Hippo CMS Information Architect Tour	To get introduced to the role of CMS Information Architect, take the following tour.
CMS Information Architect Howto	A collection of howto's for small tasks an information architect may want to do.
CMS Information Architect Concepts	A collection of concepts a CMS information architect may want to know.

General introduction to document types

The guaranteed similarity of many different documents allows fast development of any application that makes use of the documents. For example, similar documents can be rendered in the same way on a website, therefor the rendering of all similar documents can be defined in a single template. Given a document type, a web developer can create this template before the documents even exist. No rendering information is required in the documents itself, so authors do not need to know about rendering, just about what kind of information they are supposed to provide.

Other possible advantages of the guaranteed similarity of documents is in performing searches (faceted search) and data mining on the documents.

The guaranteed similarity of documents is possible by the use of document types. Document types have another advantage: they are a kind of business rules that ensure that all authors know what information they are supposed to supply.

Document types are composed by information architects. The Hippo CMS provides information architects with a convenient document type editor for defining document types.

A set of document types that is based on thorough knowledge of what the company needs makes content management particularly advantageous to the company.

A document type field can be deleted without requiring updating the instance documents of that type. Deleting a field from the document type editor will simply result in that field not showing up any more in the document editor when you open a document of that type. Note that if you have documents of the edited type in the repository, and any of those documents have values for the deleted field, if you now re-add the previously deleted field, it must be of the same type as it was before. Changing the type of a field is not supported if you have existing documents that define that field.

If a new field is added to a document type and documents of that type already exist, it may require you to update these documents manually. This is the case if new, independent information is expected in the documents. Such information has to be supplied by external sources, typically human authors.

In the Hippo CMS, the documents consist of fields. Documents of the same type may or must contain the same fields. If you know about databases, you can think of a document as a record in a table and the type of the document as the table. With more complex documents, the document would correspond to related records in several tables and the type of the document to the set of related tables (all in a relational database).

CMS document types not only define which fields are allowed or mandatory. A CMS document type may also define preset values for fields. Furthermore, a CMS document type defines how a document of the type is presented to an author: The Hippo CMS provides authors with a document editor for writing information into a document. The layout of the document being edited is configurable and so is the behavior of the editor. This configuration is defined in the document types.

Document types can be defined by nesting compound types. This allows reuse of these types and the easy definition of complex layouts for presenting documents to be edited.