Taxonomies

Taxonomies provide a way of categorizing your content. They are hierarchical tags that you can create in the Taxonomy Manager and then apply to your topics and publications. These tags are just labels, but they can be used in many ways, from making it easy to find topics by subject matter to adding classes and meta tags to HTML outputs.

Taxonomy Manager. It shows a hierarchy of taxonomy tags. At the top level there is Taxonomy. At the second level there is Acme Products and Acme Space. At level 3 inside Acme products is Acme 100, Acme 200, and Acme 300. At level 3 inside Acme Space is Cosmology, Propulsion, Space Exploration, and Space Telescope. At level 4, inside Space Telescope is Control, Data Reporting, Lens, and Maintenance.

Note

The taxonomies feature requires the Business plan or Enterprise plan. To upgrade to either of these plans, contact your account manager.

The Benefits of Taxonomies

By using taxonomies, you can:

Categorize your content by subject matter, product, service, or any other kind of grouping.
Find topics by taxonomy label instead of searching in the Content Manager, see Search with Taxonomy Tags.
Apply filtering instead of using element attributes and values, see Taxonomy Filters.
Add class names to HTML outputs, which you can then style with CSS, see Use Taxonomies as HTML Classes.
Create a navigation bar at the top of HTML5 Help Center outputs. The bar can contain external links to other relevant websites, see Top-Navigation for Help Centers.
Create Applicability Panels for Topic Categories to give extra context about when the content applies. In Paligo help, we use them to show when the content only applies to certain price plans.
Create HTML Meta Tags for Individual Topics, for use with other systems such as Algolia, Google Analytics, and Zoomin.
Use taxonomies for faceted search with third-party search systems such as Algolia and Coveo.
Create labels in Zendesk, see Taxonomies as Labels in Zendesk.

Taxonomies in the Content Manager

If components, such as topics and publications, have taxonomy tags applied to them, a tag icon appears in the Content Manager. Depending on how many taxonomy tags are applied, you will see either:

Single taxonomy tag icon - The taxonomy tag has the color that was set for it when it was created in the Taxonomy Manager. If you hover the cursor over the tag icon, Paligo shows the name of the taxonomy tag.
Double taxonomy tag icon - This shows that the component has more than one taxonomy tags applied. The double tags are white. If you hover the cursor over the double tags icon, Paligo shows the names of the taxonomy tags.

Taxonomies Workflow

There are many ways to use taxonomies, but the general workflow for setting them up is the same:

Make sure you are familiar with Working in Taxonomy Manager.
Create Taxonomy Tags.

This is where you define the structure of the taxonomy tags and how they relate to each other.

Tip

You may want to Set Colors for Taxonomy Tags as a visual aid for recognizing the different taxonomy hierarchies.
Associate your taxonomy tags with the appropriate publications, topics, and images.

This is where you make connections between your taxonomy tags and your content. For example, you could have an "Acme 100" tag for a product name and you would then associate that tag with all of the topics that are about the "Acme 100" product.
Define the appropriate settings in the Layout that you use for publishing.

This step only applies if you are using taxonomies for features in the output that you publish, such as taxonomy filters and top-navigation.

For information on setting up taxonomies for these features, see:
Publish your content.

When you have created your taxonomy hierarchy, associated the taxonomy tags with your content, and set up the layout, it is time to publish, see Publish Content.