Most common property types in Optimizely Content Management System (CMS) have built-in persisting and rendering support. In most cases you should not need to create custom properties. You can change the editorial experience without creating a custom property. However, if you need a custom property, you select a proper base type from which you can inherit, depending on the type of your data. You can also create a template for the data type (if you want the property to be visible on templates).

The following example shows how to implement a custom property by selecting a suitable base type (for example, `PropertyString`, `PropertyNumber`); a property holds an enumerable of `ContentReference` and stores it as a serialized string.

## Index references to other content from a custom property

If the custom property stores references to other content instances, you should also have a "soft" link indexer for the type. In that case, when an editor tries to delete a content item, a warning appears if a property on another content item holds a reference to the item to be deleted. If the custom property is inheriting `PropertyContentReference`, `PropertyUrl`, or `PropertyXhtml`, then the soft indexing is handled by the base type indexer. The following example shows a soft link indexer for the previous custom property above:

The indexer is registered with the IOC container for the `IPropertySoftLinkIndexer` interface, which implements the generic `IPropertySoftLinkIndexer<T>` interface where the generic argument is the `PropertyValueType` for the property implementation.