Content Categorization (Taxonomy)

Organizing your content

Using the taxonomy system is a useful way to categorize and organize how content displays on your site. Terms are organized into groups called Vocabularies. For example, a Vocabulary called “Fruit” would contain the Terms “Apple” and “Banana.” You may see taxonomy vocabularies and taxonomy terms referred to as categories throughout the administrative interface on your site, but they refer to the same concept.

By default, each A collection of fields that describe a specific type of content, like a news article, a person, or an event. Site admins can add additional content types by enabling optional modules. WDS can also create custom content types for a site. has at least one Vocabulary. For example, the Event content type comes with a Vocabulary named "Event Category". Your Content Types may also share a universal "Sitewide Category" so you can display various types of content (News, Events, People) with a common category.

WDS may have customized your site to add additional vocabularies to the standard content types.

Since taxonomy structure is important to the overall site structure, only users with an elevated user role in Princeton Site Builder can add or edit Taxonomy Terms and Vocabularies. See User & Roles for more information.

How to create taxonomy terms

Step 1: Create Taxonomy Terms

Create Taxonomy Terms

From the admin toolbar, click Structure > Taxonomy to list the available taxonomy vocabularies on your site.
Click the "Add Terms" button (using the drop arrow on the button) to add a new term for that vocabulary.
Add Name, for example Lecture
Add Description (Optional, not currently used)
Add Featured Image (Optional, has limited use case currently)
Click Save
The page will reload after saving the new term, giving you the opportunity to quickly add another.

Note that just like with content items (e.g. Page, News, Event, etc), it's possible to unpublish a A term is an individual item that belongs to some taxonomy vocabulary, typically used for categorizing content. For example, a vocabulary "Colors" may have terms in it "Red", "Green", "Blue". . Unpublished taxonomy terms will not appear in taxonomy term list blocks, search results, or exposed filters on any content list blocks. Editors will not be able to select unpublished taxonomy terms in the Categorization section of content forms either.

Step 2: Nest Taxonomy Terms (Optional)

Nest Taxonomy Terms (Hierarchy)

Taxonomy terms can have nested terms, creating a hierarchy. For example, an Event Taxonomy can contain these terms:

Seminars
- Internal Seminars
- External Seminars
Lectures
- Departmental Lectures
- Cross Disciplinary Lectures

Nesting terms like this allows you to configure content list blocks to filter the parent term only and have all content tagged with the child terms included automatically. For example, an event tagged with "Internal Seminars" will still be displayed if an Events List Block is configured to only display content tagged with "Seminars".

Note that the behavior of automatically including child terms in filters can be disabled or enabled site-wide via the basic site settings form.

A best practice is to keep nested taxonomy terms to no more than two levels.

Step 3: Apply Taxonomy Terms to Content

Apply Taxonomy Terms to content

After you complete the above steps, the taxonomy terms are now available to add to your content.

Create a new A individual item of content. For example, a page, a news article, and an event are all content items, which correspond to the Page, News, and Event content types, respectively. or find an existing one and Edit
From the right panel under heading Categorization place your cursor in the appropriate category box and the list of available taxonomy terms will appear. You can also start typing the name of a term to have the dropdown list populated. Select the appropriate term.
Click Save

More options

How to share taxonomies across Content Types using the Sitewide category

Use Sitewide Taxonomy Terms to share taxonomies across Content Types

Sitewide taxonomy terms are used across several content types. They allow you to organize various content types using the same taxonomy. Some examples of its usage:

Create a page for a topic and display People and News all tagged with the Sitewide category "Topic 1"
Display Lists for each of the content types with the same sitewide taxonomy term "Topic 1"
See sample page

To use this feature, you must first add the Sitewide taxonomy terms, then edit the content type.