Content: Create and manage website content

After you build the structure of your website, create the pages and define their layout, it is time to populate the pages with content. Sitefinity CMS content is easy to create, manage, and reuse. You create and edit content in the backend in the rich-text editor and via content fields, or, edit it on the frontend via inline editing. You can also upload images, videos, and other files that you store in libraries. For any Sitefinity CMS content, be it text or media, you can organize, manage, and make it findable internally for other team members and externally for anybody on the web.

Once you create news, an event, or other content, it is stored in the Sitefinity CMS project and other users can view, use, and edit that content.

To display content items on one or more pages of your website, you use widgets. Each content item has a widget that is used to display only that specific content item. For example, events are displayed on the website using the Events widget. For more information, see Display content on your website. 

Content in Sitefinity CMS comes in many forms, such as text, media, or content fields. The simplest way to create reusable content is by using Sitefinity CMS predefined content types, listed in the Content tab. These types of content are the ones most commonly used on websites, for example, news, blogs, forms, images, and so on. For more information, see Built-in content types.

These content types are a fundamental basis to build your site but if they do not fully complement your scenario, you can create new ones, for example, FAQs, or Author bio. For more information, see Dynamic modules.

In addition, content fields, custom fields, and related data are properties that define the content type.

Content fields and related data

Content fields provide additional means to categorize or enrich the content, for example with tags, extra information, or with related content. For example, if you are working with blogs and blog posts, for each blog post you can choose from a list with predefined default fields (such as Author and Title). You can also create one-to-one or one-to-many relations between different items. Sitefinity CMS makes it easy to display all related items on the frontend. For example, you can relate an image of a doctor to an article about Medical research. For more information, see Content relations: Related data.

Custom fields and additional information

Apart from the predefined fields for content items, you can add custom fields as well. For example, if you are working with blog posts and the predefined default fields do not suit your needs, you can also add a custom field, such as Author biography.

To manage the custom fields of content items, navigate to the Settings pane for the specific content type and click Custom fields.
For more information, see Overview: Custom fields.

You then display a custom field on your website by adding it to a template for displaying the content type, for example, Blog posts.
For more information, see Overview: Widget templates.

In terms of classification, content in Sitefinity CMS can be organized in flat or hierarchical structures. For example, blogs and their blog posts and lists and their list items are organized in hierarchical structure. On the other hand, news items are organized in a simple list with flat structure. You can classify your content items to organize them and you can use tags and categories to filter the content items when displaying them. For more information, see Overview: Classify your content using taxonomies.

With Sitefinity CMS, you can manage content both on content item level, content type level, as well as at scale. For example, you can publish or unpublish an individual item, or, via bulk actions, publish any number of items simultaneously. Or, you can set the permissions to edit a specific blog post or for all blog posts. In addition, you can define workflow for content approval, share and reuse content between pages or sites, and so on. For more information, see Manage content.

In case you have more than one frontend language for your site, you can translate all your content, including taxonomies, in other languages. Managing translated is straightforward and simple - you get an overview of the number of translations for each content item, switch between cultures, and translate your content assets.

For more information, see Translate content items, media items, and taxonomies.

In case you have multiple sites, before you create or view any content items, you must choose the site where you want to work. You do this using the selector in the upper-left corner of the page. Different sites can have different modules. 

Each site that uses the module has its own data provider. You can configure the provider to be shared with other sites as well.

Each module can use more than one data provider. For example, the News module of site A can use news created with site A or site B. Therefore, creating content items for one site allows you to use these items in all other sites. If you have configured a module to use more than one provider, when opening the module, you can choose news from which provider to display. All available data providers are displayed in the toolbar of the page. 
For more information, see Multisite: Manage multiple sites.