Reusable Content

Part of the role of a developer on a web project is not just providing editors with a mechanism for getting text on a page, but also helping to maximize their productivity in creating and editing that content.

Methods for Reusing Content#

The most effective ways to boost an editors productivity is to provide a starting point that is as close as possible to the final product.

There are three ways to do this:

• Providing sensible defaults (or initial values)
• Duplicating existing content
• Creating content templates

Sensible Defaults#

Sensible defaults help when an editor doesn't know exactly where to start from. They should still have something to start with.

For example, if you have a field in the CMS responsible for controlling a button's text, you would want to first require that the field have a value. But, secondarily, you should provide some text as a starting point. For a button, this might be something like: Click Me.

Stackbit has its own sensible default value for some fields, but also provides a way for developers to control their own defaults when modeling content.

Duplicating Content#

After an editor has created some content, there should be an easy way that they can then use that content again as needed by duplicating it. For example, if a site has one visually-rich landing page, an editor shouldn't have to start from scratch to create another.

While some CMSs have this feature, Stackbit ensures that editors can duplicate content regardless of the features provided by the CMS through our content presets feature.

Templated Content#

Another way for editors to work quickly is through the use of template variations that can be used as a starting points for pages or for components on those pages. For example, a card component may have several different layouts. Rather than asking an editor to choose the layout each time, they could work faster if they could pick the arrangement of contents first, and then edit to their liking.

This is another aspect of the content presets provided by Stackbit.