Categories & Tags

Seem confusing? Allow us to explain.

Your Standfirst site uses both Categories and Tags to group your posts by content. The Taxonomy Lister and Automatic Cards List use these to generate your content. They are also used to creat an archive. This allows a user to view all articles of a particular category or tag.

But what’s the difference and when should you use each type?

Categories

Categories are high-level taxonomies used to broadly group your content. They are also hierarchical; you can add multiple sub-categories to each parent category.

Categories are mandatory and you can add multiple categories to each post. If you don’t set a category the post will automatically be set to your site's default category. You can set this default from Settings > Writing > Default Post Category.

Use categories to generally define your site. For example; if you had a Reviews website you may set up Film, Music and Books categories. Each category may then have a child-category; the Film category may have child categories of Action, Comedy and Drama.

1. Name set your category name.
2. Slug set the lowercase, URL friendly version of the category name.
3. Parent Category used to set up hierarchy. Use this field to set the categories parent.
4. Description add an optional description to your category.
5. Category Table this is a list of all your site categories. Use this to edit, view or delete any existing categories.

Tags

Tags can be added in addition to categories in order to further define your sites taxonomy. Whilst a category will group together a wide range of posts, tags will add smaller more descriptive topics in order to add more details to a post’s description and relative grouping.

Tags aren’t mandatory and you can add as many tags as necessary to a post. Unlike categories if a post is saved without a tag it will not use a default. Tags are not hierarchical.

If a film review had the categories Film and Action it may have the tags Blockbuster, Nicolas Cage, Sean Connery and San Francisco. These tags further define the grouping of the post.

1. Name set your tag name.
2. Slug set the lowercase, URL friendly version of the tag name.
3. Description add an optional description to your tag.
4. Category Table this is a list of all your site tags. Use this to edit, view or delete any existing tags.