Content types overview

Video creator
Salsa Digital

Disclaimer: The content in this video remains relevant to Drupal 10 customers. An updated version of this training video is in the works and will be available soon.

Transcript

Introduction

Welcome to the GovCMS Content Administration Training series. 

Hi, I’m Ivan from Salsa Digital and in this video, you’ll learn about content types in GovCMS. We’ll cover the following topics:

  • The default content types that come with GovCMS
  • And you’ll learn about what content types are and how they’re used.

Content types in GovCMS

The content on a GovCMS website is made up of different content types. GovCMS comes out-of-the-box with five content types. And if we click on “Add content”, we can see the five content types are:

  1. Blog article
    • Which is used for basic blog content.
  2. Event
    • Which can be used to promote events. You can specify an event start and end date, and also a location.
  3. FOI (or freedom of information) content type
    • This should be used to display a record of an FOI request.
  4. News and Media
    • Which is for media releases and news items.
  5. Standard page
    • This content type is used to create general pages like the about us, privacy policy… any type of general page really.

So these are the five out-of-the-box content types that come with GovCMS.

Now, on your site you may have more content types as it is common to create custom ones. But on most GovCMS sites you’ll see at least these five.

What are content types?

Before we move on, let’s discuss what content types are. Content types are a useful way to group similar content, with similar characteristics. It means people can talk about sets of content (for example, events) and it’s also a way to set up a common template across a type. Let’s go ahead and click on Event and look at this content type for example. Events will always have a time, date and location and so the event content form contains these fields right here. Whereas other types of content such as standard page won’t include this information so they won’t have a time, date or location field. Another way to think of it, from a technical standpoint, is that content types bundle together fields, such as thumbnail, body, attachments and so on.