Zola has built-in support for taxonomies. Taxonomies are a way for users to group content according to user-defined categories.

Definitions 

• Taxonomy: A category that can be used to group content
• Term: A specific group within a taxonomy
• Value: A piece of content that can be associated with a term

Example: a movie website 

Imagine that you want to make a website to display information about various movies. In that case you could use the following taxonomies:

• Director
• Genres
• Awards
• Release year

Then at build time Zola can create pages for each taxonomy listing all of the known terms as well as pages for each term in a taxonomy, listing all of the pieces of content associated with that term.

Imagine again we have the following movies:

- Shape of water                   <--- Value
  - Director                         <--- Taxonomy
    - Guillermo Del Toro                 <--- Term
  - Genres                            <--- Taxonomy
    - Thriller                           <--- Term
    - Drama                              <--- Term
  - Awards                           <--- Taxonomy
    - Golden globe                         <--- Term
    - Academy award                        <--- Term
    - BAFTA                                <--- Term
  - Release year                      <--- Taxonomy
    - 2017                                <--- Term
    
- The Room:                         <--- Value
  - Director                           <--- Taxonomy
    - Tommy Wiseau                         <--- Term
  - Genres                              <--- Taxonomy
    - Romance                              <--- Term
    - Drama                                <--- Term
  - Release Year                       <--- Taxonomy
    - 2003                                 <--- Term

- Bright                           <--- Value
  - Director                           <--- Taxonomy
    - David Ayer                           <--- Term
  - Genres                              <--- Taxonomy
    - Fantasy                              <--- Term
    - Action                               <--- Term
  - Awards                             <--- Taxonomy
    - California on Location Awards        <--- Term
  - Release Year                       <--- Taxonomy
    - 2017                                 <--- Term

In this example the page for Release year would include links to pages for both 2003 and 2017, where the page for 2017 would list both Shape of Water and Bright.

Configuration 

A taxonomy has five variables:

• name: a required string that will be used in the URLs, usually the plural version (i.e., tags, categories, etc.)
• paginate_by: if this is set to a number, each term page will be paginated by this much.
• paginate_path: if set, this path will be used by the paginated page and the page number will be appended after it. For example the default would be page/1.
• feed: if set to true, a feed (atom by default) will be generated for each term.
• lang: only set this if you are making a multilingual site and want to indicate which language this taxonomy is for

Insert into the configuration file (config.toml):

⚠️ Place the taxonomies key in the main section and not in the [extra] section

Example 1: (one language)

taxonomies = [
    { name = "director", feed = true},
    { name = "genres", feed = true},
    { name = "awards", feed = true},
    { name = "release-year", feed = true},
]

Example 2: (multilingual site)

taxonomies = [
    {name = "director", feed = true, lang = "fr"},
    {name = "director", feed = true, lang = "eo"},
    {name = "director", feed = true, lang = "en"},
    {name = "genres", feed = true, lang = "fr"},
    {name = "genres", feed = true, lang = "eo"},
    {name = "genres", feed = true, lang = "en"},
    {name = "awards", feed = true, lang = "fr"},
    {name = "awards", feed = true, lang = "eo"},
    {name = "awards", feed = true, lang = "en"},
    {name = "release-year", feed = true, lang = "fr"},
    {name = "release-year", feed = true, lang = "eo"},
    {name = "release-year", feed = true, lang = "en"},
]

Using taxonomies 

Once the configuration is done, you can then set taxonomies in your content and Zola will pick them up:

Example:

+++
title = "Shape of water"
date = 2019-08-15 # date of the post, not the movie
[taxonomies]
director=["Guillermo Del Toro"]
genres=["Thriller","Drama"]
awards=["Golden Globe", "Academy award", "BAFTA"]
release-year = ["2017"]
+++

Output paths 

In a similar manner to how section and pages calculate their output path:

• the taxonomy name is never slugified
• the taxonomy term (e.g. as specific tag) is slugified when slugify.taxonomies is enabled ("on", the default) in the configuration

The taxonomy pages are then available at the following paths:

$BASE_URL/$NAME/ (taxonomy)
$BASE_URL/$NAME/$SLUG (taxonomy entry)

Note that taxonomies are case insensitive so terms that have the same slug will get merged, e.g. sections and pages containing the tag "example" will be shown in the same taxonomy page as ones containing "Example"