966008 - Separate Application tags from regular tags

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Webmaker Graveyard :: MakeAPI, defect)

Description

[Chris DeCairos (:cade)]

I'm proposing this change to help open up the MakeAPI to third parties.

The current tag implementation can be very confusing to users of the MakeAPI. This is mostly because application tags are delimited by a colon, making it impossible for any tag to contain a colon and not be considered an app tag.

By removing this limitation, we can open up regular tags to be containers for any arbitrary text value - making them more flexible and useful to our users. Moving app tags to a protected field will allow us to simplify tag logic on the MakeAPI server, the client API, and also in our tools. I also think this separation will be easier for third parties to understand as well.

As I write this, it occurs to me that perhaps there could be three tag fields to better support third party applications:

1. Tags
Writable by: Make user, owner API keys, and Admin API Keys.

2. Application Tags
Writable by: Owner API Keys and Admin API keys

3. Admin Tags
Writable only by Admin API Keys

The upside of three separate fields is that it's possible for third party apps to add tags to makes that they can use for custom curation purposes. additionally, enforcing write access to these fields using API keys should be straight-forward.