Beginning Drupal 8

Chapter 2
Creating and Managing Content
Remember, a website without content is as interesting and informative as a book without words. In this
chapter, I focus on Drupal’s content creating, publishing, editing, and management features, providing you
with the knowledge necessary to venture out and create, publish, and manage a wide variety of content on
your new Drupal website. You started that process in the previous chapter; now let’s see what you can add.
Understanding the Basics
Content is the primary building block of any website, whether it is constructed using Drupal or any other
tool in the marketplace. Content is what visitors come to a website to find, and a lack of content is often
the reason visitors fail to return to a website after the first time. In its most basic form, content is any
combination of text, pictures, video, audio, and graphics. An individual piece of content may take a variety of
different forms:
• news story
• blog post
• product description
• company overview
• forum post
• photograph
• wiki entry
Content on a Drupal-based website often starts with a title followed by body text. In Chapter 1, we
created a basic page, which consisted of content with just a title and body. Drupal provides the ability to
expand on this with a custom content type. A custom content type enables you to create additional fields
that can be used to capture other relevant and related information. A common example is a calendar event.
An event includes a title and body text (the description of the event), as well as other pertinent information,
such as the date and time, the location, and possibly a map or photo. I’ll cover creating custom content types
in Chapter 5.
Creating Content in Drupal
In Chapter 1, I introduced Drupal’s content creation capabilities by showing you how to create your first
content item and publish it to your website. The content type that you used in Chapter 1 was the basic page.
Drupal 8 includes a second content type: – an article.
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