XClose

Information Services Division

Menu

Drupal CMS: Tagging and feeds

Understand the different categories and tags in Drupal, UCL's taxonomy principles and how to tag your news, event and case study content effectively.

Feedable content types

You can currently tag the following feedable content types:

  • News
  • Events
  • Case studies
  • Publications
  • Research projects
  • Policies

A unified taxonomy for UCL explained:

In web terms, a taxonomy is a set of keyword tags that can be used to categorise and display content along different lines.

User needs, content and marketing strategy, academic discipline, organisational unit and audience are all different ways of consuming or displaying content. They are particularly effective for dynamic content such as news, events and case studies, allowing the user to specify what they would like to see and drill down to find the content that they are interested in.

Examples 

  1. Take a look at the Institute of Ophthalmology site at their News page where you can see several tags divided into categories on the left-hand side, allowing the user to choose exactly what news items they would like to see, based on the tags they've selected.
  2. An example from everyday life: when you shop online, you will see items 'tagged' by kind, price, colour, size etc. helping you choose more effectively.

A shared taxonomy for UCL means:

  • No dilution of content impact
  • Improved showcasing of interdisciplinarity and research impact
  • Ability to surface interesting connections and unlikely subject pairings
  • Efficient content management and ease of bringing together different content around a topic
  • Improved sharing and findability
  • Improved search and filtering

Because we have a shared taxonomy across all UCL sites, the number of tags involved means that they cannot be displayed easily in the CMS. Your Senior Editor will provide you with a list of tags and instructions on how to use them effectively across your website or across a family of faculty websites.

Tag categories

We have a number of tag categories to help filter content: 

  • Subject: this is the main category for Drupal tags and contains all the different subject and theme tags used across UCL. It includes all the main UCL tags such as research domains and Grand Challenges. Local teams can submit their own tags to cover academic subjects, research themes and other ways of categorising content
  • Org Unit: this category contains all the known UCL organisational unit names. Research groups need to be added separately if appropriate. Note that all content is automatically tagged with the org unit name of the site on which the content is created. 
  •  Event type: a small sub-set of closed tags describing different event types – only available for selection on event pages as a separate category. 
  • Audience: the main UCL audiences for whom content is created. 
  • Communication type: this set of tags allows us to categorise communication content e.g. press release, video, publication and helps us to display content in different areas through content management tags such as 'faculty homepage' or 'research page'.

Taxonomy principles

When requesting a new tag, bear in mind the following principles:

  1. Nouns work better than adjectives as they can stand alone: environment not environmental

  2. Singular, granular tags work better than compound terms: so the separate tags 'energy' and 'environment' is better than 'energy and environment'

  3. The tags take the case of natural language: for example 'English literature', 'life sciences', 'fine art', 'PhD' 

  4. Tags for UCL people are not permitted

To request a new tag, contact Web Support Team with details of the category and the new tag. Digital Presence will review and create the new tag if approved.

Sticky tag for super-promoted content

If you have content that uses feeds and filters, you can now pin an item to the top of a feed by using the 'sticky' tag under Catagories and then type 'sticky' into the Communications field. This pins the item to the top regardless of date. You will need to remove this if you want the item to be ordered by date again. If you have more than one sticky item they are then ordered by date within that group.

Help and support

Feedback

We are continually improving our website. Please provide any feedback using the feedback form.

Please note: This form is only to provide feedback. If you require IT support please contact the IT Services Help desk. We can only respond to UCL email addresses.

Give feedback

Related guides and more information