Come together with the global Drupal community in Rotterdam, 28 Sept – 1 Oct 2026. Sessions, contribution, connection, and Early Bird savings until 8 June.kentbye and I were talking about this concept tonight while talking about Getting Things Done solutions for Drupal.
Something that would be really neat is the ability to subscribe to, say, a forum topic, project issue, or groups.drupal.org posting, and all of its replies, but to tag that subscription as, for example, "GHOP, CCK, salamander".
Ideally, this feature would encompass two things:
1. When e-mails are sent out, an extra header (X-Drupal-Subscriptions-Tags ?) is appended that contains the list of tags. I could then setup a mail rule that if that header contains the term "GHOP", move it into a special folder.
2.There would also be a page at, for example, /user/X/subscriptions/tags/GHOP that displays site content that I've personally tagged as that term, with an RSS feed I could subscribe to. This is probably really easy to whip up as a View.
Comments
Comment #1
KentBye commentedSince the Subscriptions module is intending on being integrated with the project.module for d.o, then being able to "tag" an issue would need to support two methods of delivery.
As webchick said above, #1 is for e-mail notifications & #2 is for RSS feeds.
I asked webchick about the possibility of pre-pending the tags to the subject line instead of the header, but this wouldn't scale beyond a few tags as it would totally wipe out the subject line. So embedding the tags within the e-mail header for filtering purposes would indeed probably be the best way to handle it.
Also, I was confused about HOW the user would tag an issue, and where the tags would be stored, and how the tags would appear if someone subscribed to a specific issue.
Usually the workflow for subscribing to an issue would be:
1.) Discover an issue that you want to follow.
2.) Find the RSS feed for an issue
3.) Then plug it into your Feed reader.
Or clicking a button that would automatically add it to your "My issues" queue.
But the problem is that there isn't a good way to manage, organize or filter all of these issues.
This is where Tagging Subscriptions would come in to help save the day.
The implementation of this feature request for tagging issues with the Subscriptions.module would change the workflow to go like this:
1.) Discover an issue that you want to follow.
2.) Tag an issue via subscriptions module with any number of personal tags -- these tags would be user-specific, but globally available at /user/X/subscriptions/tags/GHOP
3.) These tags would then drive the delivery of any updates to the RSS feeds for each tag that you assigned to an issue.
I asked whether a new vocabulary term would be created on d.o. and if this would be managed by a dependency like community tags or something, but is sounds like there would need to be a new table "subscription_tags" added by subscriptions.module. This would add each user's tags to specific issues, but would only be visible to that user. (Or optionally be visible to everyone in some other way -- possibly another completely different page)
But the real magic would be that there would be all sorts of valuable metadata aggregated for issues at URLS like /user/webchick/subscriptions/tags/GHOP that would create a view of all of the nodes / issues that webchick tagged with the GHOP tag. They would be visible via the browser, and able to subscribe to them via RSS feed.
Comment #2
salvis@webchick: This would be a user function, IOW, everyone enters their own tags for themselves, right? It's an interesting feature, but I'm not convinced it's a must-have for the first release.
There are no plans to provide RSS functionality in Subscriptions. If you want to further discuss RSS, then please open a new issue, because "Ability to 'tag' subscriptions (e.g. for GTD)" is independent of the question whether to support RSS or not.
Comment #3
salvis