I have a couple of sports sites.  One one site, I have all referenced players as categories, and they all have their own pages that way.  On another, they all have pages already.  I want to be able to tag them in my blog posts and then have the related posts show up on their already-built pages.  I’d like to do the same for teams, leagues, etc.

I figure I could use categories or tags, but the suggest function is what’s making me want to use tags.  Not having to possibly choose 20 categories per post from an enormous list would be nice.

There are a couple of concerns, and things I’m wondering about:
- for players with the same name, I can give the category the same name, but different urls, making it easier to separate the two.
- for categories I’d most likely have to have some background association between my player id and the category id (in order to get the proper posts on the player pages).  Do I do the same for tags?  Or do I run searches on the tag names?
- is there any way for me to import tags from an external source?
- is there any way to go back and have older posts auto-tagged?

VodkaFish,

To answer your questions:

VodkaFish - 30 January 2008 12:01 PM

- for players with the same name, I can give the category the same name, but different urls, making it easier to separate the two.

With Tags, a Tag is a Tag, there is no way to create two of the exact same tags with different url_titles.

VodkaFish - 30 January 2008 12:01 PM

- for categories I’d most likely have to have some background association between my player id and the category id (in order to get the proper posts on the player pages).  Do I do the same for tags?  Or do I run searches on the tag names?

I hope I understand you correctly.... with Tag Module, you can show related Entries that share the same Tags. (Tag 2.0 Related Entries Documentation)
You can also display all the Tags that are tagged to that entry: Tag 2.0 Tags Documentation
So it would show like:

Tags: pie, nachos, cheese, pickles

Each one of those Tags can be clicked, and would be tag you to a Tag:Entries template, where all entries related to that particular Tag would show.

VodkaFish - 30 January 2008 12:01 PM

- is there any way for me to import tags from an external source?

Yes, you can convert all assigned Categories on entries into Tags, which will automatically apply all those Tags to your existing entries.

VodkaFish - 30 January 2008 12:01 PM

- is there any way to go back and have older posts auto-tagged?

Yes, and mentioned above.

There’s also another feature where you can set a certain custom field to be “Harvested” and apply all related content from that field into Tags for the Entry.

My last pitch at the Tag Module is it’s super simple, neat Tag Tab that shows on the Publish/Edit Entry page in the CP.

Here’s also some screenshots

http://www.solspace.com/forums/viewthread/567/#2264

Thanks for all your answers.

Let me clarify something:

for categories I’d most likely have to have some background association between my player id and the category id (in order to get the proper posts on the player pages).  Do I do the same for tags?  Or do I run searches on the tag names?

This is for including links on a non-EE page.  So these player pages are all non-EE.  I have a database, the players have IDs.  My thought was to somehow make a quick call to the db to grab player-related entries.  With categories I can just call the category.  With tags, I suppose I can do the same.  I just need an easy way to associate one with the other (other than just a search, which would just be too slow).

Also - this obviously effects my hopeful import - my players are just in a database table as it is.  I can output them into any format, csv, xml, etc.  Is there any way to import from something like that?

no, there isn’t really any out-of-the-box way to do import/export that data.