Metadata Ideas

{tag}

(Idea-in-progress)

Tag is an inline macro for attaching metadata to a page. Tags are simple name-value pairs, that may optionally be assigned to a user.

For example:

{tag|todo|The wording for this could be improved|cmiller}

Tags are rendered in the page as a smallish "note" icon with a mouse-over containing the details of the tag. The rendered tag is also an anchor (<a name="tag-$tagId"></a>) so it can be referred to directly from outside the page.

Tag names and values are case-insensitive (when searching), but case-preserving (when displaying). Leading and trailing whitespace is stripped.

Confluence extracts tags from pages when they are saved, and stores them in the same sort of way that links are stored. A search interface allows queries (and RSS feeds) to be run against this tag metadata. This allows users to come up with their own workflow on an ad-hoc basis, without Confluence imposing any real structure. We could document an example of use that goes something like this:

• Show all "todo" items on the documentation staging site assigned to me
  • The user then edits those documents, removes the todo tags, and puts a "needs-review" tag in
• Show all documents with a "needs-review" tag in them
  • Someone else reviews the document, and either puts in more todo tags, passing them back to the original author, or replaces the "needs-review" tag with a "publish" tag.
• Show all documents with a "publish" tag in them
  • Every so often, all documents marked ready for publishing are copied to the live site.

This would allow a flexible way for users to create their own simple workflow without Confluence imposing too much structure. The more structure we try to impose, the more we end up re-implementing half of Jira inside Confluence to manage pages as issues

See snipsnap's support for labels

Backpack

Hi guys, you may already know Backpack, if you dont, really check these videos showing the use of metadata, notes, album creation, and more. Its really simple, useful, and a cool demo of the things you can accomplish using ajax: http://www.backpackit.com/.