Rails tagging plugins overview and comparison
There are way too many tagging plugins for Rails. I’ve produced this post as an attempt to summarize the differences between them. Disclaimer: I didn’t actually try all the plugins but I did peruse their code when deciding which one I would use.
My criteria for choosing a plugin was:
- Important: Supports user-owned tagging
- Important: Supports tag cloud generation
- Less important: Code as clean as possible for extending
- Somewhat important: ability to contribute patches. I had been stuck with a heavily customized 2006 acts_as_taggable before and didn’t want the same thing with the new plugin.
- Not important: Related tags, and other complex tag searches
| Title | Pros & Cons |
|---|---|
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acts_as_taggable gem 8/13/2006 |
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acts_as_taggable_on_steroids 3/30/2008 |
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acts_as_taggable_on 5/3/2008 |
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acts_as_taggable_redux 5/14/2008 (by me), previously 07/2007 |
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spraypaint 12/12/2007 |
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After reviewing the options, acts_as_taggable_redux seemed like the best candidate. I immediately had a couple contributions, which I first emailed to Wes, and later he moved the plugin to github and I am now a direct comitter.
I plan to continue to enhance this plugin, and possibly add some features to it from the other plugins, such as tag caching which becomes important for scalability. As it’s the most minimal of the plugins I feel it’s a good base to start with building clean code that doesn’t have a lot of legacy stuff from the 2006 plugin, which was the dark ages of Ruby coding with lots of ugly code produced :-)
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