What Are Taxonomies in WordPress?

WordPress is a top platform for website creation and management. Its wealth of features, user-friendly interface, and thriving developer community have made it a popular choice for webmasters. One of its most powerful features is taxonomies – a tool for content organization and reader accessibility. This guide provides an overview of how to use taxonomies in WordPress.

Understanding Taxonomies

Taxonomies are a way of grouping and organizing like-content in WordPress. For example, you might create a taxonomy called “Categories” and use it to group all your blog posts. There are three types of taxonomies in WordPress:

• Categories – groups content by topic
• Tags – provides specific information on the content such as keywords or themes
• Custom Taxonomies – allows custom grouping according to the website’s needs

Working with Categories and Tags

WordPress comes with built-in categories and tags, allowing hierarchical and non-hierarchical grouping of content. Categories are hierarchical with parent-child relationships, whereas tags are not; tags provide additional information about content, such as post location or keywords.

Creating Custom Taxonomies

To create custom taxonomies, the “register_taxonomy()” function is used to define a new taxonomy and connect it to content. For example, to create a custom taxonomy for a recipe website:

1. Open your functions.php file
2. Add the code:

function recipe_taxonomy() {
$labels = array(
'name' => _x( 'Ingredients', 'taxonomy general name' ),
'singular_name' => _x( 'Ingredient', 'taxonomy singular name' ),
'search_items' => __( 'Search Ingredients' ),
'all_items' => __( 'All Ingredients' ),
'parent_item' => __( 'Parent Ingredient' ),
'parent_item_colon' => __( 'Parent Ingredient:' ),
'edit_item' => __( 'Edit Ingredient' ),
'update_item' => __( 'Update Ingredient' ),
'add_new_item' => __( 'Add New Ingredient' ),
'new_item_name' => __( 'New Ingredient Name' ),
'menu_name' => __( 'Ingredients' ),
);

register_taxonomy('ingredients',array('recipes'), array(
'hierarchical' => true,
'labels' => $labels,
'show_ui' => true,
'show_admin_column' => true,
'query_var' => true,
'rewrite' => array( 'slug' => 'ingredients' ),
));
}
add_action( 'init', 'recipe_taxonomy' );

1. Save the file and refresh your admin dashboard

This code creates a custom taxonomy called “Ingredients” and associates it with the “recipes” post type. The hierarchical parameter is set to true, allowing creation of sub-terms under main ingredients.

Conclusion

Whether using built-in categories and tags or creating custom taxonomies, WordPress offers a flexible and user-friendly system for organizing content. With this guide, users should feel comfortable creating tailored custom taxonomies to improve their website’s content organization.