Adding Items & Featuring Them Across Your Site

With your Content Type set up (fields chosen, listing page and item page designed), you're ready for the part you'll do most often: adding Items. Each Item is one entry (one project, one service, one property), and thanks to all your earlier setup, adding one is now as simple as filling in a short form. This article covers how to add an Item and then how to feature your Items in other places around your site.

Adding an Item

Go to Content → Items in your admin and click to add a new one, choosing which Content Type it belongs to (Projects, Services, and so on). You'll fill it in across a few simple tabs:

  1. Give it a Title. This is the Item's name: "Vantage App Redesign," "Brand Identity," "42 Oak Street." It's the headline that shows on cards and at the top of the Item's own page.
  2. On the Listing tab, set what shows on cards. This is what appears in the overview grid:
    • Featured image: the main photo for the card and, usually, the top of the detail page.
    • Excerpt: a short teaser sentence that entices someone to click.
  3. On the Field Values tab, fill in your fields. Every field you defined on the Content Type shows up here with a friendly editor suited to it (see below). This is where the price, the gallery, the description, and the rest get filled in.

The right editor for every field

You never have to fuss with raw data. Each field type gives you an editor built for it:

  • Text and Textarea: simple text boxes.
  • Rich Text: a full editor with bold, headings, links, and lists.
  • Number, Date, URL, Email: the right kind of input for each, including a calendar picker for dates.
  • Image: an image picker to choose or upload a single photo.
  • Images: a bulk drag-and-drop uploader; drop a whole folder in at once, then drag the thumbnails to reorder them.
  • Select: pick one option from the list you set up.
  • Multi-select: tag-style chips; click to add each one that applies.
  • List: an add / remove / reorder editor, so you can build up rows (like menu dishes) one at a time and drag them into order.
  • Group: the bundled fields shown together in one tidy section.

Settings for each Item

A few housekeeping settings round out each Item:

  • Slug: the ending of the Item's web address. It fills in automatically from the Title (so "Vantage App Redesign" becomes vantage-app-redesign), and you can edit it if you'd like something shorter or cleaner.
  • Display order: controls where this Item sits relative to the others in the listing, so you can put your best work first instead of relying on date order.
  • Published date: the date associated with the Item.

Drafts, autosave, scheduling, and history

Items get the same safety net as your regular pages:

  • Drafts: work on an Item privately and only publish when it's ready. Unpublished Items don't appear on your live site.
  • Autosave: your work is saved as you go, so you won't lose it.
  • Scheduling: set an Item to publish itself automatically at a future date and time, perfect for a launch or an announcement.
  • Version history: every save is recorded, so you can look back and restore an earlier version if you change your mind.

Every Item gets its own web address

Once published, each Item lives at its own address: your Content Type's path followed by the Item's slug, for example /projects/vantage-app-redesign. That's a real, shareable page you can link to directly, send to a client, or point an ad at.

Featuring Items across your site

Your Items aren't stuck on their listing page. You can pull them into any other page (your homepage, an about page, a landing page) using a few different sections. This is how you put your best projects on the homepage or show a strip of services under your welcome message.

Collection Listing: embed Items on any page

The Collection Listing section drops a set of your Items onto any page. Add it, choose which Content Type to pull from, and decide whether to show all Items or hand-pick specific ones. It's the go-to for a "Featured Projects" strip on your homepage or a "Our Services" section anywhere you like.

Gallery: pull photos from a Content Type

The Gallery section can build itself from the photos stored on your Items, so you never re-upload images you've already added. It offers three ways to source them:

  • The current Item's photos: when the Gallery is part of an item-page design, it shows that specific Item's images (a per-project gallery that's different on every project page).
  • All Items' photos: combine the images from every Item into one big gallery, handy for an overall portfolio wall.
  • Hand-picked Items: choose specific Items and show just their photos.

Cards, Testimonial, and FAQ: fill sections from a Content Type

Three flexible sections (Cards, Testimonial, and FAQ) can pull their content straight from a Content Type instead of you typing each entry by hand. This is ideal when the same information already lives in your Items and you don't want to keep two copies in sync. To set one up:

  1. Add the section (Cards, Testimonial, or FAQ) to your page.
  2. Switch its source to "show many entries."
  3. Choose the Content Type to pull from.
  4. Map which field fills each part of the section, for example, which field becomes the card's title, which becomes its image, which becomes its description. There's a handy "Match by name" button that auto-fills these mappings when your field names line up, saving you from setting each one manually.

When you use Cards this way, each card automatically links through to that Item's own detail page, so a "Featured Services" card grid on your homepage becomes a set of clickable doorways into each full service page. Testimonial and FAQ sections work the same way for pulling in review-style or question-and-answer Items you've stored as a Content Type.

Putting it together

Add an Item, and it does a lot at once: it appears on your listing page, it gets its own detail page built from your template, and it becomes available to feature anywhere else on your site. That's the whole promise of Content Types: do the setup once, then simply add entries and watch them flow into every corner of your site, always consistent and always on brand.

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