izhar

Feb 26, 2023

Creating a content model

What's a content model?

When you first login to the web app and see your space, you will be prompted to set up your content model. Let’s go over the vocabulary that we use when we talk about content modeling.

A Content Model is the overall architecture of your content. This will be designed by your development team. It divides up your project's content into chunks we call content types. In other words, a content model is a collection of content types.

A Content Type is the structure or container for a piece of content.  Your development team will design different content types for you. A content type is made up of fields.

Fields (aka attributes) represents different properties or characteristics for a piece of content. Your development team will decide which fields to include and what data types to assign each field (text, rich text, number, date, location, media, boolean, JSON object, or reference).

An Entry is a piece of content based on a content type. You might think of an entry as an "instance" of that content type. You might have hundreds or thousands of entries based on a single content type. As a content author, you will be creating many entries.

A Reference is a link between two content types via a field (specifically a "Reference field"). A reference creates a relationship between two content types. Your development team will set up these references for you, which will allow you to create entries that are linked to one another.

An Asset is any media file that has been uploaded to Contentful, such as images, video, audio files, .pdfs, and more. Content types can include fields for "media" which allow content authors to then link to uploaded assets. As a content author, you will be creating many references. Content modeling in the web app

Usually,developers are the ones building and implementing a content model while content creators are the ones who will be using it to create and publish content. The goal is to create a model that will support the needs of your entire team, from content creators to designers to developers.

This is what the content model page looks like in the web app for our Jumpstart Shop.

First comes content type, then comes entry

The goal of creating a content model is to enable content creators to create entries. The first step is to create a content type. As in object oriented programming, think of content types as classes and entries as objects. As illustrated in the figure below, we used Miro to diagram a simple example of our Jumpstart Shop content model. Keep in mind that a content model will never be perfect the first time. Plan to test it with the content authors and iterate.