Content model

Content is at the heart of CMS (SaaS). Before building your application, consider how you want to model your content. Your content can be any type, including webpages, components, and media, and can be shared across multiple platforms. It is important to model your content in a platform-agnostic way. Content modeling provides a "framework" for CMS (SaaS) content structure.

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Note

Before you begin modeling your content, see Building blocks of the user interface for information on available property and content types in CMS (SaaS).

Content modeling approaches

How you approach modeling your content depends on your use cases and how you plan to display your content in your applications. The following are a few approaches to consider:

• Top-down approach – Start from a high-level overview and identify the main types of content you need first (for example, blogs, product pages, forms, searches, and galleries). Then, you can work down to the individual page's details, one level at a time.
• Bottom-up approach – Begin at the most granular level of detail. Start with the finer elements and group them to form larger content items. For example, consider the text in a call to action (CTA) element, then the CTA object itself, followed by the title text and body text. These components can then be grouped as a promo box or card.
• Hybrid approach – Combines elements of the top-down and bottom-up methodologies, offering flexibility. Begin with a high-level overview of major content types, then dive into the details for each type. This approach helps maintain the overall structure while addressing specific requirements, such as defining the fields for a blog post (for example, title, body, images, and tags).

Regardless of the approach, the most important considerations are the level of control you want to give users, the flexibility to adjust the content's layout and structure, and the ensuring content reusability.

Content modeling steps

Consider the following high-level steps when developing your content model:

1. Analyze your requirements – Determine what content your application requires. This could include blog posts, about me pages, or product listings.
2. Decide on the structure – Based on your application's requirements, decide how to structure that content in CMS (SaaS). Identify the content types needed, including their fields and properties. The content type is the foundation for creating one or many experiences, pages, or block instances. The content type and properties must be mapped to the corresponding rendering to display content to visitors.
3. Create the content types – You can create and manage content types through the CMS (SaaS) UI or code using the REST API. To create your content types, select the appropriate base type and configure any standard fields or custom properties. See Content types in the developer guide and Content types in the end-user guide.

Example

Using the sample Moseybank application from the Create a demo site using CMS (SaaS) and Vercel and Create a demo site using CMS (SaaS) and Netlify walkthroughs, here are some options for modeling content for the masthead banner.

From the image, you can break down the different content of the masthead. There are five pieces of content:

1. Image
2. Image
3. Title
4. Main content section
5. Call to action (CTA) button

To increase the reusability, you can group these into three content types: image, text, and button. You can design your content model differently depending on the level of control, freedom, and reusability you want to give to CMS (SaaS) users. Here are a few examples:

• All content within a single item – Create a single component with the five content types listed separately. This option offers no flexibility regarding what CMS (SaaS) content managers can control, as everything displays exactly as designed.
• A content holder for different content types – Create a content holder for the masthead and then create content types for images, text, and buttons. This option improves the content type reusability but provides limited control or design freedom.
• Create content types with styling options – Add styling options for the layout and structure of content types, including the image, text, and button content types. This gives more flexibility to the design in CMS (SaaS), letting content types be reused in different combinations across various pages.

As you can see from the previous examples, content modeling offers a range of flexibility, from no freedom to maximum flexibility, reusability, and control.

This example only addresses the masthead banner, but as you design your entire application, you may notice repeating patterns in other sections. For example, pages with titles, text, and buttons can be modeled as reusable content types, saving time in building pages with the same structure.

For a hands-on look at the content modeling in action, see the interactive demo.