Using JXtended Labels to Manage Topics in Joomla

It is a well known fact that Joomla lacks the ability to assign content to multiple categories.  JXtended Labels has been developed to fill this gap, and it does it in a very slick and easy-to-use way.  So let's begin by following how I'm adding Labels to one of my sites, The Art of Joomla (which, by the way, is a pretty cool site if you want to learn about Joomla development).

JXtended Labels is a commercial extension (GPL licensed) for Joomla and costs around US$40.  That includes updates and forum support for 12 months and unlimited installs.

Before we start, we really need to clear up what Labels is and isn't.  As I've already said, Labels is a way to give Joomla the ability to map articles to multiple categories.  It's almost like being able to create an index for your site like you would find in the back of a book.  Labels are something that the author of the content applies for the benefit of the visitor to the site.  Labels differs from what you might call "social tagging".  Tagging is something that you, the visitor, apply to content at a personal level and this could be for your private usage only, or it may contribute to a public social classification scheme.  So, when we talk about our product "Labels", we are referring to something that provide a system to categorise content across many topics.

Installation

Once you've purchase a subscription to Labels, and downloaded the extension, you can install it in the normal way.

You can see that our package came with all the required extensions: the component, several modules and a system plugin - it all happens in one convenient operation.  Next, I'll select Components -> Labels from the Menubar.

Configuration

It's always a good idea to check out the Options (some other components call this Configuration, Preferences or Parameters) before you start launching into things.  Click the Options button in the Toolbar. A popup window will display.

This screen is in three parts.  On the first screen we've chosen to Show Content Labels; I don't want search engines to follow label links on this site (you might choose otherwise); I'm hiding label media (say an icon for the label) and I want them ordering, by default, alphabetically by title.

The next part shows the default for Label lists.  I again chosen to order by title alphabetically; don't want to show empty labels (that is, labels that are in the system but have not been applied to any content); no limit on the number of labels to display; and don't show the count for the not of other articles and such under that label.

For the last part of the Options, I'm pretty happy with the defaults.  So I'm going to click Save and move onto the interesting bits.

Adding Labels to Content

We could set up some labels first, but it's just as easy to do that in the article itself.  I've gone to the Article Manager and I will be editting Part 1 of my Legacy Mode series.

The first thing you notice is that Labels has slipped a new pane in on the right.  This is where we manage labels.  Now the idea for this site is to generate a "topics" list so I'm going to skim through this article and see what I can pick out that I think people would like to refer at a later date.  So I can see this is obviously a "Legacy mode" topic, we talk about securing files so I think "Security" would be a good topic, and there's a little on "Database" handling.  So I think I'll add those three.  We can by clicking the Add New Labels link in the Labels Pane.

The popup window allows you to add as many labels as you like.  I've added the three I just mentioned so I'm happy to click Save since I'm finished with this screen.

I can see that those labels have now been added to the system.  All I need to do now is check the boxes and save the article.  If I return to the Labels component, I can see the labels have been added and they have been applied to one article each.

Adding a Labels View to the Menu

I want a simple way for people to get to all my labels, so I'm going to add a "List" layout to the main menu on my site.

Adding a menu item in the usual way, we can see Labels has two views (to view and individual label and it's articles, or a list of the labels).  I'll be choosing the Labels - List Layout and I'm going to give that menu item the title of "Topics".  After I've done that we can see what that looks like on the site.

I've refreshed the site and clicked on Topics and there are my three labels that I created.

Clicking on the Database label, my site shows me all the articles that I've marked with that label.  Hey, that's cool - it also shows the other labels that it has been maked with.  Clicking on the article title sends me to the article page.

Excellent!  A little bit of tweaking to the template's stylesheet and the labels for the article are appearing nicely.

Conclusion

The purpose of this walk through was to show that mapping articles to multiple categories is possible in Joomla with our JXtended Labels extension.  It has shown how easy it is to use on a real-life site that is quite topical in nature.  Although not shown here, Labels is also capable of generating "clouds" which are very much in vogue at the moment.