Retrieve Content Fragment tags and post on page properties while keeping synced with data layer

Hi @gdwebct 

While avoiding the difficulty of duplicate and redundant author tagging, it is possible to expose content fragment tags into tag fields at the page properties level. The Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) ecosystem's strategic modifications and seamless integration can be used to achieve this.

Here's a high-level outline of the steps you can take to achieve this future state:

• Modify Content Fragment Model (CF Model): To start, you must change the CF Model for the content fragments you are using. Add a new "Tags" type multi-valued field to the CF Model. The tags relevant to each content fragment will be kept in this new field.
• Tagging Content Fragments: Next, you can use the newly introduced "Tags" field in the CF Model to tag your content pieces with the necessary tags. These tags are directly manageable by authors within the metadata of the content fragment.
• Content Fragment Component: To add the "Tags" field, make a new content fragment component or change an existing one. This component will be used to include content fragments on pages.
• Page Properties Modification: Customize the page properties dialog of your page templates. Add a new field of type "Tags" to the page properties dialog. This field will be used to expose the tags from the content fragments.
• Page Component Modification: Modify the page component or components where authors will include content fragments. In the component's dialog or editor, add a field that allows authors to select a content fragment along with the option to include its associated tags.
• Scripting and Mapping: Implement the necessary scripting and mapping logic that will fetch the tags from the selected content fragment and populate them into the "Tags" field in the page properties.
• Displaying Tags: Update the page template to display the tags from the page properties on the front end. These tags will now be sourced from the selected content fragment and will be available to populate data layers, meta properties, and other relevant areas.

By following these steps, authors can choose a content fragment along with its associated tags at the component level, and this data will be used to populate the tags in the page properties. This approach ensures that tags are managed at the content fragment level and avoids duplication or the need for authors to manually re-tag content fragments on the page level.

This should be pretty simple for your developers to achieve for you.  If your AEM implementation is reasonably up to date, the list of tags displayed on your site are being fetched from the Page sling model (java class) that backs all of your pages. By default (if using WCM Core, but also in most custom implementations as well) this will be fetching the list of tags from the Page Properties, which is what you're seeing. Your developers can override this function to also review all components on the page being rendered, pull in the tags from those components, and then create a list of unique tags from the Page Properties + Components/Content Fragments.

tl:dr; just a little bit of custom coding required, but should be able to be achieved by just updating a single sling model.