Start with Categories and tags: the rule that tells them apart, and how each builds a landing page or a facet. Slugs and Custom URLs then cover a record's address from the inside, how it is generated and what changing it breaks; Rewrites, redirects and which address wins covers it from the outside, mapping an old address to a new one and setting out the order everything above is tried in. SEO settings and Open Graph and Translations close the unit: what a record tells search engines and social cards, and how it is linked to its versions in other languages.
Unit 02 of 06
6 pages
Taxonomy, URLs and SEO
How content is grouped with categories and tags, addressed with slugs, custom URLs and rewrites, and described to search engines and other languages with SEO settings and translations. For the content modeller designing a site's taxonomy and the theme developer or site operator building its listings, redirects and head tags.
In this unit
Read in order
01
Categories and tags
Categories form a tree and tags are flat, and both are shared by every content type that offers them. The rule for choosing between them, building a category tree and rendering its landing pages, and filtering listings by tag across several content types, in Smarty and Twig.
02
Slugs
A slug is the part of a URL that names one record. How it is generated from the name and only once, what it must be unique against for each content type, what an author sees on a clash, and what editing the slug of a live page does to its address and how to keep the old one working.
03
Custom URLs
A custom URL gives a record an address of its own, independent of its slug and its place in the tree. Which records take one, how it is matched, why both addresses then answer, and the cases it solves: a campaign address, a short URL, a path from an old site.
04
Rewrites, redirects and which address wins
A rewrite maps an incoming path to another: a redirect the browser sees, or an internal rewrite it does not. The order in which rewrites, custom URLs and slugs are consulted, which explains most rules that never fire, and how to load and test redirects in bulk.
05
SEO settings and Open Graph
Every content record carries SEO settings: a title, a description, a canonical URL, a robots value and a share image. The platform prints none of them; the site's templates do. The fields, the robots mapping that is easy to get backwards, what the sitemap does with them, and Open Graph data from custom fields, in both engines.
06
Translations: source and related records
A translation is a record of its own, in its own language, linked to the record it was translated from. How the source and related links are wired, which records have them, and how a template finds a record's equivalent in another language for hreflang links and a language switcher.