Laravel Taxonomy Package: Categories/Tags and Their Hierarchy

In modern web applications, organizing content using categories, tags, and hierarchical relationships is critical for user experience and data organization. Whether you’re building a blog, e-commerce store, or learning platform, implementing a taxonomy system in Laravel can make your app scalable and structured.

In this tutorial, we will explore how to use Laravel packages to implement a full taxonomy system including:

✅ Categories (with hierarchy)
✅ Tags (flat structure)
✅ Assigning them to models
✅ Displaying category trees

We will use:

🧱 What is a Taxonomy in Laravel?

Taxonomy refers to the classification of content.

Categories: Can be nested (e.g., Programming > PHP > Laravel)
Tags: Usually flat, unstructured, searchable
Hierarchies: Help users navigate complex data structures easily

Example: A blog post may belong to a category like Laravel and have tags like Auth, API, Validation

🔧 Installing Laravel Categories with Hierarchy

We will use the Rinvex Categories package for this.

Step 1: Install the Package

composer require rinvex/laravel-categories

Step 2: Publish Migrations & Migrate

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=rinvex-categories-migrations
php artisan migrate

Step 3: Add Categorizable Trait to Your Model

For example, for a Post model:

use Rinvex\Categories\Traits\Categorizable;

class Post extends Model
{
    use Categorizable;
}

🗂 Creating and Assigning Categories

Create a Category

use Rinvex\Categories\Models\Category;

$parent = Category::create([
    'name' => 'Programming',
    'slug' => 'programming',
]);

$child = Category::create([
    'name' => 'Laravel',
    'slug' => 'laravel',
]);

$child->setParent($parent);

Attach Category to Post

$post = Post::find(1);
$post->categories()->attach($child->id);

Display Categories

foreach ($post->categories as $category) {
    echo $category->name;
}

🌿 Displaying Category Tree (Recursive)

You can use recursive logic to build a category tree:

$categories = Category::get()->toTree();

function displayTree($categories, $prefix = '') {
    foreach ($categories as $category) {
        echo $prefix . $category->name . PHP_EOL;
        displayTree($category->children, $prefix . '–– ');
    }
}

🏷 Adding Tags Using Spatie Laravel Tags

Step 1: Install Package

composer require spatie/laravel-tags

Step 2: Publish and Migrate

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Spatie\Tags\TagsServiceProvider"
php artisan migrate

Step 3: Add HasTags to Your Model

use Spatie\Tags\HasTags;

class Post extends Model
{
    use HasTags;
}

Step 4: Tag Your Model

$post->attachTag('Laravel');
$post->attachTags(['PHP', 'Backend']);

Display Tags

foreach ($post->tags as $tag) {
    echo $tag->name;
}

📷 Image Placeholder – Tagging UI Example

🖼 [your-image-path]/tagging-ui.png

🧠 Use Case Table

Feature	Categories (Rinvex)	Tags (Spatie)
Nested Structure	✅ Yes	❌ No
SEO-Friendly Slugs	✅ Yes	✅ Yes
Many-to-Many Relation	✅ Yes	✅ Yes
Multilingual Support	⚠️ Limited	✅ Yes
Ideal Use Case	Navigation, Filtering	Search, Search Terms

📌 Best Practices

Use slugs instead of IDs for URLs
Apply caching on recursive queries
Avoid duplicating tags or categories
Use Laravel Policies to restrict category/tag creation for roles
Add validation rules for taxonomy input forms

🎯 Final Thoughts

Implementing taxonomies in Laravel doesn’t have to be difficult. With powerful packages like rinvex/laravel-categories and spatie/laravel-tags, you can build a robust classification system for your content.

Whether it’s for a blog, a product catalog, or a custom CMS, categories and tags—especially with hierarchy—can improve SEO, user navigation, and data organization significantly.

📥 Downloadable GitHub Demo

👉 GitHub Repository

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