You may have an ongoing situation when you want to collect certain news posts together for your site visitors. Situations such as flooding or pandemic are good examples.
You can add news to your site in the normal way using the news category but in addition to this you can add an additional label or marker that will allow us to group related posts. This is called a ‘Tag’.
Adding a Tag
When writing a post you will see a box labelled Tags. You are free to create any tag you like for any situation. The important thing is that all post that you want to group must have the same tag spelt exactly in the same way. Tags cannot contain spaces.
Once you’ve added the tag it will look like this:
You can add more than one tag if you wish. You still need to choose a category for your post as normal and tagged posts can also be emailed as normal. Don’t forget to publish your post!
Displaying the Grouped Posts
Once you have created a post with a new tag, you will have automatically created a new page that will display all current and future posts that use that tag.
The address of that page will take the form:
yourschoolwebaddress.org.uk/tag/yourtag
So in my example from above with the tag covid-19, the address for all posts tagged ‘covid-19’ would be:
yourschoolwebaddress.org.uk/tag/covid-19
(where yourschoolwebaddress.org.uk is replaced for your actual school web address!)
If you want to be sure of the correct address (URL) of your tagged posts, you can simply view any tagged post and click the tag name right at the bottom of the post. This will take to you the page of similarly tagged posts and you can copy that pages address.
Getting Viewers to See Your New Page of Tagged Posts
Once you have the address for your new page, you can promote it as a link anywhere you like, you can add it to any page of the site, you can mention the link in any other post, you can email it out to viewers. You can add it to social media too.
In a on-going situation such as the Covid-19 pandemic where there are important regular updates, you may wish to couple the tagged posts with a singular sticky post (that stays on the home page of your website and at the top of your Parents’ News area).
This is a great way of working as you can keep the sticky post short so as not to break the layout of your homepage and your site whilst conveying updates and availing viewers of full information.
EXAMPLE
In the Covid-19 situation for example, you might write a sticky post like this:
Other Uses for Tags
Tags can also be used by teachers in class posts to group together similar regular posts such as ‘Star of the Week’ or other awards.