Allow users to write their own tags and see autocomplete suggestions

Hi all,

I'm an absolute beginner with website design who is starting his adventure with Joomla! and Community Builder, so please bare with my basic question.

An important part of the website that I am trying to build involves users making searchable lists. I have created a tab on the profile page to store the list, and I have created a field (type:tab), to populate the list.

The idea is that the users have a space where they can type their own items into the list to generate tags. What would be ideal is for the tag to auto-complete based on the tags that exist in other user's profiles.

For example, the list could be "interests". A user might want to enter "bicycles", for example. As they type "bic" a dropdown appears and suggests "bicycles", "bicycling", "bic pens", and any other tag that another user has entered starting with "bic".

Ultimately the idea is to have other users easily find people with the same items on their "interest" list, which I think is best done by encouraging uniformity between individually generated interest tags, hence the auto-complete suggestion. However, I recognize that I could not possibly know all of the things that people might want to write, so I need to give them the ability to generate their own as well.

Thank you for your help!

Tags field can be used somewhat for this. It's basically a multi-select field except users can add their own options. However, it will not suggest options from other users. It will only suggestions options you've entered into the field in backend when creating it. There's no functionality to pull the default list of options from other users. This will be possible with CB Query Field once it provides the Query Tag fieldtype though.

Thanks for your message. The auto-complete would be nice, but not necessary. What I really need is for these tags to be searchable, however so far I cannot get the search, nor the smart search, function to direct me to users with certain tags. Any immediate tips or should I create another post?

Edit: I have the "field management" setting set to "Searchable" with a green check mark.

Searching CB users is done primarily through CB userlists. Recommend reading the CB Primer Book for further usage information regarding userlists. CB does not work with Joomla smart search. CB can work with a regular search module via CB Search Bot, but you'll need to navigate to its parameters and select your tags field as being searchable.

Hi Kyle,

I'm writing this on a Saturday, and I read that you don't reply until Mondays, so I hope that you've had a great weekend!

I took your advice and installed the CB Search Bot. It provided some basic functionality, but it seems too simplistic for what i need. Fortunately, I think the userlist search function has the potential to do exactly what I need! If only I could get it to work. I have watched the two CB 2.0 youtube tutorial videos that pertain to this subject (6-7) and have read the Community Builder 2.0 Primer page that covers the same topic (pg 58). It seems straight forward, but I am still having problems. See my image and explanation below.



Imagine I want to do a search for users that have a "kitchen knife" tag in their "herramientas" field. I can generate the "kitchen knife" search tag as shown, but when I click "Find Users", the search comes up empty although the first user there clearly has such a tag.

I don't think it is a problem with tags, as the "Instalaciones" field is type "text area" and the search function seems unable to match search terms with terms in other user profiles. Any ideas? I've been through every setting I can find to try and solve this today.


Thanks again for your help!

Jim

Searching tag fields with custom values should work fine. My guess is your userlist is set to simple "is" instead of simple "any" search mode. With simple "is" it will use strict matching meaning it will only find users with the exact values you've supplied. Edit your userlist and under Parameters > Search set "Search crieteria" to "Simple Any word match: Only 'any of' and ranges (WARNING: can be slow)".