Glossary Terms

Taxonomy

A taxonomy is the system WordPress uses to group and label content, letting you organize posts, pages, and custom post types into collections that power archive pages, filtering, and navigation. WordPress ships with two: categories, which are hierarchical like folders with parents and children, and tags, which are flat keywords. Developers can register their own with <code>register_taxonomy()</code>, choosing whether it's hierarchical, which content types it applies to, and whether it appears in the REST API, so a recipe site might add a "Cuisine" taxonomy to its recipes. Each term gets its own archive page, and WordPress hands the term's data back as a <code>WP_Term</code> object with an ID, name, slug, and description.