What’s the difference between content types and taxonomy?
When I work on content management system (CMS) design, one frequently asked question is, “What’s the difference between content types and taxonomy?”
Content types, metadata, and taxonomy are all part of a site’s content model. A content model defines all the content types, metadata, and taxonomy.
You might notice I’ve used a bit of jargon here: content model, content types, metadata. A content model is the sum of the content types with their metadata and on-page layouts. A content type is a a discrete kind of content on your site. It has a specific purpose, specific metadata, and a specific on-page layout.
For example, you might want to have a content type for a press release, an event, or a news article. All these content types would have metadata for things like title, description, author, published date, and topic. An event would have a start date and time and an end date and time. A news article might have an expiration date. Some of these metadata are driven by controlled lists, or taxonomy facets.
Taxonomy is metadata, or an attribute, of a content type. Taxonomy facets are pre-defined controlled lists of terms used to tag content so that we can do something with that content.
Content types define the things on your site.
Metadata tells you what you need to know about content types.
Taxonomy facets are controlled lists and a type of metadata.
So what’s the difference between content types and taxonomy?
A content type defines what content you’ll have on your site and what you need to know about it. Some of what you need to know about it needs to be driven through pre-defined lists, or taxonomy.
Need an example?
In this example, each box represents a content type. The name of the content type is in bold. The rest of the text represents the metadata or those content types. The items in orange are the taxonomy-driven metadata for each content type.
Here are some content types with the metadata that goes along with them.
A content model shows the content types, metadata, and relationships.
You can see how the content types use the same taxonomies. This is how content can be tied together and dynamically displayed. If you know that a content page is about a certain topic, and that a department talks about certain topics, then you can reference content pages on the department pages, or do the reverse.
The content types, metadata, and taxonomy all depend on what you need to do with your content.