Taxonomies
What is a taxonomy?
Hugo includes support for user-defined groupings of content called taxonomies. Taxonomies are classifications of logical relationships between content.
Definitions
- Taxonomy
- a categorization that can be used to classify content
- Term
- a key within the taxonomy
- Value
- a piece of content assigned to a term
Example taxonomy: movie website
Let’s assume you are making a website about movies. You may want to include the following taxonomies:
- Actors
- Directors
- Studios
- Genre
- Year
- Awards
Then, in each of the movies, you would specify terms for each of these taxonomies (i.e., in the front matter of each of your movie content files). From these terms, Hugo would automatically create pages for each Actor, Director, Studio, Genre, Year, and Award, with each listing all of the Movies that matched that specific Actor, Director, Studio, Genre, Year, and Award.
Movie taxonomy organization
To continue with the example of a movie site, the following demonstrates content relationships from the perspective of the taxonomy:
Actor <- Taxonomy
Bruce Willis <- Term
The Sixth Sense <- Value
Unbreakable <- Value
Moonrise Kingdom <- Value
Samuel L. Jackson <- Term
Unbreakable <- Value
The Avengers <- Value
xXx <- Value
From the perspective of the content, the relationships would appear differently, although the data and labels used are the same:
Unbreakable <- Value
Actors <- Taxonomy
Bruce Willis <- Term
Samuel L. Jackson <- Term
Director <- Taxonomy
M. Night Shyamalan <- Term
...
Moonrise Kingdom <- Value
Actors <- Taxonomy
Bruce Willis <- Term
Bill Murray <- Term
Director <- Taxonomy
Wes Anderson <- Term
...
Default taxonomies
Hugo natively supports taxonomies.
Without adding a single line to your site configuration file, Hugo will automatically create taxonomies for tags
and categories
. That would be the same as manually configuring your taxonomies as below:
taxonomies:
category: categories
tag: tags
[taxonomies]
category = 'categories'
tag = 'tags'
{
"taxonomies": {
"category": "categories",
"tag": "tags"
}
}
If you do not want Hugo to create any taxonomies, set disableKinds
in your site configuration to the following:
disableKinds:
- taxonomy
- term
disableKinds = ['taxonomy', 'term']
{
"disableKinds": [
"taxonomy",
"term"
]
}
Kind | Description | Example |
---|---|---|
home |
The landing page for the home page | /index.html |
page |
The landing page for a given page | my-post page (/posts/my-post/index.html ) |
section |
The landing page of a given section | posts section (/posts/index.html ) |
taxonomy |
The landing page for a taxonomy | tags taxonomy (/tags/index.html ) |
term |
The landing page for one taxonomy’s term | term awesome in tags taxonomy (/tags/awesome/index.html ) |
Default destinations
When taxonomies are used—and taxonomy templates are provided—Hugo will automatically create both a page listing all the taxonomy’s terms and individual pages with lists of content associated with each term. For example, a categories
taxonomy declared in your configuration and used in your content front matter will create the following pages:
- A single page at
example.com/categories/
that lists all the terms within the taxonomy - Individual taxonomy list pages (e.g.,
/categories/development/
) for each of the terms that shows a listing of all pages marked as part of that taxonomy within any content file’s front matter
Configure taxonomies
Custom taxonomies other than the defaults must be defined in your site configuration before they can be used throughout the site. You need to provide both the plural and singular labels for each taxonomy. For example, singular key = "plural value"
for TOML and singular key: "plural value"
for YAML.
Example: adding a custom taxonomy named “series”
taxonomies:
category: categories
series: series
tag: tags
[taxonomies]
category = 'categories'
series = 'series'
tag = 'tags'
{
"taxonomies": {
"category": "categories",
"series": "series",
"tag": "tags"
}
}
Example: removing default taxonomies
If you want to have just the default tags
taxonomy, and remove the categories
taxonomy for your site, you can do so by modifying the taxonomies
value in your site configuration.
taxonomies:
tag: tags
[taxonomies]
tag = 'tags'
{
"taxonomies": {
"tag": "tags"
}
}
If you want to disable all taxonomies altogether, see the use of disableKinds
in Hugo Taxonomy Defaults.
Add taxonomies to content
Once a taxonomy is defined at the site level, any piece of content can be assigned to it, regardless of content type or content section.
Assigning content to a taxonomy is done in the front matter. Simply create a variable with the plural name of the taxonomy and assign all terms you want to apply to the instance of the content type.
Example: front matter with taxonomies
---
categories:
- Development
project_url: https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo
series:
- Go Web Dev
slug: hugo
tags:
- Development
- Go
- fast
- Blogging
title: 'Hugo: A fast and flexible static site generator'
---
+++
categories = ['Development']
project_url = 'https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo'
series = ['Go Web Dev']
slug = 'hugo'
tags = ['Development', 'Go', 'fast', 'Blogging']
title = 'Hugo: A fast and flexible static site generator'
+++
{
"categories": [
"Development"
],
"project_url": "https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo",
"series": [
"Go Web Dev"
],
"slug": "hugo",
"tags": [
"Development",
"Go",
"fast",
"Blogging"
],
"title": "Hugo: A fast and flexible static site generator"
}
Order taxonomies
A content file can assign weight for each of its associate taxonomies. Taxonomic weight can be used for sorting or ordering content in taxonomy list templates and is declared in a content file’s front matter. The convention for declaring taxonomic weight is taxonomyname_weight
.
The following show a piece of content that has a weight of 22, which can be used for ordering purposes when rendering the pages assigned to the “a”, “b” and “c” values of the tags
taxonomy. It has also been assigned the weight of 44 when rendering the “d” category page.
Example: taxonomic weight
categories:
- d
categories_weight: 44
tags:
- a
- b
- c
tags_weight: 22
title: foo
categories = ['d']
categories_weight = 44
tags = ['a', 'b', 'c']
tags_weight = 22
title = 'foo'
{
"categories": [
"d"
],
"categories_weight": 44,
"tags": [
"a",
"b",
"c"
],
"tags_weight": 22,
"title": "foo"
}
By using taxonomic weight, the same piece of content can appear in different positions in different taxonomies.
Add custom metadata to a taxonomy or term
If you need to add custom metadata to your taxonomy terms, you will need to create a page for that term at /content/<TAXONOMY>/<TERM>/_index.md
and add your metadata in its front matter. Continuing with our ‘Actors’ example, let’s say you want to add a Wikipedia page link to each actor. Your terms pages would be something like this:
---
title: Bruce Willis
wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Willis
---
+++
title = 'Bruce Willis'
wikipedia = 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Willis'
+++
{
"title": "Bruce Willis",
"wikipedia": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Willis"
}