OmniCon gives you two overlapping ways to organize articles inside a channel: tags and folders. They look similar at first — both appear in the sidebar as clickable filters — but they behave differently and they're best used together.
Tags — flat, many per article
Tags are a flat, comma-separated list. One article can have as many as you want. Examples: release-notes, pricing, 2026-q2.
Use tags when:
- An article belongs to more than one category.
- You want cross-cutting themes — topics that span several folders.
- You're building a tag cloud or a "more like this" affordance.
In the sidebar, tags show up as a cloud with a count next to each — that count is the number of articles with that tag. Clicking a tag filters the channel's article list.
Folders — hierarchical, one per article
A folder is a single path like /articles/tutorials/intro. One article lives in exactly one folder. Slashes create the hierarchy.
Use folders when:
- You have a clear tree of sections (e.g., Articles, Books, Billing, with sub-sections).
- You want a "browse" experience rather than a "search" one.
- You're building documentation where order and parent-child relationships matter.
This Help channel uses folders — every guide sits under /articles, /channels, /books, and so on. That's what produces the Filter by Directories section in the sidebar.
When to use both
Folders for where, tags for what. An article can live in /articles (its folder) and be tagged getting-started, how-to (its themes). Readers browsing folders find it one way, readers following tags find it another, and search finds it both ways.
Rules and gotchas
- Tags are case-sensitive for display.
SEOandseowill show up as two different buckets. Pick a convention and stick with it. - Apostrophes in tags used to break the search filter — fixed in v1.x, but if you see weird results on a tag with punctuation, file a bug.
- Folders are rendered as literal strings — there's no "parent folder" view that rolls up children.
/articlesand/articles/tutorialsare separate buckets. - Both tags and folders are exposed as Azure Search facets, so the counts you see in the sidebar match what the search index actually has, not what's in the raw article table.