What is a Content type
Content type is one type of content managed by Movable Type as well as entries and web pages. It is suitable for managing and creating all kinds of content, for example chronologically accumulated content such as news and categorized content such as real estate and store information.
Unlike entries and web pages, data input fields (called content fields) for Content type are not provided in the initial state. Let’s start with information architecture design then it will become clearer what kind of content field your content should have.
Content field is information for classification such as category and tag as well as information such as text, numerical value, date. Alternatively, you can use data of another content type.
Here is an example content “seminar”
The standard “seminar” content includes the following information.
- Seminar title
- Seminar overview
- Seminar detail
- Timetable
- Date and time
- Opening time
- Venue
- Admission fee
- Instructor
- Capacity
- Target
- Organizer
- Application URL
- Application open date
- Application close date
- Tag
Instructor has additional information as follows.
- Name
- Company name
- Affiliation
- Photo
- Profile
Although you can enter the instructor’s information for each seminar, the cost of updating the information can not be ignored. So what if you prepare the instructor’s information as a instructor’s content type and select “registered instructor” from “seminar” content type? When you update instructor’s content, all of the instructor’s information is updated simply by rebuilding “seminar” contents.
Based on the above, the content type of “seminar” will be as follows.
| Label | Type | Required? |
|---|---|---|
| Seminar title | Single line text | Y |
| Seminar overview | Multi-line text | Y |
| Seminar content | Multi-line text | Y |
| Timetable | Multi-line text | Y |
| Date and time | Date and time | Y |
| Opening time | Time | |
| Venue | Venue content | Y |
| Admission fee | Integer | |
| Instructor | Instructor content | |
| Capacity | Integer | |
| Target | Multi-line text | |
| sponsored | Multi-line text | |
| Application URL | URL | |
| Application open date | Date and time | Y |
| Application close time | Date and time | |
| tag | tag |
Each session in the timetable can also be defined as a content type, but if the reusability is low, it is unnecessary to make it a content type. The venue will be the content type as it often uses the same venue.
In this way, I think you understand that you can efficiently manage not just one content but multiple contents by using the content type.
On the contrary, what type of content is not suitable for content type?
For example, “company information”, are less advantageous to use as a content type as it is not being accumulated contents. So it will be good to create it as a web page, or create “web page” as one of contents and use it as company information .
