Understanding Templates, Components and Repeatable Fields

Before you build anything, it's worth understanding the three building blocks CollectContent gives you for structuring content: templates, components and repeatable fields. Together they let you describe exactly what a piece of content should contain, without duplicating work every time a structure repeats.

Templates

A template is the field structure from which a piece of content is built. When someone creates a new item, they choose a template, and the template decides which fields they see, in what order, and what kind of data each one holds: text, images, attachments and so on.

Templates keep your team's output consistent. A "Blog post" template might always include a title, a hero image and a body field; a "Product page" template might include pricing, specifications and a gallery. Whatever the shape, every item created from the same template has the same shape, making content easier to review, export, and publish.

Components

A component is a smaller, reusable group of fields you can insert into multiple templates. Instead of rebuilding the same set of fields every time a structure repeats, you define it once as a component and drop it into any template that needs it.

A good example is a "Call to action" block: a heading, some body copy and a button link. On its own, it isn't a full template; nobody creates a standalone "call to action" item, but it shows up inside a blog post template, a landing page template and a product page template alike. Build it once as a component, and updates to its structure carry through everywhere it's used.

Components are what keep large template libraries manageable. Rather than dozens of near-identical fields scattered across templates, shared structures live in one place.

Repeatable fields

A repeatable field lets a template or component hold multiple entries of the same field group, rather than just one. Instead of adding "FAQ question 1", "FAQ question 2", and "FAQ question 3" as separate fields, add a single FAQ field group and mark it as repeatable. Editors can then add as many FAQ items as the content actually needs, no more and no less. You can also optionally choose to limit the maximum number of repeats an editor can create.

Repeatable fields are useful anywhere content naturally comes in a list: FAQ items, image galleries, author bylines, related links or product variants. They keep templates flexible without needing to guess a fixed number in advance.

Where to go next

• Understanding field types: the individual field types available to you.
• Creating a template: build your first template from scratch.
• Creating a component: turn a shared structure into a reusable component.
• Making repeatable fields: allow a field to be repeated.