Taxonomies

Introduction to taxonomies:

Taxonomies are the point and click way to set up your site's structural hierarchy or architecture. After specifying which site the taxonomies are to apply to, creating a menu and/or folder taxonomy is as simple as clicking your mouse to add and remove the necessary categories.

Recommended steps when setting up a taxonomy:

All taxonomies should be set up on a per-site basis, and often sites will have multiple taxonomies applied to them. For example, if you have a Marketing site and a separate site for your product documentation, each would likely use it's own taxonomy.

Each taxonomy should start with a "Home" category, whether that's named Company ABC Home, Marketing Site Home, etc. is up to you:

Maybe your site is going to have top-level navigation items or headers, with sub-pages within each (as is the case with most web sites). If this is the case, each of those main "headings" should be their own top level entries in your site's taxonomy. As you can see in the example above, this site would have top level headers for Products, Services, and News.

Within each taxonomy category, you can add sub-categories that will represent the drilled-down pages and categories in each of your main taxonomy categories. Let's say under products, you have Product A, Product B, and Product C. The products portion of your taxonomy should look like this:

Accordingly, if the Services portion of your site is broken down into Service A, Service B, and Service C, your taxonomy should look like this:

If in your News section, you offer press releases, a blog, and a company newsletter, you'd want that section of your taxonomy to look like this:

This same logic should be followed for any categories within your site.

When creating pages with which to fill these taxonomy categories, you'll want to start with a page of Content Type "Overview Index" as the basis for each taxonomy category.

Consulting the example above again, you'd create Overview Index pages for Products, Services, and News. You'd also have Overview Index pages within each sub-category, i.e. - a Product A Overview Index page, Product B Overview Index page, and so on.

When you reach single page entries in your site, for example, if Service A is broken down only into two sub-pages: Executive Consulting and Technical Consulting, those two pages would be represented by single pages of Content Type "Wiki Page" that would be associated with the Service A taxonomy category.

Creating a new taxonomy:

1. Click on "Components" in the left navigation
2. Under "Modules," select "Taxonomies"
3. Once in the Taxonomy interface, click "Create new taxonomy"
4. Fill in the taxonomy name.
5. Add the first or base category to your taxonomy, by clicking "Empty" in the tree, and clicking "Edit Selected."
6. Select which content type your taxonomy should index, i.e. - Overview Index Page
7. Add desired security policy and taxonomy tags.
8. Click "Create taxonomy" to submit.

Editing an existing taxonomy:

1. Click on "Components" in the left navigation
2. Under "Modules," select "Taxonomies"
3. Once in the Taxonomy interface, navigate to the taxonomy you would like to edit, and click "Edit" under "Actions" on the far right.
4. Once in the edit window, make any changes necessary including
   1. Add categories to areas of the taxonomy by selecting the level underneath which to make the addition, i.e. if you want to add a "Services" category under your "Home" or base entry, click "Home" and then click the "Add Category" button.
   2. Move and delete elements in your taxonomy.
5. Click "Save taxonomy" when finished making changes.
   

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