Taxonomy
Learn how taxonomies group and categorize content in Content Lion, enabling flexible organization, tagging, and navigation across repositories for teams and client applications.
📚 What is a Taxonomy?
A taxonomy is a hierarchical structure used to group related concepts. Think of it as a smart labeling system that helps your teams find, tag, and organize content more intuitively.
Unlike folders, where a file can live in only one place, taxonomies let content belong to multiple categories at once. This flexibility is powerful for large teams managing diverse content sets.
🌿 Let’s Visualize It
Here’s a visual example using animals to represent a taxonomy structure. The root category is “Animals,” which then splits into “Farm Animals” and “Wildlife.” From there, each category branches out further—like “Cows” under Farm Animals or “Deer” under Wildlife.
This structure mimics how you’d organize content in Content Lion: Top-level categories → Subcategories → Content items.
Prefer vehicles over animals? Here’s the same concept applied to a "Vehicles" taxonomy:
🏷 Why Use a Taxonomy?
Unlike folders, taxonomies allow an asset to live in multiple categories. This allows assets to be flexible and powerful for tagging and navigation.
Example Use Cases:
- Tagging content by department: “Marketing,” “Sales”
- Categorizing by product lines: “Shoes,” “Outerwear,” “Accessories”
Rather than duplicating it into different folders, you simply associate it with relevant categories. This makes it easier to manage and find content later.
🔁 The Taxonomy Lifecycle
Taxonomies evolve, so Content Lion uses a versioned draft-to-live lifecycle:
1️⃣ Draft – Structure your categories (no content tagging yet)
2️⃣ Live – Authors can tag content to these categories
3️⃣New Version – Edit structure, then promote again
🧩 Applying Taxonomies in Repositories
In Content Lion, you can assign one or more taxonomies to any asset repository. This is ideal for organizing content across teams, departments, or campaigns—without duplicating assets.
Example Scenario:
Let’s say you have two teams using the same platform:
- The Marketing Team applies the “Products” and “Channels” taxonomies to organize promotional materials.
- The Sales Team uses “Products” and “Regions” to group sales enablement assets.
Each team gets a tailored view, built from the same content base, but structured to fit their workflows.
🌍 Publishing and Delivery
Once a taxonomy is published, it becomes available to Content Lion’s delivery APIs. This means client-facing applications can use your taxonomy structure to power:
- Product filters
- Search (e.g., filter animal by animal species, age, care type)
📖 Real Example, Content Lion with Austin Farm Sanctuary Use Case
Below is a realistic look at how taxonomies come to life in Content Lion.
➡️ Summary
Taxonomies help bring order to your content chaos. Whether you're running an animal sanctuary, a product catalog, or a content campaign, they help you structure and reuse content across your ecosystem—without duplicating or losing control.
Want to walk through how to build one inside Content Lion? Head to the next section: Creating & Managing Taxonomies ➡️
CL Corrected Statuses
Action |
User edits taxonomy and selects “Done” |
After the taxonomy is published, and a user edits the taxonomy again, the icon swaps back to draft |
Action |
User publishes taxonomy |
Draft: Not Selected
Draft: Selected
Published: Not Selected
Published: Selected
Bug
Example in this Video: Current functionality of Taxonomy icon in left column that needs reversed. In this video the published state is represented by a dash and the draft is represented by a check mark. This leads the user to believe they haven’t published or they don’t need to publish as check marks symbolize a completed state.