slate blog

We don’t often get feature requests for slate but the one we’ve gotten consistently, and in some cases repeatedly from the same people, is in regards to tags. So for those people some news on tags.

Why doesn’t slate have tags already?
In approaching a system like slate (read: complex) we realized that we can’t just have tags per feature. For example, a distinct set of tags per site for blogs and a separate, distinct set of tags per site for resources. We knew that people would yearn, nay, demand that they could use tags globably and link various objects in slate together via tags. So instead of delving into the mysteries of acts_as_taggable and mucking with what is apparently a deprecated plugin we’ve held off until there was a good way to handle tags across a large system. I think we’ve finally found the answer.

So the answer?
has_many_polymorphs

And that means?
Honestly, I don’t know what polymorphs means (many forms?) but there’s a wonderful little write-up on evan weaver’s blog about how to use his new plugin to ‘grow up your acts_as_taggable’.

Ooh, Ooh, v0.3.2 then?
Ah, sorry, no. See, has_many_polymorphs, requires Rails 1.2 which we’re not at yet. To implement tags (not just code/DB stuff but interface as well) plus get done what we’re already behind in doing (poor WYSIWYG) plus test the entire system in Rails 1.2… too much to ask I’m afraid. But we hope it’ll be a quick follow-up in v0.3.3. We know how useful it would be because we could seriously use it ourselves.

Here ends a friendly update regarding our most requested feature. Back to PHP and ePayments for moi.