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 Unpublished taxonomy terms will not appear in taxonomy term list blocks, search results, or exposed filters on any content list blocks. Editors will not be able to select unpublished taxonomy terms in the Categorization section of content forms either.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.

How to use Content List blocks: a general guide

Content List blocks exist to provide a way to easily create a list of content that exists in your site. Instead of manually typing up a list of links to various pages in your site, you can add one of these to a page and have all the links created automatically for you. You also don’t need to worry about updating the list manually if:

a title to a page changes
the path to a page changes
a page is replaced with another new, updated page.

Content List blocks are available for each of the Content Types that are available in the Site Builder platform. So the Events List block lists pages of the Event Content Type, the News List block lists pages of the News Content Type, and so on.

Because of the specific characteristics in each Content Type, each type of Content List block will have some unique configuration options. The option to display the “Event Date” field is only available in the Event List. The option to display the “Office Phone” field is only available in the People List. You get the idea.

There are some common configuration options available across all Content List blocks. A principal one is the ability to have the list of pages “filtered” so that only a subset of all of the pages that exist is shown.

The filters section of a people list block config form showing the field to enter taxonomy terms to filter the list.

This can be done by first categorizing your pages a specific way, then configuring your Content List block to only show those specifically-categorized pages. The previous “Organizing your content” section gives you an overview of how to categorize your pages. This section will give you an overview of how to filter your Content List so only specifically-categorized pages will be listed.

In the Content List configuration pane, you will find a “Filters” section. In this section, you will find sub-sections for each of the various Taxonomy Vocabularies available for the list’s Content Type. For instance, for the Events List, you will find sub-sections for Event Audience, Event Type, and Sitewide Category. Please note: if no taxonomy terms have been created in a Used primarily for categorizing content, a vocabulary defines a specific grouping of taxonomy terms. Some default vocabularies exist on all sites, but WDS can create custom vocabularies if needed. Synonymous with categories. , no sub-section will be available for that vocabulary. Selecting a term in these sub-sections will result in your Content List being filtered so that only pages categorized with the selected term will appear in the list. Selecting multiple terms will result your Content List being filtered so that pages categorized with any of the selected terms will appear im the list.

Hierarchical reminder

If you have “Use hierarchical taxonomy vocabularies” enabled in Basic Site Settings, when a visitor selects a “parent term” in a list’s “exposed filter,” content categorized with any of that term’s “children” is included in the filtered results. See Step 2 in the previous “Nest Taxonomy Terms” section for more details. Note that using hierarchical taxonomy is the default setting when new websites are created.

Additional options

You may notice that there are many more additional configuration options available for filtering your Content List by taxonomy terms. Here is an overview of some of the principal settings.

Expose filter to visitors

The filters section of a people list block config form showing the fields for additional filtering options.

This option gives your site visitors the ability to narrow down a long content list so that only pages categorized with the selected term will appear in the list. Visitors can filter the Content List by a taxonomy term or terms using filter controls added at the top.

Please note: If you combine exposed filters and filtering the list with selected taxonomy terms, the content list will not be filtered by the selected terms. Instead all content items wil be displayed in the list, and the selected terms will be the only items available in the exposed filter controls.

Allow multiple selections

As you may have surmised, this lets your visitors have the Content List display pages categorized with any of the selected terms.

Filtering behavior

The “Hide content tagged with any of the selected term(s)” option in this section lets you “flip the switch” on the filtering behavior. You can specify that instead of your Content List displaying only pages that have been categorized with the selected taxonomy terms, it will instead display only pages that have not been categorized with the selected taxonomy terms.

Avoid this problematic combination

We strongly discourage combining the “Expose filter” option with the “Hide content” option so as not to confuse your website visitors; when was the last time you visited a web page where checking options eliminated items with those options? If it was recently, was there a “negate” checkbox available?

Hide content items that are not tagged with any terms from this vocabulary

As the text implies, this option removes from the list pages not categorized with any of the taxonomy terms in the corresponding Taxonomy Vocabulary. This gives you the opportunity to create a subset of pages that can appear in a list, have filtering options available for those pages, and have the knowlege that you won’t have to worry about stray pages appearing in the list.