Using Taxonomies

Defining taxonomies for a site

Taxonomies must be defined in the site configuration before they can be used throughout the site. You need to provide both the plural and singular labels for each taxonomy.

Here is an example configuration in TOML and YAML that specifies three taxonomies (the default two, plus series).

Notice the format is singular key = "plural value" for TOML, or singular key: "plural value" for YAML:

[taxonomies]
tag = "tags"
category = "categories"
series = "series"

taxonomies:
  tag: "tags"
  category: "categories"
  series: "series"

Assigning taxonomy values to content

Once an taxonomy is defined at the site level, any piece of content can be assigned to it regardless of content type or section.

Assigning content to an 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 this content.

Preserving taxonomy values

By default, taxonomy names are hyphenated, lower-cased and normalized, and then fixed and titleized on the archive page.

However, if you want to have a taxonomy value with special characters such as Gérard Depardieu instead of Gerard Depardieu, you need to set the preserveTaxonomyNames site configuration variable to true. Hugo will then preserve special characters in taxonomy values but will still titleize the values for titles and normalize them in URLs.

Note that if you use preserveTaxonomyNames and intend to manually construct URLs to the archive pages, you will need to pass the taxonomy values through the urlize template function.

Front Matter Example (in TOML)

+++
title = "Hugo: A fast and flexible static site generator"
tags = [ "Development", "Go", "fast", "Blogging" ]
categories = [ "Development" ]
series = [ "Go Web Dev" ]
slug = "hugo"
project_url = "https://github.com/spf13/hugo"
+++

Front Matter Example (in JSON)

{
    "title": "Hugo: A fast and flexible static site generator",
    "tags": [
        "Development",
        "Go",
        "fast",
        "Blogging"
    ],
    "categories" : [
        "Development"
    ],
    "series" : [
        "Go Web Dev"
    ],
    "slug": "hugo",
    "project_url": "https://github.com/spf13/hugo"
}