Robert Axford
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| 10/24/2006 2:27 AM |
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Posted By smcculloch on 10/24/2006 12:56 AM
Hmm, getting a little confused now, we have the author one sorted out, something like:-
[AUTHORARTICLES:XXX]
But for the keyword one, it's a little more difficult, the current choices are:-
* Use search keywords to find similar (using DNN search) (not everyone has search turned on too)
* Use a like on title and description using the title of the current article.
* Allow author to choose articles?
* Display other articles in the same category?
For people to feel that something is "like" something else, implies that they share things we are looking for.
What you have to do therefore is determine what we are looking at when we think one article is like another. Then assess with a weighting on all of these things to provide a value. The higher the values between two articles in matching criteria, the more alike they are.
It is obvious that any articles seletected by the author to be related will be alike. Give them a weighting of say... 10
It is also obvious that articles in the same category have been positively determined to be alike. Add 8 to the weighting.
When articles have matching words in the title, add 6.
When articles have matching words in the summary, add 4
When articles have matching content in the details, add 2
If this is done partly by the module and partly by the author when each article is first added, a web of related articles, as well as how strongly they relate, will be built up.
That's the general idea anyhow.
But.....
If this sort of system is not feasible in a module such as this then I suggest that authors who really require this function ensure that they organise and categorise their content better. If one has correct and powerful categories, then anyone will be able to find related articles by simply clicking. Don't just have 3 categories... have dozens. Treat them as metadata... as keywords if you will. That's why more than one can be selected by ticking all those boxes.
Search engines can only try and make up for bad information architecture... It is better to get it right from the start. No-one's content is so disparate that someone would not be able to browse for similar content by simply clicking through categories. A collection of articles is not random information of the sort that one needs Google to sift through. It is already very well specified simply by its presence in the articles module within the website.
Regards,
Rob
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Chris Wylie
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| 1/22/2007 7:47 AM |
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Hi Folks,
What is the status of this?
I would find it very useful to have just a simple implementation based on the assigned categories using the same functionality of the "latest articles" module.
Let's say I have news articles on clothing. I have 7 categories: the 4 seasons and 3 clothing type: boots, jackets, hats.
If I have a winter jacket under the 2 categories: winter, jacket
it would be nice to have "related items" show links to other winter jackets.
This could be done with a "latest articles" functionality and setting both the "winter" and "jacket" category. It would be nice to add a "union" or "intersection" radio button to the Latest Articles module. So you could return all winter and all jackets articles (union), or just "winter jackets" (intersection).
Is there any way I can achieve this funtionality with the current version?
Thanks,
Chris |
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Robert Axford
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| 1/23/2007 12:29 AM |
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I've been giving this topic more thought recently and also here today...
That intersection scenario you describe Chrism, is perhaps the only really valid function that a 'related articles' link could have - The idea that the link would return articles with the same combination of categories.
One has to assume that the site owner/author has created categories and organised their articles correctly. Therefore there can never be any more closely related items than are already within the categories. (The only other way to add related material would be to search the site and make some sort of heuristic judgement of other content. The result would be a mess.)
Adding the ability to show items with the identical combination of categories however is definitely an advance on the existing [categories] function and I feel that this should be the method implemented if this were going to go ahead.
It could be a token called [related] that displays a linked labeled "Related articles". It would only display the label if there is more than one category, otherwise it would display just that category.
But the more i think about that, the more I think it could be like this:
Add a 'Tags' or 'keywords' section to the 'create article' view. This would differ from categories in that the author inserts keywords of choice from the article. Those keywords would be used in addition to categories to determine if an article is related.
The benefit is that the visitor need only browse a small number of categories, but can be shown a large number of related articles when they drill down. it sort of splits the categorisation into a user-visible part and an author-visible part, resulting in 'categories' for broad navigation and 'tags' for sifting around.
As an example of how this would work:
Categories for a computer site:
Gaming
Development
Hardware
Tags for an article in the gaming category:
PC-games, warcraft, blizzard
If I'm viewing articles in the gaming section and read one about warcraft, then when I click on related articles, it will show me not just more gaming articles, but ones more directly related to the article. The tags provide further categorisation that is not visible to the site visitor, but is used to provide them with targeted content.
In addition, it'd be cool if the tagging system would populate a list with all the tags for use in other articles and it should be easy to add a new tag or delete an exisiting one.
Hope that makes sense.
Rob
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Mark Marucot
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| 1/23/2007 4:13 AM |
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The approach for this is to add tagging feature. Please see this link for details. http://www.ventrian.com/Support/FeedbackCenter/tabid/265/fbType/View/FeedbackID/542/Return/MyFeedback/Default.aspx
Kindly vote for the tag clouds feature.
Most of the CMS used tags to further categorized articles. This tags can be use to display related articles on the current viewed article. The following are my suggestions:
1. Create tag cloud module.
2. Add tagging feature for every article.
3. Create related articles token to display articles links related to the current viewed article. |
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Alex Shirley
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| 2/21/2007 6:11 AM |
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[quote] Posted By smcculloch on 10/24/2006 12:56 AM
Hmm, getting a little confused now, we have the author one sorted out, something like:-
[AUTHORARTICLES:XXX]
But for the keyword one, it's a little more difficult, the current choices are:-
* Use search keywords to find similar (using DNN search) (not everyone has search turned on too)
* Use a like on title and description using the title of the current article.
* Allow author to choose articles?
* Display other articles in the same category? [/quote]
We will probably want to do all of the above! |
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GlenWin
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.Glen.1/XL-animation_thumb.gif)
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| 2/28/2007 8:23 PM |
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Hi Scott,
I am eager to see this function implimented... will this RELATED ARTICLE token be availlable in the next release? An update would greatly appreciated :)
(Or will it be a custom add-on?)
Cheers
Glen |
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Chris Wylie
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| 2/28/2007 10:01 PM |
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Most high end CMS use three main ways to accomplish this.
1 - overlapping keywords. These are selected (or searched via a thesaurus for cross referencing) from a moderated list of allowable keywords. The problem is that it takes time and stewardship to moderate this list, especially with evolving technology, and more often than not it falls into disrepair.
2 - comparing the frequency of words from the principle document with the frequency of words from other documents. When two documents have a high concurrency of the same frequently used words they are considered related. This could be done by pulling out the top 5 most frequent wordsfrom the principle document and putting these words into the DNN search engine. It would also be nice to be able to utilize Google search, or some of the other searches like Open-Search that provide indexing of content, including PDF files and office docs based on role authorization.
3 - allowing author to hard code links to other documents known to be related.
I would like to see options 2 and 3 implemented.
Chris
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Dax Davis
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| 3/01/2007 12:38 PM |
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OK, spell checker sucks. Just lost everything I typed when it refreshed. Live and learn...
I think you definitely need to include the ability for the author to link manually to other articles. If you go beyond NA being an announcements module and use it as Articles then an author is likely to want to link to other, related, articles they've written.
I do understand about author apathy, so I would suggest using the keywords as well. How to search I'll leave up to others (would using DNN search slow things down?). If you could make it so that the the related articles token shows any linked articles first and then the rest being keyword searched (up to the maximum).
It would also be cool to be able to select whether to show keyword searched or not. That way you have control over what displays.
Dax |
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Chris Wylie
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| 3/01/2007 1:49 PM |
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| The ability to filter by categories also. For example - related newsletters, related desing guidelines, etc. This would allow groupings of related document types. |
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Robert Axford
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| 3/01/2007 2:35 PM |
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Here's a variation that may be simpler to implement. It requires authors to tag or categorise their content when they submit it. Anything else is too random and just plain lazy on the part of the author. I prefer to avoid any system that requires a lot of indexing and assessment of content by DNN itself. I believe this related-articles functionality is a straightforward function that should be achieved by direct manual tagging. The enhancement being to simply show more items that are similarly tagged.
The existing option is to display the article categories along with the article. The problem with this is that it does not let one browse for articles that have the same or similar 'grouping' of categories.. it only lets one browse the categories individually.
The missing aspect is the 'same or similar group of categories'. So....
The current option is: Any individual category
Article is about: Red boats on the sea.
Categories: Red, Boats, Sea.
Problem: Visitor currently has an option to browse the most recent articles in either Red, Boats or Sea, but not all three.
Improvement: Perfect category matches
Be able to view, in one click, articles that are categorised exactly the same as the current article. E.g. create a link labelled "Related" that would display latest articles from Red AND Boats AND Sea.
Improvement: Nearest category matches
Make it so that the 'related' articles displays the articles with the highest number of identical categories first. E.g. if there are five categories, then display perfect matches first, 4 out of 5 second, 3 out of 5 third and so on.
Enhancement: Display the article titles
Don't display a link to "Related articles" at all. Instead, display the actual article titles that would result from clicking the link. This is far more useful than having to click through to somewhere unknown.
Enhancement: Latest, Best, Popular
Don't restrict the selection to simply the most-recent articles in the matching category-groups. Instead, have highest-rated, most-viewed, as well as most-recent options.
The more I think about it, the more the display of categories, as it is done now, just doesn't make a lot of sense. There's no real value in it. Instead, displaying the best results of browsing those categories is the holy grail.
Rob |
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Dax Davis
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| 3/01/2007 3:50 PM |
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I like the tags idea, and thought that was already in the plans. Then you can do tag clouds, etc. and maybe that is a good way of doing the related articles automatically.
But I don't see why you wouldn't have a direct list of related articles that the author can assign. I would think it would not be a link to another location, but a list of titles that links to those articles. I have worked on a LOT of content rich sites and commercial content sites where this has always been a mandatory item.
Dax |
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Henry h
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| 6/08/2007 7:27 AM |
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I quite like the system described by robax . That should be a great starting point.
I also like the tag system. My understanding is as follows: Tags will be in addition to categories. Tags are entered as a series of keywords by the author. This is as opposed to the current method of assigning a category to an article from a list of possible options. Hence, tagging is quick and easy to use and implement.
Now a number of tokens can control how related articles are rendered based on various modes:
- [RELATED_AUTHOR_ARTICLES:XXX:YYY]. This shows all articles by an author, sorted by time. XXX is the maximum number of articles to show. YYY can be LATEST, RATE or VIEWS for sorting.
- [RELATED_CATEGORY_ARTICLES :XXX, YYY, ZZZ]. This shows all articles that have the same set of categories. XXX is the maximum number of articles to show. YYY is the number of categories to match. For example if another article has 6 categories, any article with a minimum of YYY = 4 matching categories will be shown. ZZZ can be LATEST, RATE or VIEWS for sorting.
- [RELATED_TAGS_ARTICLES:XXX, YYY, ZZZ]. This is similar to categories, except that it uses the tags to find related articles. Similar parameters can be used. XXX is the maximum number of articles to show. YYY is the minimum number of matching tags. ZZZ can be LATEST, RATE or VIEWS for sorting.
The token is then replaced by a table of links with titles of the corresponding articles. I am not sure if it is necessary for it to be in a separate file such as related.item.html. It should be possible to use this token at the end of an article. So it is similar to [SUMMARY] in nature.
The token can also be used in Articles Latest. Now here novel things can happen: for example
Current system:
Article 1: Bla bla
Article 2: Fooooo
…
New system with related:
Article 1: Bla bla
Also see:
Article 3: Bar
Article 4: Zeta
Article 2: Fooooo
Also see:
Article 5: Alpha
Article 6: Beta
….
The above can be easily achieved by combing the [TITLE] tokens and the [RELATED] tokens in Articles Latest
Then we can play with the system to see what works and what doesn’t.
Hopefully this will satisfy our diverse needs. Suggestions, improvements welcome.
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Dax Davis
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| 6/08/2007 4:40 PM |
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Spline, those are excellent suggestions. Very cool implementation.
Dax |
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Danny Tam
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| 6/08/2007 5:47 PM |
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Good ideas Spline. =)
Tagging should be an excellent addition to the "Related Pages" request. |
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Scott McCulloch
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| 6/11/2007 6:25 AM |
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| Great suggestions, I will go through them this week. |
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Scott McCulloch
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Mariette Knap
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| 10/20/2007 7:05 AM |
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Bump... |
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 Mariëtte Knap
www.smallbizserver.net |
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Chris Wylie
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| 10/20/2007 10:02 AM |
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I like the Related System Spline suggests. Auto relating articles based on matching categories would work if you have a high degree of category resolution and not too many articles. It will be less useful when you have many more articles than you do categories. I do something of the sort as a side bar here:
http://www.energydesignresources.net/BuildingTypes/Schools/tabid/83/Default.aspx
The main page is a filtered view on just "building type: schools" and the side bars are latest article modules filtered on "Schools AND Design Briefs" and "Schools AND Case Studies".
I think it will always be of value for the author to be able to hand pick related articles. Here is one suggestion:
Related Articles w/ AJAX
Related Articles would present with the use of a [RelatedArticles] token on the document details template. This would allow visitors to quickly link to other articles that might be of interest.
The document author manually selects and links the related articles. In the Create/Edit Article form a list of all current documents is presented in a side by side list box. Available Articles are listed alphabetically in the left hand list box. The Selected Articles are listed in order of preference in the right hand list box. Left and Right arrows move the documents back and forth. Up and Down arrows move a selected article up or down in the selected list. AJAX will be used to minimize screen refresh.
If there are thousands of articles, the Available Articles box may be cumbersome. Perhaps we could have an expandable category tree that we can drill down to locate the articles. This would also assist in finding their location.
Wylie
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