Sitemason

No doubt if you’ve used any online application recently you’ve noticed that it’s tags, tags everywhere. They prove immensely beneficial for searching, categorizing and grouping. The next iteration of our publishing tool, the News Feed Tool, employs tags for these same reasons. People who are used to tagging their pictures on Flickr or videos on YouTube will find familiar benefits for using tags to unleash a new world of organization for their news articles.

One of the less obvious benefits of tags are how they affect the front end development of a new web project. Complex website functions like pulling a list of related articles or specific event dates depending on which page you have landed on, is generally a task for heavy lifting scripting languages like PHP or PERL. An example might be this:

A record label has a number or signed artists, they also have a number of releases that may or may not be from a current artist. In addition, each of their current artists has a list of tour dates and also merchandise items. The challenge is to pull all of those items, where the content that is displayed is solely dependent on what artist a visitor is viewing… and do so without having to duplicate any content entries in the CMS.