CoreMedia CMS manages content organized in freely configurable so-called content items. Content items normally contain the information of one entity. They may contain only a single information, an image, for example or may merge all information concerning a content object.

To have a consistent appearance and to avoid unnecessary effort, templates should be used for the creation of content items. CoreMedia supports this in the form of content types, which can be designed following object-oriented principles.

Content items in CoreMedia CMS are described by so-called document properties (also called fields or properties for short). An item of the type "press statement" for example may consist of properties such as:

On the other hand, an image item has different content fields, such as dimensions and graphical data.

The more structured a content item is in specific fields, the more flexible is the access to contents from output templates, for web page construction, for example.

Furthermore, the Site Manager allows you to use content fields as search criteria. So it also pays off here to put some more effort in the creation of content types and to have as many properties as possible.

Since content type and source format of the content items are application-specific, CoreMedia CMS content types are not rigidly programmed. You have the possibility to design the content types and fields that you need to represent the maximum amount of structured information from your content in CoreMedia CMS. In general, this design process will be done in cooperation with members of the editorial staff.

The content types can be defined in one or several XML files, to support a more modular content type assembly. Its structure is described more detailed in the following sections. In Chapter 5, Appendix you learn how to install your content type file.