Content modelling

Designing for flexibility, efficiency and utility.

Drupal content modelling overview

Aim

Design and implement a content model for a Drupal site so that the structure is coherent, consistent and flexible. This will support user needs for information discovery and presentation.

Approach

An experienced Drupal architect will assess the content requirements coming out of the Discovery Workshops and design a content structure to allow information to be efficiently discovered and displayed.

Outcome

A content model which addresses the requirements and works well with the capabilities of Drupal. This key artefact will provide the guidance a Drupal web developer will need to build your website; and also allow site visitors to clearly see content in a logical and structured hierarchy.

Drupal content modelling

Drupal is a powerful system under the hood and is capable of the most demanding content modelling needs. The best outcomes are achieved when the content model, as designed, works in with the structures and tools provided by the system.

Drupal is well known for its content modelling abilities. Ever since the days of the "Content Construction Kit" in Drupal 6, it has provided flexible and robust tools for modelling content. Where other CMS's of the time were limited to categories and Tags, Drupal had a rich set of entities and fields which allowed for rich content models to be conceived and readily built. 

Since that time Drupal has gone on to strengthen its capabilities. Drupal 7 saw the evolution to the entity and field system in core which still forms the foundation for content modelling in Drupal 9. The real strength of Drupal is in its ability to model relationships and then expose these in multiple ways for faceting, filtering and navigating content.

The content modelling process

Content modelling in Drupal is not so different from data modelling in other systems. In the most general sense Content Types can be thought of as classes, Nodes can be treated as instances and the fields can be thought of as properties. Fields can be shared across classes and can also be thought of as an interface in many ways. Structures such as Paragraphs and Blocks are akin to compositional units which can be combined inside of other entities.

All of these aspects combine to form a content model. The content model supports the data which is required to drive the website.

Morpht has been building Drupal websites for a decade. Before that its co-founder was involved in the semantic web technologies and knowledge management fields. Content modelling is in the blood at Morpht and it is something we love to do. It forms part of the Information Architecture service we offer. We relish demanding projects which require careful consideration and an eye to the big picture.

Frequently asked questions

Content modelling is the process of defining the structured content types, fields and relationships a site needs (e.g. "publication," "event," "person," "location") rather than treating every page as a blob of free-form text. Drupal's core strength is structured content, so getting the model right up front directly determines how flexible, reusable and searchable content will be for years; a weak content model is the single most common cause of expensive rebuilds later.

Migrating "as-is" from an old site without re-modelling content tends to just carry forward the old site's structural debt, inconsistent metadata, duplicated content, and poor findability into the new platform. Large-scale Morpht projects (such as re-architecting over a thousand pages and thousands of publications into structured site sections) have specifically used content modelling as the mechanism to fix this, not just migrate it.

Structured, well-tagged content is what makes AI-driven features (faceted search, recommendations, content summarisation, agentic content tools) actually reliable; AI applied on top of poorly modelled content just automates the existing mess faster. Content modelling is effectively the groundwork investment that determines whether later AI/DXP investment pays off.

Insights

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Case study

Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority (IPEA)

Morpht was able to provide IPEA with a new website on the GovCMS SaaS platform, upgraded to Drupal 9 and allow site editors to import all reporting data without the need of external help. The site also has a greatly improved page speed and a new design and interface which maximises the findability of Parliamentarian expense reports.
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Case study

Respect@Work

Morpht improved the user experience for the Australian Human Rights Commission's site through interest and behaviour-driven personalisation.
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Article

Managing lists in Drupal

An examination of the humble "list" and how content can be modelled in Drupal to be flexible, simple and editor friendly.
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Content processing for site migration

Learn about how to use the Migration API to massage and migrate source data into Drupal. A presentation by Kelvin Wong at DrupalSouth 2019.
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GovCMS demo site

Morpht has released a GovCMS demo site which demonstrates some techniques which can lead to easier more effective site builds for Government agencies.
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Information architecture for site builders

Information architecture for site builders video presentation presented at DrupalCon Sydney 2013. Find out about the horizontal aspects of Drupal, modelling multi typed objects, relationships and tips for building faceted classification.

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