As a blog site visitor, I’d like to know the tag I chose in seeing the filtered index. Currently, if a blog site has numerous posts and the site allows me to click on a tag to see a filtered version of the entire index, the list looks the same and there is nothing visual to remind me of the tag associated with the filtered list.
As a blog site designer (developer?), I’d like the ability to provide a visual reminder to the visitor of the list of blogs they are viewing from the tag the visitor clicked.
I’m assuming this is a suggestion as opposed to a question as searching through both the documentation and community did not show anything on this topic.
So you think one should give an extra status “Selected” to the selected tag’s button? Like a new color to highlight it. Why not. Only Duncan can tell you if that works.
But then what would be highlighted by default if no tag was selected? How about if the tag “all” is not set?
Or on the Blog Index page, similar to the Search page, add a line that then says “All posts with XXX tag.”
That would certainly make sense for blogs with a lot of posts. On the other hand, you can only ever filter by 1 tag. And you’ll be able to remember that one word, right?
And when you have filtered the posts, all blog tags are still visibly available. If the desired result is not there, you click on another button.
If I did have access to the tag filter as a variable, I could use it in text boxes to create verbiage like a form letter to be included on the blog index page.
For example, a couple of my blog tags are Technology and Economics. If I generate an Economics index, a simple tag filtered text box could read, “Choose a blog to learn more about Economics.”
Take it one step further, having a conditional around the filtered tag opens up the door to many more possibilities that can be applied to other non-index pages.
“If [TagFilter]= X then Y else Z”. Where X, Y, and Z are different strings.
Could this potential include popups?
Now my thinking is around e-commerce sites. How are current Sparkle developers presenting either up-selling or similar items either being browsed or placed in the cart? Are such Sparkle sites capable of doing this? Or are Sparkle sites leveraging e-commerce platforms to accomplish this?
@Mr_Fozzie, what do you (or anyone else for that matter) think of the workaround idea of having a tag filtered index page introduced first by a popup that identifies the filter?
Currently, my menu structure is comprised of a series of buttons with each pointing to a tag filtered blog index page. The (non-blocking) issue I have is each tag filtered blog index page looks the same - just different blog posts. My goal is to somehow have the user know the list is specific to their chosen interest.
A tag that can be placed in a variable, I would think at a minimum, would allow me to place that variable in a text box so I can customize the tag filtered blog index page. Beyond that, it would be great if it could be conditionalized for other attribute changes like your mentioned button color change.
While the tag cannot (currently) be placed in a variable, what if my current button pointed to a popup that contained tag specific verbiage? I know what button was clicked so I know what tag the user is interested in. And within the popup, I place the button that leads to the tag filtered blog index page.
So here’s an example user journey:
A user is interested in seeing my blog posts that pertain to “Economics”.
They click on my menu’s Economics button.
They are presented with a popup saying something along the lines of “Here’s the list of blog posts about Economics.
They click on the popup button that takes them to the Economics filtered blog index page.
The advantage of this approach is I am able to confirm to the user that the list of blog posts they are about to see is indeed associated with the topic they are interested in.
The disadvantage is there is an extra step to see what the user seeks (the filtered blog postings).
What I was getting at instead of the tags defining all your blogged categories you could set up 5 blog index pages dedicated to the categories. In Sparkle you can have more than one blog with all its posts.
If you feel your User will get lost in it all use colour per category and match that up with your tags.
Oh, and regards to your e-commerce question…
Sparkle leverages e-commerce platforms that play nice. I have created more than 4 now and they run faultlessly and just about looks like it is Sparkle itself serving up the e-commerce!
