Beginning Drupal 8

Chapter 5
Content Types
If you ask Drupal developers what the most powerful feature of Drupal is, many will say it’s Drupal’s ability
to create custom content types. What is a content type? Think of a content type as a template that you
provide to users who author content on your site. You may decide that the standard content types that come
with Drupal out of the box, “Basic page” and “Article,” provide all the features you need for your site. But it’s
likely that you’ll encounter situations where you want more control over how users enter information and
how that information is displayed on your site, and that’s where custom content types come into play. In
this chapter I’ll show you how simple it is to create a new content type from scratch. Hold on to your tickets,
we’re about to take off!
The Basic Page and Article Content Types
When you install Drupal 8 you automatically receive two content types that have been defined by the team
who maintains Drupal core: the Basic page and Article. If you author a piece of content using the Basic page
content type, you will see that it provides two basic fields: a title and a body.
An author using the Basic page content type simply enters a title (a required field as indicated by the red
asterisk) and the text of their content in the Body field. The Body field is flexible and can contain whatever
the author feels like writing about. The author could
• Write an entire book in the Body field, including HTML markup (headings, tables,
CSS, and so on).
• Insert pictures.
• Write a single sentence.
The Article content type is similar to the Basic page, except it offers the ability to upload a picture as a
stand-alone element, such as a banner image for the article (not embedded in the body text), and define a
set of tags that can be used to categorize the content (see Chapter 4 for details on categorizing content).
Like a Basic page, an Article can be used to author content about any subject, and the body area allows
for entering free-form text.
While the Basic page and Article content types are perfect for general content, there will likely be cases
where you want to provide some form of structure around the information that is captured. You may want to
• Require that certain information is entered before the author submits the content
item for publishing; for example, the start date and time for an event, the address of
the venue where the event is being held, and a link to the event on a Google map.
• Have the ability to perform calculations based on the information that is captured in
a content item.
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