Adding a Content Type

Adding a Content Type with Amber Matz In this tutorial, we'll walk through how to add a new content type. By the end of this tutorial you will understand how to add and configure a new content type Vendor for our demo site. To follow along, you should understand the concepts of content entities and fields and you should have a plan in place for your content structure. See the written version of this tutorial for links to these prerequisite tutorials. In the Manage administrative menu, navigate to Structure, then Content types. This page can also be accessed through the path admin/structure/types. The Content types page appears showing all the available types of content currently on the site. Click Add content type. The Add content type page appears and we can fill in the fields as follows. For Name, let's enter Vendor. A machine name for this content type is automatically generated based on the name. You can edit that by clicking the Edit button next to the machine name. The Description field is used to explain the use of the content type. Let's fill in, Information about a vendor. In the vertical tab labeled Submission form settings, we can configure the form that is used for creating and editing content of the Vendor type. The Title field label is the label of the Title field that is shown when editing or creating content of this type. Let's change Title to Vendor name. Preview before submitting allows you to choose whether you should allow content creators to preview the content before submitting. The options are: Disabled, which means no Preview button would be provided anyone creating or editing this content. Optional, which provides a Preview button to content editors along with the regular Save/submit button. And Required, in which editors are forced to preview content before it can be saved or published. Let's select Optional. This will allow content creators to preview the content when they are ready to, rather than forcing them to always preview before saving content. The Explanation or submission guidelines field allows you to provide instructions for creating or editing content. Anything you put here will be displayed at the top of the page when someone is creating or editing content of this type. We'll leave this field blank but, keep in mind, it can be a useful place to add Help text for your content editors. Let's move on to the next vertical tab, Publishing options. This is where we decide on default options for new content of this type. The Published checkbox allows you to decide whether to make the content item publish by default when the content is saved. Let's keep this box checked to make vendor pages published by default. But a content editor can uncheck this box before saving their content to save a draft. We're only setting the default value for the content type, not the only value. Next is the Promoted to front page field. In a default website, this setting can be used to show content on the home page in a "River of News" format. We'll leave the default value as unchecked. This field could also be useful as a filter when configuring views or lists of content that only appear on the front page. And if the site is configured as such, can provide a way for content editors to easily promote content. Next we have Sticky on top of lists. In a default website this setting can be used to keep content on top of a list. It can also be useful as a filter when configuring views. We'll leave this unchecked as well for the default value. Finally, in this vertical tab, we have Create new revision. By leaving this on by default, we can better ensure that a new revision is created each time the Vendor content item is being edited. Note that changing these settings does not affect the content items that have already been created. So this is a good task for the beginning of your site build before any content has been created. Let's move on to the next vertical tab, Display settings. This tab contains the field Display author and date information, which, when checked, will display the author's user name and the content publication date on each vendor page. However, we don't want that, so let's turn it off. Next we have Menu settings. Available menus allows us to decide which menus that this type of content can be added to. Vendors do not need to appear in menus so let's uncheck all the menu options. Since we are not adding any content to a menu by default, we don't set the default parent item either. But when you check an Available menu, you'll need to select a parent item as well. OK, we've configured all the defaults for the Vendor content type. Click Save and manage fields to save the content type and move on to adding and editing fields. We're then directed to the Manage fields tab, which is where we can add fields to our content type but we're going to save this task for a separate tutorial. Now go ahead and return to Content types and add a new content type for Recipes. See the written version of this tutorial for further instructions and specific values. But the general process is the same as what we have just walked through. In this tutorial we walked through the steps of how to add a new content type Vendor. On your own, create a content type, Recipe. See the written version of this tutorial to refresh your memory of the process and for values specific to the Recipe content type.