Content Items and Types

Content items are the central objects in the CUE publicaton structure. They are generic containers for all the kinds of content you might want on your web site: news stories; magazine articles; theater, film, book and restaurant reviews; obituaries; interviews; stock market reports; photos; video clips; audio files; attached documents such as PDF files - the list is very long.

In addition to holding all these different kinds of content, content items also contain additional information about the content: metadata such as the name of the author and the article's publication history. Content items can also contain relations to other content items. A news story, for example, might contain relations to:

• Images to be displayed with the story

• Related news stories to be displayed as links in a "More about..." box

• A background video report to be displayed alongside the story.

Moreover, content items have an internal structure that varies according to content type, and different organizations can have very different requirements with regard to content item structure. For this reason, content items are customer-definable objects. All the content types required in a particular CUE installation are specified in a content type definition file called the content-type resource.

The content-type resource defines and names all the content types available to the Content Store, and for each content type it specifies:

• A set of fields. All the information in a content item is stored in fields. A text content item (generally referred to as a story in this manual) will usually have at least a body field for the main content and a title field (although different names may be used) plus a range of other fields that vary according to the content type.

• Optionally, a set of relation types. A relation type is simply a name used to classify an article's relations to other objects (other articles, images, multimedia objects, external links and so on). For further information about relation types, see Relations.

Since it defines the structure of all the articles in a CUE installation, the content-type resource is obviously of central importance. It determines:

• What is stored in the database

• What is displayed in the CUE Editor user interface

• What is made available to template developers in the CUE Front GraphQL API

For further information about this, see The content-type Resource.

Alongside the content-type resource files is another important resource file called the layout-group resource. This resource defines the internal structure of section pages. For further information about the layout-group resource, see The layout-group Resource.

The content-type and layout-group resources are publication-specific: if your organization publishes multiple web sites, then each site will be defined as a separate publication, and each publication will have its own content-type and layout-group resources. All the publications can, however, also make use of a collection of shared resources called storyline templates and story element types.

Story element types define the block level elements of which stories are composed – elements such as headline, lead text, paragraph, image, pull quote and so on. Each element type is defined in a separate resource (story-element-headline, for example).

Storyline templates define different sets of story elements for use in different contexts (different publications, different types of story and so on). When a journalist creates a new story in the CUE editor, she must first select the storyline template she wants to use. This will determine which story elements are available to her while writing the story.