Tags and metadata on aalto.fi
Content home (for articles, services and research groups)
Content home determines which hub the page belongs to and also defines its URL. For example, a subpage for a department should have the name of the department as its Content home, so that users can see the relationship between the two when accessing the page. The Content home of Service pages is automatically the Services hub, in which all Service pages will appear.
Category (for news and events)
News pages and Event pages are sorted by their Category. The selected Category (or Categories) does not affect the page URL, but like with Primary/Secondary tags and Relates to, is used for filtering content in advanced searches and automatic liftups.
The Content home of Events and News is automatically the Aalto University Events and News hubs respectively. The hubs will also appear in the page URLs, as for all page types.
Primary and secondary tags
- Primary tags are pre-determined by the Aalto University Communications Team and cover the main content themes, for example Research & Art.
- Secondary tags highlight the topics related to the content. They describe what’s unique with the content in more detail, for example 3D printing.
Relates to
Relates to tells the system that your page is linked to other hubs or research groups.
Understanding the logic behind automatic liftups
When deciding which metadata to use for events, news and articles, remember that they will show in automatic liftups in other pages at aalto.fi. When you create a page, the metadata fields are similar to basic data about a car, such as brand and colour. We will use this as an example for the logic behind automatic liftups.
If you want to buy a used car, you might have specific requirements, such as the year of manufacturing, brand and mileage. The more search terms you input in the search field, the fewer cars will show up in the feed, but you will also get more accurate matches. Depending on how specific your needs are, you will input fewer or more search terms.
The same goes for an automatic liftup feed. If you are creating a general feed for a school’s main page, for example, you might leave fields blank to include all possible search terms. But if you want a more topic-specific feed, we should include at least one keyword from any metadata field on that page. The more fields we fill out with at least one keyword similar to that page, the narrower is our result. On the other hand, more keywords per field widens the result again. Make sure to check if you are pleased with the type and amount of pages that shows once you have created the liftup.
As an example, we look at the metadata of a news story about Jenni Haukio’s Independence Day gown, shown in the image above. It relates to 6 hubs and has 2 categories, 3 primary tags and 3 secondary tags.
To create a topic-specific feed with news similar to the Jenni Haukio story, we can input the following keywords in the automatic liftup metadata:
Now the Jenni Haukio gown news story will appear in your automatic news liftup, because the category “Research & Art”, the tags “Research” and “textiles”, and both keywords in the Relates to field match the news story metadata.
If we removed the category “Research & Art” from the automatic liftup, our news story would no longer show because it is not in the "University" category that is still there. On the other hand, if we did not remove the current category keyword from the liftup, but just added more, our news page would show up.
This means that adding more keywords to one metadata field will widen the number of pages showing through the automatic liftup. However, the more metadata fields we fill in, the more we narrow down the number of pages to be displayed. This is because pages will have to match at least one of the keywords in each filled in field in order to show in the automatic liftup. You can test this out with your own keywords and see what happens!
Updated instructions (March 2026)
Aalto.fi pages have fields for different metadata, such as ‘Tags’, ‘Category’, ‘Relates to’ and ‘Authors’. This page will explain the role of each metadata type.
Some metadata fields are optional, meaning that they can be left empty. However, it is still recommended that you always add tags to your content.
Tags and metadata fields in Drupal
On aalto.fi, all tags and metadata are selected in the right-hand side bar. If the side bar is collapsed, you can expand it by clicking the icon at the bottom-right corner.
Tags (for most content types)
Tags categorise content by topic. Tags should reflect all the main topics that are related to the content. For example, a news article on sustainability should have the tag ‘sustainability’.
The main use of tags is to filter content in automatic liftups. They also have a small weight in the internal site search.
Content home (for articles and research groups)
Content home determines which hub the page belongs to and also defines its URL. For example, a subpage for a department should have the department’s hub as its Content home, so that users can see the relationship between the two when accessing the page.
For some content types the Content home is automatically determined. For example, the Content home of a Service page is automatically the Services hub, in which all Service pages will appear. The Content home of Events and News is automatically the Aalto University Events and News hubs respectively.
Content home can also be used for filtering content in automatic article liftups.
Category (for news and events)
News pages and Event pages are sorted by their Category. The selected Category (or Categories) does not affect the page URL, but is used for filtering content in advanced searches, such as the main news and even listings, and automatic liftups.
Category can be used for filtering content in automatic news and event liftups.
Relates to (for most content types)
Relates to tells the system that your page is linked to other hubs or research groups.
Relates to can also be used for filtering content in automatic liftups.
Automatic liftups wizardry
These components help you create newsfeeds, list upcoming events and create article series that update automatically.