What is a Content Type?

A "Content Type" is jargon for what is a simple programming concept. I've been asked this question many times over the years, and hopefully this post will cut through the obscurity once and for all.

Document. Event. News Article. Staff Member. These are all examples of Content Types.

Which input fields would you expect to see when adding a new Staff Member? You'd probably want "First Name", "Last Name", "Date of Birth", "Phone Number", "Active Projects", etc. For Events, you'd likely want "Event Title", "Start Date", "End Date", "Location", and "Contact Name". The fields serve to describe the item, and any field(s) can be added to or removed from a content type.

That's it. A content type is the term for a "bucket" of input fields. All items marked as "Events" share the same fields. If you add a new input field to the "Event" content type, then all current (and future) Event items will have that new field, too. Pretty simple, huh?

The real power of content types isn't the categorization alone. Since all this information is now nicely structured within these content types, it's a whole lot easier to form relationships among different items. Remember that "Contact Name" field in the "Event" content type? A developer could easily set that field to pull in all staff members (items belonging to the "Staff Member" content type) and allow the user to select which staff members to use.

Many modern CMS platforms (e.g. Drupal, Pods, or SyntaxCMS) allow developers to easily add and configure new content types without touching a line of code.