Steve has been blogging about DXTags and how they can be used by non-domino developers to create exciting and totally different blogs using the DominoBlog template and I have to agree, using special tags, like he has done, really does add a greater flexibility to the site designer.

As an example of the power of special tags outside of website design, I created an application for a customer last year that used a tagging system internally. The customer wanted to be able to output letters based on the contents of documents within the database. When the application had been originally written the letters were hardcoded into the database. This meant that if the letter needed changing they had to get a developer to do it.

After I looked at the application for a while I came up with a tagging system. They could create ‘Letter Template’ documents in the system and use tags like **FNAME** and **LNAME** where they wanted to firstname and last names to appear. Kind of like how mail merge works. The system works great, they can change the letter templates however they want and they don’t need to get a developer in to do it ( unless they want new tags )

So, there you go, another idea for the use of special tags.

Oh, Steve has also mentioned a new project along the lines of a website manager. Hopfully we won’t have to wait too long before we see it as I have a small project to do in the next few weeks that it may suit. Buying a few licenses would save me a load of development time…