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Hi every1,

I am about to write a tagging-plugin (called "tags" in case someone is on the same track)

The plugin has as of now the following functionality:
when editing any object of a plugin (a link for example) a plugin will call a function plg_tags_use($type) ($type being the plugin-name)

This returns a setting of the tags-plugin, saying if the tags should be used here. I think its good to concentrate the question where tags be used in the tags plugin itself instead of distributing it to the using plugins themselves. Objections?

then, a function plg_tags_get_input_field($object_type, $object_id='') is called.
This basically returns an text input field showing the tags currrently assigned to that object of that plugin.

that can be changed by the user, tags being separated by comma. When saving the plugins data, there is another function to be called:
plg_tags_save_inputs($object_type, $object_id)
This will save new tags to the database, remove tags not used anymore and link the tags used to the object in reference of course.

Of course there is a function also that returns that current list of tags for any object.

so far the working facts. If someone is interested to see, it currently works with the links plugin.

thats as far as I got right now. Any feature requests from your side so far?

I will have a tags-admin, only he can assign tags to objects. That right can be given to everyone of course. should there be user-specific tags? it might complicate the search-issues... what happens with the admins task then? are they ignored or overlapped?

the user-index.php will have a tag-cloud as known from sites such as flickr. The admin site a list of tags with some details and the option to delete specific tags from all objects. Anything else?

The search for the plugin will simply retrieve if there are tags in the db containing the string and a link to those. supporting plugins will then provide the link to all the objects referenced by tags through a special function.

should plugins be able to provide a subtype of referenced objects such as 'links' and 'categories' for the links plugins?

all suggestions and contributions are welcome.

Oliver , your approach looks very reasonable but I wonder if there a need for the first Plugin API - if it's just needs to determine if this plugin supports TAGS. I'm thinking that you just need to check for one of the other two tag API's. Possibly if there are tagging options then you could call the API PLG_getTaggingOptions()

Also an alternative for the other two tagging functions, as I thing simplier names explain the intended purpose and are in line with existing Plugin API's - PLG_getTags and PLG_saveTags.

Should there be permissions to use tagging - per content type? I may not want anonymous users to add tags for example.

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well I was thinking that just because a plugin supports tags, the admin does not necessarily want to use tags on that special plugin.

as for the naming, remember that we are not talking about a Plugin API here but a completely separate Plugin.

if you think that it should be a plugin API, talk to Dirk. He once suggested this to be a plugin.