PloneKeywordManager

The PloneKeywordManager allows you to change, merge and delete keywords in Plone and updates all correspondend objects automatically. It uses a similiarity search to support you in identifying similar keywords. PloneKeywordManager helps you to build an inductive vocabulariy with several people working on the same Plone-Site. Keywords can be cleaned up from time to time by a site-manager to create a consistent vocabulary.

Installation

PloneKeywordManager can be easily installed and removed with the CMFQuickInstaller. If you want to install it in the "old" way, you can create an external method with id=Install in your Plone-Site. Then edit the newly created external method, set Module Name = PloneKeywordManager.Install & Function Name = install and click on Test. That's it. A new action (Manage Keywords) should appear next time you log into your Plone-Site.

PloneKeywordManager uses Python's difflib for the similarity search per default, but if you want to speed up the PloneKeywordManager, you should install the Python-Levenshtein-Module (written in C) which will makes things faster up to 10 times. A copy of the Levensthein-Module is provided in the package (to install it on linux do something like "cd python-Levenshtein; python setup.py install"). PloneKeywordManager will use the faster Levensthein-search automatically if it can be imported by your Zope-Server.

Usage

Entering the management-interface for the Plone-Keyword-Manager, you will see an alphabetical listing and a selection for all keywords existing in your site. Use the last one to see similar terms for a single keyword. Use the former one if you want to see a list of all keywords starting with letter b, click it. The PloneKeywordManager will then search all keywords starting with b and will also look for similar keywords. You can now select several keywords and delete them for example. If you only want to change a single keyword, select it, then enter the new keyword and click on merge. If you want to merge several keywords into one new one, select them, enter the new keyword and click on merge.

The last selected keyword is entered automatically into the textbox if JavaScript is enabled. This may be irritating at first glance, but you'll learn to appreciate quite fast. If you use it the right way, you don't have to copy&paste into the textbox. Try it yourself, you'll get the idea behind it...

Feedback

PloneKeywordManager is a quite simple solution to a major problem in the real world use of Plone: If you can't work with restricted vocbularies your keyword-vocabulary will get "trashy" very fast (depending on your authors interpretation of existing keywords etc.). PloneKeywordManager was mainly coded on the Plone-Paderborn-Sprint (September 2003) founded Bertelsmann-Foundation. Feel free to improve it and send patches to me:

Maik Jablonski