What is a content type

Best practices in Kbank demo site

Starting with this page, we frequently refer to the Kbank demo site to explain key concepts and demonstrate the best practices for implementing Xperience effectively. We built Kbank to show practical examples of different content modeling approaches and business scenarios that we’ve seen applied in Kentico applications. 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 what data and in what format is stored.

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 different pieces of an article are stored in a meaningful structure.

The diagram shows how the fields of an 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 referenced by the article. It includes fields, such as media title, medie description, internal description, media file for the binarfy, 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.

Content type’s structure ensures that editors input all the 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’ve 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 like the Page Builder. You also learned about the Kbank demo site we use to explain the best practices and showcase different approaches to modeling.