Hugo includes support for user-defined groupings of content called **taxonomies**. Taxonomies are classifications that demonstrate logical relationships between content. See [Taxonomies under Content Management](/content-management/taxonomies) if you are unfamiliar with how Hugo leverages this powerful feature.
Hugo provides multiple ways to use taxonomies throughout your project templates:
If you need to display custom metadata for each taxonomy term, you will need to create a page for that term at `/content/<TAXONOMY>/<TERM>/_index.md` and add your metadata in its front matter, [as explained in the taxonomies documentation](/content-management/taxonomies/#add-custom-metadata-to-a-taxonomy-or-term). Based on the Actors taxonomy example shown there, within your taxonomy terms template, you may access your custom fields by iterating through the variable `.Pages` as such:
When iterating over content within taxonomies, the default sort is the same as that used for section and list pages: first by weight, then by date. This means that if the weights for two pieces of content are the same, then the more recent content will be displayed first.
Weights of zero are thus treated specially: if two pages have unequal weights, and one of them is zero, then the zero-weighted page will always appear after the other one, regardless of the other's weight. Zero weights should thus be used with care: for example, if both positive and negative weights are used to extend a sequence in both directions, a zero-weighted page will appear not in the middle of the list, but at the end.
In the above example, this piece of content has a weight of 22 which applies to the sorting when rendering the pages assigned to the "a", "b" and "c" values of the 'tag' taxonomy.
It has also been assigned the weight of 44 when rendering the 'd' category.
With this the same piece of content can appear in different positions in different taxonomies.
Currently taxonomies only support the default ordering of content which is weight -> date.
There are two different templates that the use of taxonomies will require you to provide.
Both templates are covered in detail in the templates section.
A [list template](/templates/lists/) is any template that will be used to render multiple pieces of content in a single html page. This template will be used to generate all the automatically created taxonomy pages.
If you are using a taxonomy for something like a series of posts, you can list individual pages associated with the same taxonomy. This is also a quick and dirty method for showing related content:
This would be very useful in a sidebar as “featured content”. You could even have different sections of “featured content” by assigning different terms to the content.
If you wish to display the list of all keys for your site's taxonomy, you can retrieve them from the [`.Site` variable][sitevars] available on every page.
This may take the form of a tag cloud, a menu, or simply a list.
The following example displays all terms in a site's tags taxonomy:
Because taxonomies are lists, the [`.GetPage` function][getpage] can be used to get all the pages associated with a particular taxonomy term using a terse syntax. The following ranges over the full list of tags on your site and links to each of the individual taxonomy pages for each term without having to use the more fragile URL construction of the ["List All Site Tags" example above](#example-list-all-site-tags):
