No, there haven't been any changes to how tags work in 5.0, and we have no current plans to work on hierarchical tagging. (Someone could possibly write a plugin that added support for hierarchical tags using the existing data model, though.)
I just want to add a follow-up question for clarification. The reason I was asking about hierarchal tagging is because I'm wondering if there is a plan to support 'guided' tagging. For instance, when a user clicks on 'add' a tag, then they will be presented with a list of available tags within a defined taxonomy. Or, if they typed in the letter 'a', then they will be presented with a list of available tags starting with the letter 'a'. Then, so on and so forth. Would this be something that the Zotero developers are thinking of supporting in the future? Or, perhaps, this is already done before and a plugin is already available?
Zotero already does autocompletion of tags (i.e., if you type "a" it displays a list of tags in your database starting with "a", with more specific narrowing with more letters).
That's a good point. There is autocompletion. It looks like the list of tags gets built/stored in the database dynamically as new tags are added. Is there a way to provide the Zotero application a predefined set of tags that users can select from, thereby restricting the tags to this predefined list?
You could sort of accomplish what you want currently by creating a dummy item and then tagging it with all of the possible tags. Others will still be able to add new tags, but at least the autocomplete list will be complete.
I have been using Zotero in my research for 6 years by now and all I can say is that, for my work, at least, hierarchical tags would mean a huge advance. I've been using clunky surrogates such as "manuscripts / Greek / medieval" (single tag) to this end for a while, but that's not too efficient.
Upgrade Storage
Thanks.
I just want to add a follow-up question for clarification. The reason I was asking about hierarchal tagging is because I'm wondering if there is a plan to support 'guided' tagging. For instance, when a user clicks on 'add' a tag, then they will be presented with a list of available tags within a defined taxonomy. Or, if they typed in the letter 'a', then they will be presented with a list of available tags starting with the letter 'a'. Then, so on and so forth. Would this be something that the Zotero developers are thinking of supporting in the future? Or, perhaps, this is already done before and a plugin is already available?
I don't know how to build a plugin for that, but I would be happy to help in anyway.