Need some suggestions on setting up topic tags. Background:
Came from Wordpress, so was used to categories and tags. There, I used categories for TYPES of content, and tags for TOPIC of content.
Only tags in Ghost, so used tags for types of content (News, Commentary, Media, and so on).
Now I want to also provide some way to view stories on a particular topic. How?
I realize I could do it through dynamic routing. I already have two pages set up that way, Newsletters and Archives, using the private tag #privatenewsletter as a filter. But, I really donāt want to have to set up a new page and dynamic route for every topic I want to include.
And yes, readers could use Search. But, Iād like to both narrow down the search, AND provide a page where they could just scan the latest posts in that topic. (For example, in about two months we will start a new legislative session. I have a large number of readers who would go straight to that topic page if it existed.)
So, Iām looking for ideas. I COULD forget about the types of content, and use tags just for topics. But that means losing that functionality.
Are your content types exclusive? And new content types are rare? Perhaps those should be collections, and your topics should be tags. Thatād make it easy to offer a page with everything sharing a tag topic, and multiple tags on a post wouldnāt be a problem.
Well, as I said, I looked at doing this through routing. But, according to that article, content collections are exclusive, and some of our posts are tagged with more than one content type, such as Media and Analysis.
I have a Tags page (which I call Content Categories) with subpages for our content types. Checking our analytics shows that some users do use that page to check out types of content, so I donāt want to give that up.
If there was a way to differentiate tags-as-categories and tags-as-topics I could possibly do something with that. I suppose I could figure out some arcane filters to do this ā but it seems like such a pain to set up, with a number of custom pages and a large and messy Routes.YAML file.
I donāt miss Wordpress often, but this is one of those times.
The problem is that the categories page (ForwardKY.com/tags/) creates a category and a subsequent page for every tag except private ones. So, outside of the fact of combining types of content and topics of content, the page would get pretty unwieldy.
Since it appears that Iām stuck with using tags for both classification systems, I think what I will do is create my own āindexā page, with content types on the left and topics on the right, with links to the resulting tag pages. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I like the idea. I think users will find it much easier to navigate than the current tags page.
I may post back once I create it and report on how it is going. (Analytics is our friend.)
One other thought. On the Content Categories page, are you using a get helper to fetch the tags? If so, could you just filter for the tags you want for that page (content types)?
Definitely check back and let us know what you came up with
Gotcha. Thatās an important point Iād missed in your original message.
One other thought - you could consider making one page to display all the ātopic tagsā and another to display all the ācontent type tagsā. Using the page editor, add the appropriate tags (all the ātopicsā or all the ātypesā) to each page. Then use {{foreach}} to loop through the tags on the page (sort of like in the advanced example) and make card for each of the tags on that page. When you added a new tag, youād just need to open the page in the editor and add the tag there.
