The basis of all created content is rooted in the document types that you create. Without any defined document types, no way would exist to create the content. Chapter 3 covers the details of creating a document type and how they are constructed. This chapter discusses what it means to structure the document types to create the content tree that you designed in your planning phase, as suggested earlier in this chapter.
Think about how you want the users of the Umbraco backoffice to work with the content tree. Some questions you might ask are:
The answers to these questions (and more) will determine how you build out your document types. For the purposes of this example, assume that the requirements dictate that you create two different editors — one for standard page content (who will have access to all the content) and one for editing news articles only. This means that the news editor should not be able to add standard content pages to the site. To control this access, you set the allowed child types as appropriate when creating the document type for news articles (covered in Chapter 3).
For the news articles, you want to create two distinct document types that you can add to the content tree (see Figure 8-1 for an illustration of the content tree):
Because you planned your content, you know that News Article will be a child node of the News Area, so creating the News Article first makes sense. Also, in this case, News Article will not have any child nodes allowed, so it's the perfect place to start:
Creating the News Article as a child document type of the News Area is not necessary because the two of them will not share any common properties. Setting the News Article as an allowed child type is not synonymous with its being a child of the News Area document type. The allowed child node type designation refers to the relationship between the two document types in the context of the content tree only.
Remember, too, that creating parent document types to share common properties, such as meta tags, is a good idea to avoid document property duplication. For more information on how to work with parent document types, see Chapter 3.
You can apply the same approach to many other types of content, of course, such as events, profiles, staff records, and so on. The next section discusses how templates fit into the content creation scheme.
The other noteworthy feature of Umbraco is its flexible node-sorting capabilities. You can easily sort nodes at all levels of the content tree by right-clicking a container node and clicking the Sort menu item. You have two ways to sort your nodes from the resulting Sort dialog: