Should I use different content types or tags?

Question

I am working on my first Drupal site and I am worried about building things that will cause me trouble down the road.

The site is a move from a custom CMS to something more manageable. I didn't build the old CMS either.

I have several items under labels like news, press release, announcements, etc. As I'm building out the content types I realize they could all be the same thing except they are considered something different by end users.

Would something like this be a candidate for separate content types or one content type and I could tag each piece of content as "news" or "press release" etc. ?

I'm hoping I can learn from someone else's mistake and get some hindsight on the topic.

Answer 1

The above responses are all excellent and this is a great question. I struggled with this and was unable to find much written on the topic.

When I initially built my first Drupal site, I only had a couple content types and almost all my content was an "article." I just added a ton of fields to my article content type! I don't want to say this approach is wrong for all projects, but it ended up being the wrong one for my project.

It seemed OK at first: as I got better with views, I realized I could display any fields in any context I wanted and I even started (erroneously) thinking that content types were somewhat irrelevant. And, as my colleagues above point out, you can do an awful lot with taxonomy.

But as I got closer to rolling the site out to the client and considered how they would maintain the site, I realized I was in trouble. Having everything lumped together under "article" makes for a long input form and confusion. Also, I came to realize that as much as I love fields, display types can come in handy in certain cases, and purpose-specific content types make managing display types easier/clearer.

So I overhauled my entire site and now I've got purpose-specific content types (it's a music label site)...

Articles (just for news articles now)
Album Reviews
Artists
Frequently Asked Questions
Quotes
Shows
Songs

Answer 2

I'd go for content types. That way you can easilly filter the content for the specific types when needed later.

It's easier to display all different content types at once, then to hide specific ones by their tags.

Answer 3

You could go either way. If the structure of the different pieces of content you listed is different, I'd go for different content types. Otherwise, taxonomy will be a simpler, and cleaner way to go.

As soon as you start requiring different fields on different pieces of content, then it's time to split off into a new content type.

Keep in mind things like presentation (display) - different layout will be easier to handle (with something like Display Suite) on different content types, rather than different taxonomy terms.

Answer 4

• Its pretty much depends on your vision of requirement you may want in future.Content types are field-able bundles which contains entities of same type.Same type in the sense of different fields you bind on them.
• In your case it looks like it will be good to have different content types reason being you might want to have word limit on body for news but not for press release,you may want to have videos linked with every(required) news item but not with other two,let say you want user with specific user role to add/edit news nodes only but not the other one,or you want anonymous user to see only press release nodes but not the other two.
• But again have a second thought if you are pretty sure that every thing is about to be same on all nodes,its just tagging, go for taxonomy.
• Last thing for consideration , if we consider content type as folders , nodes as files and taxonomies are tags files are tagged with. It makes more sense to have similar kind of files in one folder rather having all files in one folder,differentiated with tags. As the time you search for a file, you know what can be the worst case and that also when you have tons of files.