Classifying content

In Jahia, you may wonder if you should use categories, tags, keywords, interests, or custom properties to classify your content. To choose the right tool, you'll need to understand the benefits of classification as well as the criteria to consider. Classifying content is also referred to as managing your content.

Benefits of classification

Besides keeping your content tidy and in order, there are many reasons why you can benefit from classifying your content. Here are the main benefits that we have identified: 

• Better search results for your visitors
  With Jahia Augmented Search, tags, categories, and keywords are considered and weighted when visitors search for content.
• Improved search for editors
  When an editor searches for content or an asset in jContent, content classification is considered. 
• Showing your visitors how a piece of content is classified 
  You can help your visitors to create accurate content queries by showing them how content is classified. For instance, you can display tags used in an article directly on your website for your visitors. You could do so by adding a component to a page that displays the latest news in the sport category.
• Enriched customer data collection for your analytics
  When a visitor views a page, the event is sent to jExperience (if you have it installed) or optionally to analytics products like Google Analytics. Page view events can contain your classification information which helps you to better analyze your visitors behavior.

Criteria for deciding how to classify your content

Below we have provided different criteria to help you choose the best classification strategy for your content. Neither one is better than the other, it will depend on your requirements.

• Flexibility versus control
  Sometimes, you require a flexible way to organize your content to make it easy for editors to add new values in your classification. Other times, you want control to ensure that content can only be classified using values from a specific list. You can use permissions to determine which users can add or edit the values in this list. 
• Hierarchical versus flat
  Certain classifications require a clear hierarchy, for example to reflect the structure of an organization or geographic levels. For other situations, a simple list of words can provide a sufficient method of classification. 
• Site versus cross site
  You’ll also have to decide if you want your classification to be shared across your sites or not. Some classification might make sense at your corporate level and others might only apply at your brand or site level. 
• Internationalized labels
  To show how content is classified to your visitors, for example the product categories contained on a website, you’ll need to provide translated labels of your classification. This requirement can add complexity to the classification process. 

Taxonomy in Jahia

First consider the general differences between categories, tags, keywords, and interests.

• Categories
  A widely used classification tool. The Category Manager and hierarchies give you additional flexibility for representing a classification structure. Categories are created or edited in Category Manager.
• Tags
  A simple and straightforward way to classify any content. The Tag Manager gives you an overview of all tags on the site and allows for counts and renaming. Autotagging enables you to leverage Amazon Rekognition services to automatically tag images when you upload them to your sites.
• Keywords
  Usually applied at the page level or for content that can be displayed as a full page. Historically used for SEO.
• Interests
  Used for customer segmentation, scoring, and personalization. Interests are provided by jExperience.

The classification tools listed below are built in Jahia. You can also create a custom property and use it classify your content. Before creating a new property, consider the use cases and criteria described on this page to define it in the best possible way.

The table below can help you decide between the different tools that are available in Jahia to classify content.

Additional information

This table shows how jContent and jExperience gather data from categories, tags, keywords, and interests. Also remember that:

• You can apply permissions on subcategories to users, to restrict editing and translating on subcategories or on making subcategories available for classification.
• Developers can create a rule to automatically copy tags values to interests to avoid having to classify your content twice (once with tags and once with interests).