What is a content type

Best practices in Kbank demo site

Throughout this guide, you can use the Kbank demo site as a practical example to see content-modeling decisions in a real business scenario. To explore the website yourself, you can start the hosted instance of Xperience by Kentico’s Business Tutorial Kbank demo site.

What are content types?

We’ve mentioned the term content type several times in the previous page. What is a content type, and why do we talk about them?

Content types (and their relationships) are crucial elements of any content model. They are blueprints for individual items. When an editor creates an item using this blueprint, the content type determines which data is stored and in what format.

From a business perspective, content types need to represent meaningful structures that both humans and machines understand. The following images show an article with additional related content and how this data is translated into a content type.

The first image shows how the different parts of an article are organized in a meaningful structure.

The diagram shows how the fields of the Article and Asset content types map onto different parts of a webpage.

The webpage layout contains a teaser image, featured items, and a full article page. The Article content type contains fields such as title, teaser image (which references the Asset content type), summary, taxonomy, article text, related articles, and article publication date.

The Asset content type defines the structure for media items that this article references. The Asset content type includes fields, such as media title, media description, internal description, media file for the binary, and a media category.

The website screenshot illustrates how different fields are reused. For example, the article’s title, teaser image, and summary are reused in the article Teaser and Featured news blocks, and the full article page.

The second image shows the power of a content type. The Article content type serves as a blueprint for all items built on it. Editors use the content type to create individual article items and input data into a predefined structure.

The content type’s structure ensures that editors enter all required data relevant to the article into objects of the same structure. Depending on their marketing goals, editors can then use Page Builder to adjust what each article looks like or what other data the page contains when they display the articles on the website. You can find more about modeling presentation components in a dedicated series of guides.

Summary

You learned about the role of content types in your digital marketing content. You know that content types serve as blueprints that define the structure and format of data. When editors work with these formally defined objects, they ensure their content is consistent and allows for customization through tools, such as the Page Builder. You also learned about the Kbank demo site we use to explain best practices and showcase different modeling approaches.