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Could we have an alphabetic sort option for tags?
During my effort at building structure and content in the EE.CD tags pages, I found myself often wanting a way to list all the tags in alphabetic order, regardless of their status or their place in the hierarchy.
This is useful for a curator to see if some concept you have in mind already has a tag, but it is also useful for a person in the process of choosing a tag for a question. Yes, you can use the search, but there is the risk of performing the wrong search. Somehow I feel that having the plain old list is more useful for sequential searching.
It is true that usually one relies on the tag suggestions in the tag input field, but it may be a little confusing, especially if a hierarchy is in place. It is indeed very good that tag suggestions also consider the synonyms, but the presentation could be cluttered at times.
I suggest to add an additional button alphabetical to tags pages, maybe with a checkbox (somewhere below?) titled something like include synonyms, so that someone can see all the tags and, if they so desire, synonyms.
1 answer
This is a good suggestion, and I thought "oh, just adding another button there -- that might be easy enough that even I can do it!". And then I realized there's something else we ought to address as part of this, and I'm definitely not good enough with Ruby for that, so I wrote a Github feature request.
The tags page currently has three buttons: usage, hierarchy, and "missing excerpt". The first two are sorts; the last is a filter. We want to end up with three sorts: usage, alphabetical, hierarchical -- and some filtering options, that one and "include synonyms" (your request).
It wouldn't make sense to apply the filter widget you see on category lists and search results to the tags page -- we want the concept of filtering, but not that approach to filtering.
I'm proposing that we use buttons for the three sorts (adding alphabetical), and then add the following options:
- On the alphabetical view only: "include synonyms".
- On the alphabetical and usage views only: "show only missing excerpts"
To explain those restrictions:
None of this would play well with the hierarchy page, either usability or implementation. For synonyms, we don't have separate usage data since they're not actually used, so on the "usage" view all we could do it list them next to their target tags -- which already show synonyms.
I drew some "developer art":
mockup
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