Maintain your content model

15 minutes

Manager / Developer

0% complete

Maintaining the model is an ongoing task to get the best results from your content model in the long term. It doesn’t require much work but must be done regularly and diligently.If you’ve inherited your content model from someone else, we recommend going through the other e-learning paths in this section, too, so that you learn how to model properly.

When to create a new content type

3 minutes

Open

When to create a new element

4 minutes

Open

Typical content modeling red flags

7 minutes

Open

Content types are the building blocks of your content model. You want to make sure they are useful and avoid having too many odd parts that aren’t effective.

You’re sipping your morning coffee when an email arrives. “Could you add a new text element so we can fill in the Author name in the Article content type that you modeled a couple of weeks ago?” it reads. You log in without delay, add a new text element named Author, log off, and go about with your daily responsibilities.That’s how it usually is. Is it, however, the right thing to do?

In order to optimize a model, you need to be able to identify opportunities for improving it. The simplest approach to identify the opportunities is to recognize certain patterns. There are good and bad patterns. The good patterns are usually the ones that simplify things, such as naming conventions. However, they're useful only if they're followed or enforced.