You probably know how to organise your content with categories. But what if you want to be able to show content from multiple categories, based on something they have in common? That’s where tags can be useful. And the good part is: you can use this right out of the box, because it comes with the Joomla core.
An issue that websites often face is how to get visitors to the right content. Using a search box is one quick route to enabling users to see if a page exists for what they want to read about.
One easier route for users to find pages for a particular topic is by assigning articles to a category and then making a category list or category blog page menu item which only shows articles from that category.
Filtering content is a more accurate method and amongst the filtering methods available is the “tag”.
What is tagging and how does it work in Joomla?
Tagging is a method of adding keywords or phrases to an article. Articles can then be grouped by these tags.
Joomla makes tagging super easy as it can be done from right within the article editor if you want to add a tag “on the fly” or from within Components > Tags if you have a list of tags that will be assigned throughout the content of the website.
Take a look at the article editor window. In my example I have typed the words “tide times” and pressed return, this saves the tag to the database when I next save the article (NB it doesn’t save it if I close the article without saving)
If I use the dropdown to the right I can choose from a list of tags already added to the website.
Showing your tagged articles
Joomla offers many different menu types, from linking to a single article, a category or a component. There are 3 options for tags: A compact list of tagged items, a list of all tags or tagged items.
A list of all tags
This shows all tags added to the website
Tagged items
A list of tagged items will show tagged articles within the website, for example all articles that are tagged with the word “weather”. You may need to experiment with the menu item settings as by default it shows the article title and all its text.
Compact list of tagged items
As it says this just shows tags which link the user to articles tagged with that word.
Is tagging right for my website?
Using tags is a quick method of filtering content in Joomla. It’s very helpful when you have a content-heavy website. If your site has a handful of pages you’re probably ok relying on the navigation bar of your website.