2.1. Taxonomies and structuring content

What is taxonomy?

Taxonomy is a representation of the structure of your website, often beyond menus. A good example of taxonomies in practice, is using taxonomies for a fliter. Say you want to create a news page, but the news that you want to list on that page can be categorised by different categories. E.g. Sport, Finance, Science. You want them all to appear on the same page, but you want people to be able to filter by these categories. To do this, we would create a taxonomy vocabulary called "News" and within this create the terms for Sport, Finance, and Science. We would then apply the taxonomy vocabulary to the news page filter, and categorise each news item by the taxonomy terms.

However, the uses for taxonomies go beyond this to any structure and categorisation of content on your website, from menus to filters.

 

Types of Taxonomy terms

There are three main types of taxonomy terms

Information Architecture (IA)

Your information architecture is a reflection of your sitemap and the categorisation of content on your website.

Topics

Topics are used to categorise specific types of content. For example, you might set up topics for your news section, allowing news items for certain topics to be viewed on certain pages, or for news items to be filtered by topic. Topics could also be used for things like products, FAQ's etc.

Locations

These are locations that you might use to categorise your content. For example, a local government might allow content to be filtered based on the home town of the user.

 

Updating Taxonomy Terms

  • To update taxonomy terms, go to Structure > Taxonomy, and select the taxonomy that you would like to update.
  • You will then be presented by a taxonomy list. To add a taxonomy item, select "Add Term" and complete the required fields.
  • To edit a taxonomy term, select "Edit" next to that taxonomy term and make your required updates.
  • To delete a taxonomy term, select the dropdown next to that taxonomy term and then select "delete".