Umbraco User's Guide

3

Document Types

• What are document types?
• How do you organize your site using document types?
• How do you work with document types outside of Umbraco?
• What are document type properties and which ones have special meaning?

This chapter covers all you need to know about the backbone of the content tree in Umbraco, which is made up of various document types. The simplest way to think about a document type is to visualize it as an object with various fields that hold data, similar to how a database table is set up in a relational database. The fields that you define for these document types determine how the data is stored in the database—that is, Nvarchar, Ntext, Date, and Integers—as well as how the user will interact with that data, in the form of the chosen Umbraco data type (covered more in Chapter 12). For the purposes of this chapter, it's sufficient to know that a data type is equivalent to an HTML input field that is used to enter content into the CMS.

See Appendix D for a comprehensive list of descriptions of each data type that come standard with your Umbraco installation.

In addition, this chapter covers the benefits of nesting document types and how to best design your site structure from the start to provide support for a flexible content structure.