Think about taxonomies

Divide lists into taxonomies and content types

When you selected the content types that serve as categories, decide for each whether the content type should stay a content type or it should be taxonomy and you need to change it accordingly.

Taxonomies and content types are suitable for different use cases. You can usually use taxonomies when you need an internal, invisible relationship between objects (for example, a persona or customer journey metadata) while content types are better for external, visible relationships observable on the front end (for example, blog authors or article CTAs).

Use content types if you want to:

• Localize the values and you want to display them on your multilingual website, app or other media.
• Let your content creators add new entries to the list of values.

On the other hand, use taxonomies if you want to:

• Be able to filter based on the values in the content list in Kontent.ai.
• Represent internal (invisible) relationships.
• Prevent content creators from altering the list.

Global search for content items is available as well, but filters are only available for taxonomy values.

Use content types and items for lists

You can model content types that you see as a 1:N relationship in a straightforward way. If content type A (e.g., Blog post) links to content type B (e.g., Author):

1. For creating the options, create content items based on content type B (Author). Each item will represent one option.
2. Add a linked items element to content type A (Blog post) that will be limited to content type B (Author).
3. If suitable, limit the element so that content creators can add a specific number of options only.
4. Create a content item of content type A (Blog post), and link the related content items of type B (Author) to it to create their relationship.

If you want content type A to link again to content type A (for example, for related articles), start with step 2 directly.

For a limited (often curated) number of content items, link them vice versa. That means, link the content items of type A (Blog post) from content items of type B (Author). For example, for the top blog posts of this week, you’ll have an item called Top blog posts of this week, which will link to each promoted blog post.

For M:N relationships, this approach is recommended as well because it’s easier to manage. Add a third content type that will link all relevant items of the other two content types.

See the diagram below to check how both cases are modeled in the Safelife demo project:

• Blog categories is an example of a 1:N relationship with preset options.
• Author is an example of a 1:N relationship with changeable options.
• Navigation item is an example of a 1:N relationship with itself.
• Topic is an example of Blog post's and Article's M:N relationship.

There's also an option to create taxonomies using linked items elements. To find out which approach works best for you, see how to model your taxonomies the right way.