Joomla Tagbot Plugin

Joomla Tagbot is a mambot/plugin that gives visitors to your site the ability to bookmark any article (content item) in one of the many Bookmark or Tagging sites such as Digg.com, Furl.net, Spurl.net, Del.icio.us etc.

Project Development Page: http://forge.joomla.org/sf/projects/tagbot   [download]

Support Development

Like tagbot? Help us make it better.

End User Usage:

To use the tagbot, simply click on one of the links or icons for the bookmarking sites. If you are not registered at the bookmarking site, the site will ask you to register. After registration, you can bookmark all the articles, on any site that uses the Tagbot, to your favorite bookmarking site.

Developer/Webmaster Usage:

The mambot also works for Mambo, however, you may not be able to configure the order in which the bookmarking links/icons appear in your articles. This happens if your Mambo version does not support the mambot parameter type "filelist". This has also been reported for some Joomla Versions. So if you have the problem where no bookmark links show up. Go into the mambot parameters and change all the "Tag Site" parameters to "Do not Show"

Updates

The latest testing version is Tagbot 1.0.6 Beta Release 1.

Fiji Tagbot Version 1.0.6 Beta Release 1 (Recommended)

  1. Added a Cache to lessen memory usage. Now the Tagsite XML config files are cached and only "re-parsed" if you make a change to the xml files.
  2. Added configuration option 'Display Position' to allow tagbot to render inside of the main content section, as well as outside it. This works in conjunction with the 'Display Location' property so that tagbot can render at the top, bottom, or both.
  3. Reworked a substantial portion of the code to make it easier to maintain, as well as implement the new feature.
  4. Significant amounts of configuration data were being cached in memory multiple times. This has been removed.
  5. If the custom CSS option was selected, it would only be included if you selected to render the tags before the content, or both before and after the content. If you only selected to render the tags after the content, the default CSS would ALWAYS be used.

Fiji Tagbot Version 1.0.4 Stable

  • Included support for Technorati, Newsvine, and and 20 or so other bookmarking sites.

Fiji Tagbot Version 1.0.4 Beta

  • Two modes, auto and manual. Manual allows you to show the tagbot only in content with defined.
  • You can now disable the tagbot in any content item using
  • Choose to show or not show the tagbot in user modules.
  • List Itemid's where you don't want the tagbot to show.
  • Included the digg.com bookmark.

 Download:

You can download the Joomla Tag bot from our Joomla Plugin download area.

Websites Using Tagbot

List your Site Here.

Stability:

The tagbot has been updated to version 1.0.4Stable.
This version includes support for 28 differnt Tagsites!

Installation:

  1. This is a regular plugin, install via the Joomla plugin installer.If theres an error let me know, that should not have happend.
  2. Make sure you publish the bot after installation.
  3. Make sure you edit the mambot parameters and choose the "tagsites" to publish. This bot needs its parameters saved at least once to work.
  4. If you dont see any buttons yet, it may be because your content is cached. If it doesnt show after about 5 minutes, make sure the tagsites directory and xml files in this directory is readable by the mambot. (live_site/mambots/content/tagbot/tagsites/)
  5. If this does not work, then go into the mambot params, and change all the "Tag Site" parameters to "Do not show". This defaults the mambot to read from the filesystem, instead of the params, which may be incompatible with the mambot on your Joomla version
  6. If nothing shows up in your content, or you only see the text "Tag it:", please use the contact link at the bottom for inquiry.

Configuration / Mambot Parameters:

To customize the mambot, click on the mambot in the Joomla Mambots Manager list.

The Parameters allows several basic customizations.

Heres a list of less straight forward customizations.

1) Display Text: This text shows up alongside the list of bookmarks.

2) CSS customizations:

This allows you to customize the format of the tagbox.
Do NOT include the <style> tags.

The output of the tag bot is of the format:

<div class="tagbots">  
	<div class="tagbot">
		<a href="[bookmark url]"> [bookmark link or image] </a>
	</div>
	<div class="tagbot">
		<a href="[bookmark url]"> [bookmark link or image] </a>
	</div>
	<div class="tagbot">
		<a href="[bookmark url]"> [bookmark link or image] </a>
	</div>
	<div class="tagbot_seperator">
</div>

Heres a simple style that should display your bookmarks inline on the right;

div.tagbots {
   clear: both;
   text-align: right;
   float: right;
  }
  
  div.tagbots div {
   padding-right:4px;
   float: left;
   text-align: left;
  } 
  
  div.tagbot_header {
   font-weight: bold;
  }
  
  div.tagbot_seperator {
   clear: both;
   height: 0px;
  }
Heres one that will display them inline on the left: 
div.tagbots {
   clear: both;
   width: 100%;
   align: left;
  }
  
  div.tagbots div {
   padding-right:4px;
   float: left;
   text-align: left;
  } 
  
  div.tagbot_header {
   font-weight: bold;
  }
  
  div.tagbot_seperator {
   clear: both;
   height: 0px;
  }


 

Extending the Mambot list of bookmark sites:

To make this 'simple', the mambot reads the configuration for each bookmark site from an xml file.
The xml files are located in the "site_path/mambots/tagbot/tagsites/" folder. Where site path is your base Joomla install directory. (mosConfig_absolute_path)

You can write an xml file for any bookmark sites if you know the structure of the url they use to bookmark a webpage. This is usually documented on the site.

The structure of the xml is simple, example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<tagsite>
	<title>Digg</title>
	<button>{img_dir}/buttons/digg_it.gif</button>
	<icon>{img_dir}/icons/digg.16px.gif</icon>
	<url>http://digg.com/submit?url={url}</url>
	<window attributes="toolbar=no,width=800,height=600,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes"/>
</tagsite>


The funny braces:

Strings encapsulated with braces tell the mambot that they need to be replaced with actual information relating to that article.

 

{img_dir} is translated by the plugin to the plugin img directory.
{title} is translated to the title of the article being bookmarked
{url} is the url of the article being bookmarked

Heres a list of optional strings that will be searched for and replaced.

{description} - Description of article. This is taken from the meta description.
{intro} - Intro Text or snippet of the article (100 chars)
{tags} - List of Meta tags

NB: Meta tags and meta description can be edited via the "Meta Info" tab on the right, when you are adding/editing an article in Joomla.

The tags and what they mean.

The root of the xml file is <tagsite>. This tells the plugin that its a tagsite file.

The title element, <title>, is what you want shown as the text of the bookmark url. If images are set to visible by the plugin params, then the title becomes the alt text of the img.

The button and icon elements, <button>, <icon> are the sources of the images to replace the bookmark link text.

You can use any images on the web, by placing their path between the <icon> </icon> tags for the icon.
For Example:

<icon>http://example.com/images/img.jpg</icon>

The url element, <url>, is the url of the bookmarking site where it receives a new bookmark entry.
This should be documented at the bookmark site.
Again, the funny braces:
{title} is translated to the title of the article being bookmarked
{url} is the url of the article being bookmarked

A typical url will look like:

<url>http://example.com/bookmark?title={title}&url={url}</url>

So if you know this url for a site not already available for this plugin, please send us the url or the xml tagsite file so we can share it with the rest of the users of the plugin.

You can also include stuff like:

<author>Author Name</author>
<email>Author Email</email>
<version>1.0</version>

in the file.

This can be used to track changes in the tagsites url.

 

Demo:

You can view it below this article.  

For more info and questions give me an email.  
 

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