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10 years ago Author: Cleve Gibbon Blog Post
Content Types The steady, and welcomed transition from unstructured content to structured content is raising the profile of content modeling within our projects. It has also highlighted the semantic differences in the terms we use to describe content models. A shared vocabulary for content modeling is coming. But for now, let’s create a baseline for the following key terms:
-Content Types -Content Elements -Content Items
Content Types As you navigate through the web, read a book, or play the wii, you run across things such as press articles, books, cameras, events, job postings, products, services, patient records, and so on. These chunks of information are all potentially content types. Whether or not they become a content type depends upon your business goals and user needs. A content type is a “unit of reuse” within your content model that can be assembled to create new information products. For example, a chapter content type can be assembled into a book, or a series of posts aggregated to create a new blog. In the content model, content types (chapter, post) are identified and their relationships defined with other content types (e.g. book, blog). A content type is concept (or classification) used to describe a family of related things. If I asked you what colour is a fruit, you’d be hard pressed to answer the question. However, we know fruits are typically sweet and colourful. So sweet and colour are good candidates for being elements of the content type Fruit. Identifying Fruit as a content type is the first step to chunking out information and bringing a little bit of structure to the content model. Authors don’t create content types. They create content items from content types. For example, a strawberry is a content item based off the content type Fruit. It’s a content item because a strawberry has values given to it by content creator, most likely with the elements sweet (true) and colour (red).
Content Elements A content type has a collection of elements. Each element has a name and type. A type indicates what kind of values a element may hold. For example, a element with the type Text stores text values, where an Image type holds images, and a Date only expects, well dates. Types impose constraints on the kinds of values that can be assigned to elements. For example, you can’t assign a JPEG image to a name element of type text. This is good. Nor can you assign the value Bob to an age element of type integer. Also good. However, the biggest win for typing your content elements is getting that shared understanding of what kinds of elements make up your content types. What content do you have and how is/could/should it being used?
Content Items A content item is an instance of a content type. It is created by supplying values to the elements that make up a content type. For the more technically minded folks, content types are to classes, as content items are to objects. But no matter how you stumbled across content modelling, think of content types as the cookie cutter and your content items as the cookies. It’s important that you invest the effort at design-time to create best cookie cutter that meets the needs of your target audience, because in the real world there are only cookies.
In Summary Content types are used to structure chunks of information. Content items actually store information. However, content types rarely exist in isolation. They have relationships. Some are owned by others. Some merely use others. In building out content models, we also need to capture and express the relationships between content types. - See more at: http://www.clevegibbon.com/content-modeling/content-types/#sthash.KiLsMoll.dpuf
http://www.clevegibbon.com/content-modeling/content-types/