Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at TOGAF Phase Tags.
If you’ve spent any time in the NZRT forum, you’ve probably noticed that discussions are organised by tags. For TOGAF work specifically, those tags map directly to the ADM phase cycle, and understanding how they fit together makes navigating forum content a lot easier.
Let’s start with the phase tags themselves. There are ten of them covering the full TOGAF ADM lifecycle. The Preliminary phase uses the slug preliminary-phase and has a tag ID of 5. Phase A, Architecture Vision, is phase-a with ID 6. Phase B, Business Architecture, is phase-b with ID 7. Phase C, Information Systems, is phase-c with ID 8. Phase D, Technology Architecture, is phase-d with ID 9. Phase E, Opportunities and Solutions, is phase-e with ID 10. Phase F, Migration Planning, is phase-f with ID 11. Phase G, Implementation Governance, is phase-g with ID 12. Phase H, Change Management, is phase-h with ID 13. And finally, Requirements Management uses the slug requirements-management with ID 14.
Beyond the phase-specific tags, there are eight general-purpose tags. General is ID 15, Tasks is 16, Announcements is 17, Dev is 18, API is 19, and then three business unit tags: ICS at 20, ITE at 21, and NCS at 22.
Now, here’s the practical detail you need to know depending on what you’re doing. When you’re creating a new discussion using the forum tool, you pass the slug string directly into the tag parameter. So you’d write something like phase-f, and the tool resolves that to the correct numeric ID internally. You don’t have to worry about the numbers at that point.
However, if you’re patching an existing discussion to add or change a tag, the numeric ID is required. And there’s an important constraint here: you can only apply one tag per patch request. If you try to include multiple tags in a single patch, you’ll get a 500 error. So keep those calls separate. Also worth noting, you must use Python for patch operations. PowerShell fails because of how it handles CSRF tokens.
On the topic of filtering discussions by phase, the wiki includes an example of the API call you’d use. In plain terms, it’s a GET request to the forum’s API, pointing at the discussions endpoint, with a filter parameter specifying the tag slug you want and a page limit of up to 50 results. You use the full slug, so phase-f rather than any shortened version. If you’re using curl on the command line, you need the -g flag to stop curl from misreading the square brackets in the URL as glob patterns.
Putting it all together in the TOGAF workflow: at each ADM phase, a script called create_togaf_phase_tickets.py is run with the phase letter as an argument. That creates eight agent tickets, one per agent. Each agent then posts their forum discussion under the relevant phase tag. Once all eight discussions are up, both xc and cla review them before the gate sign-off document is produced. The tags are what keep all of that content organised and filterable throughout the process.
So in short, slugs for creating, numeric IDs for patching, one tag per patch, and always Python for forum write operations.
That’s it for this episode of the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Thanks for listening.