Restructure content -- From rich text to structured content
Find out how you can convert the featured content that is stored in a rich text widget and a separate image into a reusable content item in our step-by-step interactive demo.
This interactive walkthrough was prepared in Kbank, our demo website environment. If you’d like to follow along or simply want to know what it’s like to work with Xperience by Kentico, try our Kbank demo website. You can request your demo site through the form at Kentico website and ask for the Xperience by Kentico – Business Tutorial Kbank demo site. Once you approve the request, we will automatically send you a link to your demo site.
Why move featured content out of a rich text widget
A rich text widget provides a quick solution to get a page looking finished, which is why it often ends up collecting content that would be more useful elsewhere. Once your content lives inside rich text, maybe with an associated image and a heading, it becomes the property of this one page. You cannot show it on another channel without manually copying it. That means hunting down all the individual instances across your site each time you need to make an update. That way, keeping the content in rich text widgets consistent depends on whoever edits it and their ability to track down each instance.
Moving the content to a featured content item solves these issues. The content lives in the Content hub as a structured item, complete with its own Title, Short description, and Asset fields, and the featured content widget displays it on the page. Since the content and its display are separated, you can alter one without affecting the other. And when you make a change in one place, the update propagates everywhere.
Restructure a page into reusable content
In this short demo, you’ll take an existing page section built from an image, a page heading, and a rich text widget, and rebuild it as a featured content item that you can later reuse on other pages or in other channels (such as email or headless).
You’ll walk through:
- Adding the featured content widget to a page in the Page Builder.
- Creating a new featured content item directly from the widget properties, without leaving the page.
- Moving the heading, the paragraph, and the image into the item’s Title, Short description, and Asset fields.
- Adding a taxonomy tag that will allow you to locate and filter the item later.
- Removing the old widgets, previewing the result, and publishing the page.
By the end, you’ll know how to restructure content on any page where rich text is carrying out more work than it ought to.
Wrap up
Nicely done. You’ve taken content that was locked into a single page and turned it into a featured content item that lives in the Content hub, and can be used anywhere, even across different channels.
Here are some takeaways worth carrying over into your own projects:
- Content items are reusable; rich text is not. Once a piece of content exists as a Content hub item, you can add it to other pages or channels without recreating it.
- One update reaches every place the reusable item appears. When an offer or a message changes, you edit the item once instead of hunting it through various pages.
- Rich text is still the right choice for text that genuinely belongs on a single page and nowhere else. The point is to recognize when your content has outgrown it.
- Tags make content discoverable months later. When you use the Content hub filter, a tagged item appears, so the next person looking for featured content finds what already exists instead of writing it again.
- Your content survives a redesign. Because the item holds the content, and the widget handles the presentation, your team can restyle featured sections without anyone retyping the content itself.
Keep learning about reusable content in the following guides: