CoreMedia Digital Experience Platform 8 Developer Manual, Version 7.5.45-10
6.2. Basic Content Management | 6.2.1. Common Content Types

Requirements

An appealing website does not only contain text content but has also images, videos, audio files or allows you to download other assets such as brochures or software.

In addition, current websites aim to reuse content in different contexts. An article about the Hamburg Cyclassics might appear in Sports, Hamburg and News section, for example. An image of the St. Michaelis church (the "Hamburger Michel") on the other hand might appear in Articles about sights in Hamburg or religion. Nevertheless, it's not a good idea to copy the article to each section or the image to each article because this is error prone, inefficient and wastes storage.

Therefore, content should be reusable across different contexts (different sites, customer touchpoints for instance) by just applying the context specific layout and without having to duplicate any content. This increases the productivity by reducing redundancy and keeps management effort at a minimum.

Solution

CoreMedia Blueprint is shipped with content types that model common digital assets such as articles, images, videos or downloads. All these types inherit from a common parent type and can be used interchangeably. In addition, none of these types has fixed information about its context so that it can be used repeatedly and everywhere in your site. The context is first determined through the page which links to the document or through the position in the folder hierarchy of the website (see Section 6.3.2, “Navigation and Contexts” for more details).

Common Content Types

CoreMedia Blueprint defines the following types for common content. Using CoreMedia's object oriented content model projects can define their own content types or add to the existing ones.

e-Commerce Placeholder Types

Blueprint comes with some additional content types required to build representations of entities of an e-Commerce system.

e-Commerce Content Properties

A short description of the properties provided for e-Commerce scenarios is provided below.

Common Content Properties

All common content types extend the abstract type CMTeasable to share common properties and functionality. Teasable means that you can show for each content that inherits from CMTeasable a short version that "teases" the reader to watch the complete article, site or whatever else.

A short description of the core properties of content is provided below. Properties specific for certain Blueprint features such as teaser management etc. are described in their respective sections (follow the link in the Description column).

Media Content

The abstract content type CMMedia defines common properties for all media types. Media types for content such as pictures (CMPicture), video (CMVideo), audio (CMAudio), and HTML snippets (CMHTML) inherit from CMMedia.

A common feature of all CMMedia objects is the ability to generate and cache transformed variants of the underlying object (see CMMedia#getTransformedData). This ability is extensively used for rendering images without the need to store image variants and renditions as distinct blobs in the system.