Retrieving posts by similarity
Now that you have implemented tagging for your blog posts, you can do many interesting things with tags. Tags allow you to categorize posts in a non-hierarchical manner. Posts about similar topics will have several tags in common. You will build a functionality to display similar posts by the number of tags they share. In this way, when a user reads a post, you can suggest to them that they read other related posts.
In order to retrieve similar posts for a specific post, you need to perform the following steps:
- Retrieve all tags for the current post
- Get all posts that are tagged with any of those tags
- Exclude the current post from that list to avoid recommending the same post
- Order the results by the number of tags shared with the current post
- In the case of two or more posts with the same number of tags, recommend the most recent post
- Limit the query to the number of posts you want to recommend
These...