Rock U - Content Management - Content Channel Types and Content Channels

Transcribed Video Content

Blogs, news, and web ads, and really so many other things in Rock all flow through content channels. And content channel types are the blueprint that we put together to make it easier every time you set up a new content channel. Let's look at what both of those look and how easy setup is. So let's find channel types. We'll go to admin tools up to settings and we'll look for content channel types. Click there. We've got a lot of great ones out of the box, and one I'm gonna look at is called blogs as this is something you'll commonly make a content channel for. Quite a few important things here. You name the content channel type, you pick the date range, and this depends on what kind of content channels you put beneath this. For blogs, you usually, they're only relevant to it's only relevant to add a single date. Whereas if it was events, you might wanna add a date range because an event happens between certain days and you want it to, kind of archive or go away after a certain time. For some content channels, dates won't, matter at all, so you can pick no dates as well. Then you can pick whether time is included along with the date range. For a blog, that's nice if you wanna release something at a certain time of day, for example. Then you can disable priority if you don't want certain items to have a toggle or a checkbox where you can say that these are priority items, that's helpful for things ads where they'll rotate in and out and you might want to just use a checkbox to say, this is priority right now, it should be displayed. Then disable content field. If you have some sort of item that will be added in this channel type that doesn't have content and you want to just show the attributes that are on a content channel, you can select to disable the content field, but it really depends on what kind of content channel you're gonna be adding. For blogs, we definitely want the content field. You can also pick whether you want to disable status and that's things when for content channel items, you can have some that are pending approval, approved, or denied. If you select this, every item will always be approved. Then you can pick whether this shows up in channel lists so that when you're adding a new content channel, this blog's content channel type is an option and we want that. Then channel attributes, this is something you can add that is an attribute that will be set once on the channel under these types or under this type. So we have blog image set up here, you'll see it again in a moment. Then item attributes, these will be on every single item within the content channels. And you can set these also individually on content channels, but if you have one will be in every content channel such as a summary or an image, you can add that here. Now let's go to content channels themselves. We'll go to admin tools, then content channels, and we've got quite a few here again. We'll click into the website blog and we'll edit it. Now there's some things to look at here, the name, description, and type. So we've picked the type of blogs, that's the content channel type we just looked at, meaning it will inherit all those attributes and other things that we set. We also picked a nice icon here and that will just make it easier for us to identify this in the future. Or if you wanna show it on your site, you can do that as well. Then here's that actual channel attribute that was just set on the content channel type. So we can pick a blog image for this blog if we'd . We can also select what kind of editor we want to use for our content, and we can pick structured content, and we can even have different tools configured. But this is a nice way if you don't wanna use HTML in your content, if you just want to type it out and have an easy way to bold, make headers, and more, you can pick structured content or HTML content, and then you can pick between the code or HTML editor. Then we can select some things whether personalization should be enabled, and we have much more information covering personalization in our documentation. And this is just about whether we want to enable features that allow us to show certain items to certain sets of people. We can also pick whether the items in the content channel are manually ordered, same with content or with the child items, then whether items require approval to go live. And if you're using something universal search, you can pick whether these are indexed so that they're easy to search. Then this is where you add child content channels to add a bit of hierarchy. Item attributes, these can be added on top of those item attributes we saw added on the content channel type. So author is one here, then content library. If you want to upload some of your items and let these be accessible to the Rock community and bless them, we have more content covering what the content library is about, what it's for, how to upload items, but this is where you would enable it for this channel and pick the license you wanna use and then hook up some different attributes. Then advanced, this is where you can enable RSS if you want. And this is a great way to allow people to pull your feed of blogs. And it's pretty simple. We can also enable tagging kind of you would do on a group or a person. But back to the RSS, we can pick a channel URL, and this is the URL publishing point. Then you can pick the time to live. So this is how often in minutes the RSS will come back or the feed will come back to see if there's any new items. And then the publishing point, this is basically the template to the URL that the content item can be viewed at. So this is where you actually have the information that the RSS is gonna pull. We'll save. Let's look at a real item, and here's an example. If we click into it, we can see things the approval status, whether it's pending, denied, when it went active, this can be out in the future, of course, and we have time enabled. Then if you have personalization set up, you can add things , content intents and audience segments and request filters to tailor this content towards certain people. Then here's the actual content library setup, and here's the content body. We're using code here, of course, just the code editor pulled up here. And then those attributes, we saw all these item attributes set up either at the content channel type or on this specific channel. And there we go. Here's an item. We can save this. We can easily display it on our site. And if you ever want to go back and do things copy the URL or look at the metrics for an item, you can secure it and more. You can even delete it easily. We'll click into metrics. We don't have data being collected for this content right now, but if you enable log interactions on the content channel item view block displaying this item, then you would be able to see basically the traction that these different items are getting. With the content channel type holding the structure and the channels holding the items, now you can start spinning up new streams really quickly and you can use those content channels to make sure that everything stays consistent.