Creating your own content type

Frequently units have a special type of content they would like to appear on their sites. Typically the best solution is for the unit to create their own content type. As a site administrator you can add your own content type by browsing to Structure->Content Types.

One example for this may be that your department has a lot of research projects it would like to present on the website. Each project has a title, start date, author, category, summary, body, and references. Since their is no KU content type for this you could just create this as a general KU content type. The problem is that makes it more difficult to group your research or to generate dynamic listings of the research later using views.  

This would be a good candidate to create your own content type. After clicking on Structure->Content Types, you can Add a new content type and define each of the fields you would like to display. By clicking Manage Display, you can choose what fields and labels you want to display. If you take advantage of Taxonomy/Tags for categories and lists, it will make it easy to generate high-quality views later on.

There are multiple resources on the web that go into details on creating custom content types. Below are a couple of recommendations:

• Custom Content Type Tutorial
• Create a custom content type (drupal.org)
• Drupal 7: Creating content types (youtube tutorial)