Content Index

[mberman]

Hi,
I have a large text-rich site (hundreds of articles, thousands of pages, currently in J4 but will migrate to J5 this summer, '25). I would like to create a content index of the type you find in the backs of reference books, where users could either browse through a lengthy alphabetical list or do searches.

I think one way would be to use tags, but I'm not sure if this is the best way for a project like this - each article would have many tags. I also thought of having Smart Search run an index and then use that, but my site may be too large for Smart Search, according to the article on large sites. I also looked through available extensions but didn't find anything that matched what I wanted to do.

Ideally, I could go through each article and just select words and phrases and hit a cmd-key shortcut that would add it to an alphabetized list of index items with a link to that article, or even page of an article, then create a page that would output the entire list alphabetically with links to all the pages that have that item, just like in the backs of books.

Is something like this possible? Is there a better way to do it than with tags?

Thanks for any advice you can give me.

-Matt

[AMurray]

I'm thinking you either mean a (1) Site Map, or a (2) Table of Contents.

See options for (1) https://extensions.joomla.org/instant-s ... site%20map
and for (2), have a look at https://extensions.joomla.org/extension/quick-index/

[mberman]

Thanks, AMurray, for the reply, but as far as I can tell neither does what I am looking for.

I actually have and use QuickIndex and use it to create the table of contents for each article. But it only indexes one article at a time and outputs to the article itself. I don't see any way for it to combine all the article indexes on the site into one master page. And it only indexes headings, not words and phrases in the body of the text.

While site maps do gather info from all the articles, I just looked through a bunch of them and they all seem to be limited to menu items, categories, and headings, all of which I would certainly want, But they don't seem to have any way, either automatically or manually, to include words and phrases from the bodies of the articles, at least as far as I can tell. But perhaps I'm missing it.

Example: In the following paragraph (appropriate to Valentine's Day) I have underlined all the items that I would want in the index.

Phonological analysis first identifies an element’s component phonemes. The spelling < love > represents the pronunciation / lᴧv / whose analysis as three single-phone phonemes is straightforward. Assigning the ‘default’ grapheme corresponding to each phoneme gives the phonological representation < luv > that only partially corresponds to the standard spelling < love >.

[ceford]

Interesting problem! I have no answer - just some thoughts. You might be able to do something with Category Lists. Or something like the backend Articles list with filters and pagination.

You could use article metadata (description and keywords) for display in your list with a template override. What other information do you want to display in the list? Could be dates, hits, tags, ...

Do you want to see a list of all articles or just batches of 20? There could be performance issues with complete lists.

This would make an interesting project for someone interested in coding - there are groups who do this sort of thing.

[Webdongle]

Perhaps a Glossary extension?

[mberman]

Does anyone know if there is a maximum limit on the number of tags, either per article or per site?