Giving our users the ability to comment, tag, and rate the various content in our site, provides them a level of interactivity that will make them want to come back again and again. There are mainly two reasons for these features to arouse the curiosity of users. First, it is human nature to want to provide their opinions about anything available to them. Once a group of users has offered its opinion on everything, you will find that a second group of users will rear their heads to look at and interact with the highest rated, most heavily commented and tagged content.

In this chapter, we will delve into what it takes to create a flexible system that will allow us to tag, rate, and comment any object in our system (at the database level). We will apply all these three systems to our photo gallery section. Tagging and commenting will be somewhat straightforward in that they will simply take raw user input and tie it to the various content areas. The rating...