Part 4: Creating Structured Data Forms

Now that we've explored the basics of eCrowds, the site features you get out of the box, and expanding upon your site, it's time to explore some of the more customizable elements of the system. Out-of-the-box, the eCrowds solution comes with 5 pre-defined content types: Blog Post, Wiki Page, Category Index, Standard Page, and Word Processor. Because these structured Content Types use forms as their foundation, they provide an easy means to structure content and to control the required fields for a given page, etc. You can create as many new Content Types as you'd like with eCrowds, but before you do so, you must create the form that Content Type will use to structure the page. In the next session, we'll walk you through creating a new Content Type - Press Release. First though, we'll create the form our Content Type will use.

Let's first think, at a high-level, about what fields your press release form should contain. Perhaps you've decided on the following fields:

Press Release Title
Press Release publication date
Press Release Body Content
Press Release Description
Press Release Contact

To make things easier on you, eCrowds already comes with default title, start date, WYSIWYG (word processor), and summary fields. So in this case, the only field you'd need to create is "Press Release Contact" information.

To create this field:

Click "Quick Links" in the top right-hand corner, and under "Components," select "Fields."
Click "Create new field"
Give your field the name "Press Release Contact" and select the field type:
Skip over content type and security policy for now, we'll cover those items later on.

Now, we want to add this field, along with the others, to our form.

To create a new form:

Click "Quick Links" in the top right-hand corner, and under "Components," select "Forms."
Click "Create new form"
Give the form a name, "PR Form", and drag and drop the desired default or custom fields for the form to use in the order they should appear. If we continue with our example above, you'd drop the following fields into your form:
1. Title
2. Start Date
3. Word Processor (wysiwyg editor)
4. Description
5. Press Release Contact (field created above)
Don't worry about formats or security policies yet, we'll get to that later.
Click "Create form" to submit.

Now that you have the fields and structure of your Content Type's form ready, tomorrow we'll cover how to create new Content Types for simple creation of consistent-looking new content.