# Gutentag

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A good, simple, solid tagging extension for ActiveRecord.

This was built partly as a proof-of-concept, and partly to see how a tagging gem could work when it's not all stuffed within models, and partly just because I wanted a simpler tagging library. If you want to know more, read [this blog post](http://freelancing-gods.com/posts/gutentag_simple_rails_tagging).

## Installation

**Upgrading?** Gutentag has recently switched table names from `tags` and `taggings` to `gutentag_tags` and `gutentag_taggings`, to avoid conflicting with the more generic table names that may exist in Rails apps already. If you already have been using Gutentag, you'll need to create a migration manually that renames these tables:

    rename_table :tags,     :gutentag_tags
    rename_table :taggings, :gutentag_taggings

Get it into your Gemfile - and don't forget the version constraint!

    gem 'gutentag', '~> 0.5.0'

Next: your tags get persisted to your database, so let's import and run the migrations to get the tables set up:

    rake gutentag:install:migrations
    rake db:migrate

## Usage

The first step is easy: add the tag associations to whichever models should have tags (in these examples, the Article model):

    class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
      # ...
      has_many_tags
      # ...
    end

That's all it takes to get a tags association on each article. Of course, populating tags can be a little frustrating, unless you want to manage Gutentag::Tag instances yourself? As an alternative, just use the tag_names accessor to get/set tags via string representations.

    article.tag_names #=> ['pancakes', 'melbourne', 'ruby']
    article.tag_names << 'portland'
    article.tag_names #=> ['pancakes', 'melbourne', 'ruby', 'portland']
    article.tag_names -= ['ruby']
    article.tag_names #=> ['pancakes', 'melbourne', 'portland']

Changes to tag_names are not persisted immediately - you must save your taggable object to have the tag changes reflected in your database:

    article.tag_names << 'ruby'
    article.save

## Licence

Copyright (c) 2013, Gutentag is developed and maintained by Pat Allan, and is released under the open MIT Licence.