How taxonomies are used

Taxonomy data sent in your content feeds helps to categorise and organise your content effectively. With Dynamic Timelines, this data is especially useful for Contributors (authors) and Sections (e.g., Sport, Technology). These timelines group and display content based on assigned terms, enabling features like Term Cards to show all posts related to a specific category (e.g. all Sport posts display after tapping the "Sport" Term Card). 

To ensure accurate and functional use of our Dynamic Timelines and Term Card features, please refer to the below guidelines.

Guidelines for sending taxonomies

When taxonomies are assigned to a post, each must be sent as a unique tag in the feed. This ensures that the results returned against each are accurate and ultimately useful to the user.

The contributor field should only include actual authors. Non-author values such as sponsors or external entities should be sent in a separate field to prevent inaccurate results.

Similarly, only user-facing categories should be sent as values against the section taxonomy. 

Multiple terms

When sending multiple terms for a taxonomy, they should be sent in separate tags. Each assigned category, whether a Contributor or a Section, must be sent individually in order to correctly populate their own dedicated term.

Example:

Instead of sending a single grouped term: 

<category>Sport & Technology</category>
<dc:creator>Author 1 and Author 2</dc:creator>

Send each term separately:

<category>Sport</category>
<category>Technology</category>
<dc:creator>Author 1</dc:creator>
<dc:creator>Author 2</dc:creator>

Term Cards

Additional information can be sent to fully populate the Term card. Optionally include separate elements for the author headshot and summary in your RSS feed, and ensure these are sent per post entry.

Example of Contributor markup including an author bio and headshot:

<some_wrapping_node> 
<author>Author Name</author>
<author_bio><![CDATA[Author bio]]></author_bio> 
<author_headshot>https://www.xxx.com/author_image.jpg</author_headshot> 
</some_wrapping_node>

If you need to make manual edits to your Contributor Term Card, this can be done in Express in Taxonomies > Contributors > click into Contributor to edit or add metadata. 

Similarly, Section Term Cards can also display a summary but this not currently mappable via RSS. If needed, these can be manually added in Express > Taxonomies > Sections > Description.