Tags in Joomla provide a flexible way of organizing content. The same tag can be applied to many different content items across content types (articles, weblinks, newsfeeds, contacts, and catgories). Any item can have as many tags as desired.
Once an item is tagged with a specific tag, browsing to the link for that tag will give a list of all items that have been tagged with that tag.
Tags can be created in two ways.
- You can browse to the Tags manager (link on the Components menu). There you can create detailed tags in a way similar to creating an article. Besides a name, tags can include a description, images, meta data and other items similar to all other Joomla content types. In the Tags Manager you can also choose a parent for a tag to create nested tagging.
- You can create tags on the fly in any content editing screen that has a tags field. Start typing the name of a possible tag. Once you get to three letters you will start to see suggested tags that alread exist. If you are creating a brand new tag finish typing the name and hit enter and the tag will be created for you when you save.
Once you have tags and some tagged items you can display them in the front end in several ways.
- By default Joomla will display tags embedded in each item that has been tagged. You can turn this display off by changing the parameters. You can control positioning of this display with layout overrides and alternate layouts and you can style it with your css.
- You can create a menu link that displays a list of tags, with links to the tagged items for each tag.
- You can create a menu link that displays a list of tagged items for a given tag and display either as a list or blog style.
- You can use one of the tags modules. Popular tags will display a linked list of the tags that have the most tagged items. Similar Tags will display a list of items that have a similar set of tags to the currently displayed item (note that this module does not display on pages that are not showing content items).