have been able to get up to speed with the features very quickly, meaning less support calls to me!