Bulk Metadata

In some cases, it is useful to apply metadata en masse to a website. Common use cases include:

• A certain section of a website should look and feel different from the rest of the website (such as a different template or a different theme).
• Default metadata such an og:image should be applied to portions of the website.
• If a certain portion of the website should not be indexed by robots, the metadata can be used to set the robots meta tag to noindex for a portion of the site.

If you want to create metadata for many pages at once, create either an Excel workbook or a Google Sheets workbook in the root folder of your website in SharePoint or Google Drive.

• Name the file metadata for Google Drive.
• Name the file metadata.xlsx for SharePoint.

The workbook should have only one worksheet and at least two columns as in the following image.

The column titled URL has the URL pattern of the pages that should get a particular metadata entry.

The wildcard * (the asterisk) can be used as a prefix or suffix, allowing for flexible matches on the URL pathname. Typical examples include /docs/** or **/docs/**.

Note: The metadata sheet is evaluated from top to button, site wide meta data set to ** must be before more specific entries.

For each metadata property, create a column in the worksheet and name it using the property you want to assign. Typical examples include template, theme, or robots.

Page-level metadata added via a metadata block takes precedence over bulk metadata. See the documents Authoring and Publishing Content and Metadata (block) for more information.

Note: You need to preview / publish the metadata sheet in order to see changes reflected on your page.

Tip: Excel can be slow to update inside SharePoint. If you do not see your changes reflected in preview or publish, hard refresh (click into URL bar and refresh) the Excel document in your browser and preview should work as expected.

Folder mapped Metadata

If the site has foldermapping configured, the metadata files within that folder will apply to all pages for that mapping. For example, if /templates is folder mapped to

/templates/default all metadata in /templates/default/metadata.xlsx will be applied after the global metadata to the pages below /templates.

Additional Metadata

When having metadata that is managed by several teams it is not practical to keep them all in the same metadata files. Multi metadata support is possible by configuring the all the metadata files that need to be taken into account in the /.helix/config.xlsx file:

The order of the entries in the list dictates the order of how the data is applied. The final order of the metadata is as follows:

If there is metadata configured in the /.helix/config.xlsx:

• Page level metadata block wins over
• Folder-mapped metadata sheet wins over
• Metadata sheet(s) in configured order over
• Blueprint metadata

if there is no configured order:

• Page level metadata block wins over
• Folder-mapped metadata sheet wins over
• Global Metadata sheet (/metadata.xlsx)
• Blueprint metadata