Add tags to CPAN modules via CPAN::Forum

There were several occasions when people in the Perl community have mentioned the desire to improve the way one can locate the right modules on CPAN.

There are of course the two public search engines, the better known search.cpan.org written and maintained by Graham Barr and open source kobesearch.cpan.org of Randy Kobes that can also be downloaded from CPAN: CPAN::Search::Lite and installed locally.

There are additional tools to aid the people evaluating modules such as the CPAN Ratings and the results of the CPAN Testers.

Something that was missing is some kind of categorization or tagging. CPAN does have a categorization but it depends on the authors (yet another task they need to do), needs interaction from the maintainers of CPAN (powerful but few) and is in fact hardly maintained.

So in order to let anyone help with the categorization/tagging process I added a tagging system to CPAN::Forum. The list of all the existing tags on CPAN::Forum can be a starting point to get ideas.

Once there is a substantial number of tags, I'll provide a way to download all the information in order to use it to improve any search tool for CPAN.

It can also be used to add tags such as looking for a new maintainer though I am not sure what will happen when these modules do find a new maintainer. Will the owner of the tag remove it?