Create and delete content items

Martina Farkasova

9 minutes

Content items

To start creating content in your project, you'll need what we call a content item. Content items represent individual pieces of content, such as a blog post, product update, or case study.

Explore your path to mastery

Get to know the ins and outs of content items at first sight.
Make your first steps by creating your first content item.
See how your content item transitions through its lifecycle in different workflow steps.

Create a content item

Before you start creating new content, ask yourself if you need a completely new item, or if you'd rather copy something you already have in your project.

In Content & assets > Content, click Create new in the upper right corner.
If collections are available to you, select one for the new content item.
Select a content type.
If multiple workflows are available, select one for the new item.
Click Create.
Type a name for the new content item.

And that’s it! Your new content item is now created. Each change you make is saved automatically.

See your content in contextWith live preview, you can see how your content appears in your channel while editing, without leaving Kontent.ai. In the top left of the content item, click

to open live preview.

The name you’ve given to your item serves as the item's identifier in Kontent.ai. And because the content item name is shared across all your item's variants, you can find your item in any language.

Simultaneous editing

When you and a colleague of yours open the same content item at the same time, both of you get notified by a banner on top of the screen. When your colleague starts editing some element in the item, Kontent.ai locks the element for you and you'll see a notification with a refresh button in the element. Kontent.ai will unlock the element for you after your colleague leaves the element. When your colleague makes an item-wide change, such as setting a due date, you'll get notified by a banner on top of the screen, nothing gets locked for you.

Create localized content

If you’re part of an international team and you’re creating content in different languages, you might want to look into language variants. Language variants represent different versions of your content for different languages and regions. For example, you might have a single blog post translated into English, Spanish, and French.

Duplicate content items

Sometimes, you might find yourself in a situation where you need a slightly different version of the same content item. Maybe you’re A/B testing your landing page and want to change a thing or two to see which version is more appealing to your visitors. Or, you’re putting together a new job advertisement for the same job position but in a different local branch.

In Content & assets > Content, open the item you want to duplicate.
Click More actions in the upper-right corner.
Choose Duplicate.
Choose Including content.

A duplicate of your content item named “Item_name (copy)” is automatically created in the project. Your new duplicate contains elements, components, and linked content of the original content item. The version history, contributors, comments, and due date don't get copied. If you have several language variants of the content item, all of them get duplicated as well.

Reusing content without duplicationDuplicating your content is not always the best option, as your list of content items might get easily cluttered by different copies of the same content. Sometimes, all you need is to create a linked item that contains the information you need to share across multiple content items.

Duplicate empty content items

If instead of

Including content you choose

Empty, you create a blank copy. This is the same as creating a new content item of the same type. Make sure to name your new item so you can easily find it in your project.

Move items between collections

Every content item can be moved under a single collection. Your choice of the collection also applies to all variants of the item.

Requirements for moving items between collections

You are assigned to the collections you want to move between.
In both collections, you have the Edit permission for the content types of the selected items.
In both collections, you have the Edit permission for all translated variants of the selected items.

In Content & assets, open a content item.
Under the content item name, click Change collection.
In the Change collection dialog, select a collection from the Move item to drop-down.
Click Move.

Need to move several items at once?In

Content & assets, select a few content items. Then click

> Change collection.

Delete content and set content expiration

You can delete content items individually while editing them, or delete items in bulk from the content list. You can only delete content items and language variants that are not published. If a content item has variants created for multiple languages, you can only delete one language variant at a time. When you delete a language variant, content in other languages stays intact and the item returns to a Not translated status for that language. To delete a content item:

Open the item for editing.
Click More actions > Delete.

Deleted content items can be immediately restored by clicking the Undo button. Content items that have been deleted for a longer period of time cannot be restored.

To delete more content items from your project:

In Content & assets > Content, select content items using the checkboxes next to their names.
Click in the top right.
Choose Delete.

If the Delete option is greyed out, the content is published, and you need to unpublish it first.

Content expirationThere might be times when you only want to have your content published for a limited time only. You might be running a campaign or launching a time-limited offer on some of your products. In such cases, setting an expiry date would be the right choice. To do that, schedule the content items to get automatically unpublished and archived at the right time.