Hi all,

I’ve read the docs and played around changing the values but I’m still not 100% clear on what this parameter does within the tag:related_entries tag.

Can anyone explain more than the docs do?

Cheers,
j.

Yeah Small Beer! We go back a long way!

Ok, so the related_entries function let’s you pull blog entries related to a given entry by tags. But you can further refine the relationship by selecting the related entries by the rank of the tags associated with them. You can rank the tags by total clicks a tag has received, by total entries a tag has, or both. This way you can show the related blog entries and filter out the outlier tags that, because of low rank, don’t mean that much.

So rank_limit is the param that you use to control by how many tags to fetch related entries. Remember, this function behaves just like the weblog entries function. So the ‘limit’ param controls how many blog entries to show, while the rank_limit controls how many tags to consider when establishing relationships between entries.

mk

Hey Mitchell, that makes much more sense now, cheers!

Do you think there’s any way of actually choosing tags when adding them that are ranked higher when relating entries?  Here’s my thinking (tell me I’m mad if you like!)…

When you add tags on the publish/edit page, if you wrap a word in something, say exclamation marks i.e. !Jamie!, when it’s added to the tags tables a column called “weight” is increased by 1.  So then you can have an extra value to use with the rank_method parameter, i.e. rank_method="weight".  The exclamation marks would obviously be removed from the tag.

Sound crazy?  Maybe, but we really need a way of ranking by tags that are important to the entry but which may not be particularly popular.

Let me know what you think!

You’re mad

You need a method to give more “weight” to a few tags? Use “official” ones and query them first, separately. I don’t think the exclamation mark method’s gonna fly.

Ingmar - 27 August 2007 08:52 AM

Use “official” ones and query them first, separately.

I’m not really following that Ingmar.  Can you explain?

Well, maybe I’m barking up the wrong tree here. My train of thought was this: Use a limited set of “official” tags, and display them first, ie before the rest of the tag cloud, or wherever you’ll be using them. Really depends on how you are using tags, I suppose.

Thanks Ingmar but that wouldn’t work for us.  We’re gonna rethink relating entries and use something other than the tag module.