BuddyPress.org

Hi everyone-
I’m trying to create a tag cloud from items listed in the profile fields (for example, “Personal Interests,” which would have stuff like “tennis, traveling, running,” etc.). Right now the code I have goes through the xprofile fields data table and pulls out everything with the specific field id relevant to the group and puts it in an array, using spaces and commas as delimiters. (Don’t get me started on the dolts that write “I like to take long walks along the bike path with my 19 kids” as their tags. Or separate them with period, or semi colons, or write them on separate lines…)

It then counts the number of users that have that specific tag, but ONLY if it’s an exact match… e.g., “running” and “runner” aren’t going to match and will show up as separate tags. (At that point, it does a title on the href search link to list how many users have that tag.) We then list every tag that’s been used on “list all tags” page, but I forsee it becoming a total behemoth and it’ll need to be trimmed somehow.

The xprofile field data is kind of clunky, and I haven’t figured out a way to put up a tag cloud. The Groups tags plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/buddypress-group-tags/) seems to work OK, but I can’t translate it to the profile field tags.

One thought from our production team was to use facebook-like functionality that “suggests” tags when you start typing them in, which would lead to a cleaner tag cloud.

Anyone have any ideas on how to better the profile tagging process? It’s driving me nuts, and I’m seriously thinking of deactivating the next dumb user that writes out a run on sentence in their Personal Interests text area.

Thanks in advance-
KC