Content types

Choosing a content type

Every page on the site is one of these types. Choose by purpose, not by appearance — the type controls which fields you get, how the page is listed elsewhere on the site, and what metadata search engines receive.

See a test page of each content type on the demo site: https://govcms.convivial.io/demo/content

Type	Use it for
Page	Site structure and static content. Most of the site is Pages, arranged in the main menu.
Section	Landing pages that introduce an area of the site and link down into it.
Article	Time-based information: news, announcements, blog posts, presentations. Has a Published date and is classified by Article type.
Resource	Evergreen information such as guides, policies and publications. Listed by Topic and Audience.
Event	Events with a Start, End, Location and optional Series.
Person	Staff profiles and content authors.
Alert	Time-sensitive, dismissible site-wide notices with a Start date, End date and a Type that sets the colour.
Collection	A curated list of content.
FOI disclosure	A record of an FOI request.

The remaining types — Topic, Audience, Article type and Language — are lightweight pages used to group other content. Create them sparingly and reuse them.

How the types relate

The types fall into three kinds, and knowing which is which tells you where a new piece of content will appear:

• Structural — Page, Section, Collection, Article type. They form the site hierarchy: you place them in the menu, and other content sits beneath them.

• Items — Article, Event, Resource, FOI disclosure, Alert. Dated, and listed automatically: an Article appears under News and beneath its Article type, an Event under Events, a Resource under Resources beneath its type, an FOI disclosure under FOI. You do not add them to the menu.

• Classifiers — Topic and Audience. Every Topic and Audience page lists the Articles and Events that reference it, automatically. A Person page lists the Articles that name them as author in the same way.

So the listings on the site look after themselves: create an Article with the right type, topics and audiences, and it shows up in five places without anyone editing a list.

Listing pages

The site's landing pages are ordinary content that editors can open and adjust:

• Home, News, Events and People are Sections whose listing is an Embedded View component — recent articles, upcoming events, people cards — with other components around it. Edit the introduction and the components around the view as on any page; the view itself is configured by a Site administrator.

• Search, Resources and FOI are Collections: faceted search pages whose filters sit beside the results. Their layout is a Site administrator's job; editors normally change only the title and introduction.

Shared fields

All the main types share the same building blocks, so once you know how to edit a Page you can edit anything:

• Title, Description and Thumbnail — used wherever the page appears as a card, teaser or search result.

• Header — introduction, banner image, banner palette and featured links.

• Content — the rich text body.

• Components — structured blocks such as accordions, cards, tabs and statistics; see Component types.

• Attachments — files for download.

• Metadata — owner, review-by date, stage, goal, intent, and the taxonomy terms that classify the page; see Taxonomies.

The fields are described one by one in Editing a page.