Tagging articles instead of feed sources

[ulu]

In Google Reader I was able to set different Tags to one article. With this feature I was able to use Goggle Reader as a slip box.

It seems to me that selfoss can only handle one category for articles and lacks the feature of tags for articles.

The advantage of tags over categories is the ability to sort articles by different meanings. For example if you subscribe to 3 different lawyer blogs and using categories you stuck with one category "law". But if you can use tags you can separate the articles in category "law" to different legal areas like private law, criminal law, commercial Law and so on.

[MentalFS]

You can apply multiple tags to a feed by separating them with a comma (and no space).

[ulu]

I used selfoss 2.3 and checked 2.4-master yesterday. I am unable to set any tag to a specific single article. I can only see the categories behind the topic of an article. Even if I open an article there is only the possibility to mark it with a star, keep it unread or "open" - while the latter does nothing on click.

If you mean "tags" in the source-view, this is not what I want. Setting multiple tags to a category is nonsense because now each articles of a feed source is getting all those tags.

Long story short: I want to tag single articles and not whole categories (== source of a feed) like it was possible in Goggle Reader.

[J-Jay]

+1 It will be very useful to be able to tag single article instead of source.

[devoldski]

is this possible today?

[jtojnar]

No, not yet. The plug-in API is planned for selfoss 3.0. #877

[devoldski]

Moved comment: First, thank you for a really cool software. I have been using it for a while for aggregating multiple sources of news and see that I often would like to add it change tags on items in a similar way as to star them. Would it be possible to add on more states in addition to, new,unread,starred?

I looked at https://github.com/fossar/selfoss/blob/master/src/controllers/Items.php and thought that the public functions starr/unstarr might have an extension to starr it into a category or numbered list such as starr($id,$category_id)

or even add a field for tags on a per item basis tag_item($id,$tag_id)

i understand that this might require UI changes, im just wondering if this could be a way of sorting this?

[jtojnar]

I think tags are the most generic solution. One would either write a set of tagging rules in the settings and have the item tags computed at runtime, or, which would probably be more efficient, use an association table as you suggest. Then articles could be tagged manually or automatically by tagging rules.

I am not worried about interface for tagging articles, a button next to star to edit tags would probably be enough. But how should we display the tags in the article view and in the sidebar? Should we mix them together? That will probably be confusing. But having article tags and source tags as two separate filters will make the interface quite cluttered. Maybe clicking a tag filter could just show a union of articles from sources matching the tag and individual articles matching the tag?

[devoldski]

Why not use existing feed tags as the starting point?, so that you only care about one set of tags, but that you can "reassign" or even add new tags for single items if needed.

in the tags list you could add a mark to the tag whether it is associated with a feed or item eg. (f) (i)

[ulu]

But how should we display the tags in the article view and in the sidebar? Should we mix them together? That will probably be confusing. But having article tags and source tags as two separate filters will make the interface quite cluttered. Maybe clicking a tag filter could just show a union of articles from sources matching the tag and individual articles matching the tag?

In my humble opinion it would be ok to have tags directly in article view to be able to add or remove tags (maybe as tag followed by a [x] for remove). In addition we could have it in the sidebar to switch directly to all articles with a specific tag. I think that's an intuitive approach.

To your second thought of separate filters. This is the same what Inoreader does. Source tags can be marked with a different colour or form of tag UI. Maybe Source Tags are in square brackets e.g. [color table 1] and article tags are in round brackets (color table 2). In this case, everyone can decide whether to use the article tag or the source tag for tagging. In my opinion, after the introduction of article tags, the source tags will only be used to tag the URL of the feed, because article tags are superior.

[devoldski]

Personally I would not worry about how the tag was set after it is set. Being able know if tag isi set in feed or manually is a nice feature, but I think it is more important to be able to change tag on a per item basis than to know how the tag was set.

Will think about how to implement in UI.