We're counting down the days to the official SooperThemes Drupal 8 Release! Count with us as we will be writing a Drupal 8 related blog post every day for the next 8 days.

Drupal 8 content and content types video tutorial

view on sooperthemes.com if you can't see the video

This tutorial is for people who are new to Drupal 8. We'll be showing how to add content to Drupal 8 and how to change or add new content types. Content types are very flexible in Drupal 8 and that's what makes Drupal more powerful than WordPress and other systems for many use cases. 

Drupal 8's Content Overview Page

Just like all Drupal's previous versions this administration page is the central hub where all your content appears in one place. You get there by clicking the Content link in the toolbar. This takes you to an overview of all the pages in your Drupal website. From here you can edit and delete pages using the action links to the far right side of the table. Additionally you can operate on multiple pages at a time using the controls below the Action label.

The content administration page is not just for pages, using the primary tabs you can navigate to administration pages for files and comments. This can be extended by additional moduels that provide custom content entitities using Drupal 8's Entity API. For example on sooperthemes.com we also manage domain licenses and digital downloads on separate tabs, because these are custom entity types.

Adding Content In Drupal 8

Once you're at the content administration page it's easy to see how to add content. You start by clicking the blue button that reads "+ Add content". You'll now see a listing of content types that are available at your Drupal installation and you have to tell Drupal which type of content you would like to create. After choosing a content type you'll be taken to the content form where you get to fill in all the form fields that make up your content type. You'll learn more about these fields in the next section where we discuss adding fields to content types and adding new content types.

Drupal 8 Contact Management Administration Page

Adding Content Types In Drupal 8

The ability to create new content types and choose from a large selection of different field types is what makes Drupal the system of choice for many organisations that manage a lot of content. Companies of all sizes including Tesla, Disney, United Nations, and Qualcomm use Drupal because it's the best solution for managing a large amount of content on the internet.

To manage content types in Drupal 8 click Structure in the toolbar and then click Content Types.  Now you're looking at a listing of content types installed on your website. If you just installed a new Drupal 8 website with the default profile you will see the Article and Basic Page items.  If you installed one of our theme demo profiles or the free Glazed CMS installation profile you'll have a bunch more options. Check out our YouTube video above for a quick tour. 

Once you're at content types overview click the "+Add content type" button to create a new page type. The minimum you can do here is give your content type a name, for example "Special Page, or Forum Topic". There's a number of other options for your consideration when creating a content type:

Option
What it's for
Description
Administrative help text for content type
Preview before submitting
You can require or offer a preview of the content before submission
Explanation or submission guidelines
Additional help text for content editors
Publishing options 

You can choose whether this content should immediately be published upon saving. More importantly you should also check the "Create new revision" checkbox to ensure that you can compare and revert to older version of the content in case something goes wrong when editing the content. 

The other 2 options "Sticky at top of lists" and "Promoted to the front page" are legacy options that reference different ways in which your content can be prioritized in content listings (called views in Drupal).

Display settings
Choose whether to display the author and post date on this content type, which really only makes sense for blog posts or other social content. This should be disabled for most use cases. 
Menu settings
Selecting menus here enabled content editor to add the content items to menus on your website.

Creating A Jobs Content Type

Let's create an example content type for the new Careers section of our website. We'll need to post job vacancies, so let's call our new content type Jobs. To create a new content type go to Structure > Content Types and click the "+ Add content type".

Here we fill in the name of our content type and disable the options for author information and menu structure. After all we don't want all our job postings to clutter our menu system, you would use the views module to create an overview of available jobs.

Next click the "Save and manage fields" button. Now we're in the content type configuration page and this is where we add the fields that we need on our job vacancies. To see exactly how this works check out the video above!

Building A Content Type For Job Vacancies

Adding Visual Drag And Drop To Your Content Type

Finally we'll show you how to get even more control over the design of your content with Glazed Builder our visual drag and drop builder for Drupal 8 and 7. You can use Glazed Builder on any long-text field in Drupal on any type of entity. To enable Glazed Builder on your content type go to Structure > Content Type > Your Content Type > Manage Display. Here you can select one or more of your text fields (For example the body field) and switch the Format option from Default to Glazed Builder. Take a peak at the end of our youtube video to see the end result!