Moboom allows you to separate your site's structure from your site's content using content sets. Learn what content sets do and how to work with them.
Content sets let you create content (like blog posts, product descriptions, contact details). You can then pull that content into pages.
For example, you can write blog posts in a content set. And then use that content for individual article pages, search result summaries, and featured posts on your home page.
Here’s what the content set for Moboom’s blog looks like. The blog has several posts each with fields like title, published date, tags, and so on.
This same content is then used in blog posts (like Add a Facebook Like Button) on a list of all blog posts (the Blog home page), and in search results (search for “facebook like button”).
You can create different types of content sets:
Content sets are pretty simple to use. To get started using content sets, create a managed content set:
Tip The managed content set course talks more about field types, but the most commonly used are Text for a short snippet of text like a headline and Textarea for about a paragraph or more of text.
Now you have a content set, but no content. So next, add some content:
Congrats! You’ve created your first item. Next, add your content to a page.
Once you’ve created a content set, add it to a page. This page will be a template, and it will display one item at a time. And depending on the URL, the page will display a different item. This system is actually pretty simple to set up.
Note Some widgets, like the Search Results or Blog Roll widget, will display multiple items on the same page.
So, to add a content set to a page:
Note While most widgets accept fields from content sets, some don’t. The Text widget works with content sets, but the Rich Text widget doesn’t.
Once you’ve finished adding content sets to the widgets, your page should look something like this.
You’ve now set up a page to use a content set.
But the preview in the studio is only showing one item (one blog post). To see other blog posts, you’ll need to understand how content sets work with URLs.
The URLs for pages using content sets have two parts:
Once you’ve set up a page to use a content set, click Preview to see the page in the browser.
Look at the URL, this will look something like: example.preview.moboom.com/blog-post
The /blog-post
part is the page slug. This is essentially the base URL of the page. Later, you’ll see how to add an ID after the slug to view different items (e.g., blog posts).
To see or edit a page slug:
Note As with any URL, avoid spaces, uppercase letters, and symbols in the page slug. These can cause issues in some browsers.
In the upper right, click Page Settings, and then click the Settings tab. These settings are mainly related to your page’s URL. The Page Slug is the base URL of the page. Later you’ll learn how to add an ID of an item after the slug to see that particular item.
Next, to display a particular item (e.g., blog post), use the item ID.
Every item you create in a content set has an ID, which looks something like: 4bffa20d-a74c-9559-4709-5231fc8b0be8
Tip While it’s a little TMI at this point in your understanding of content sets, if you create a Synced content set, you can manually set the ID for each item. That’s how the pages for this site have short, clean URLs.
First, find an ID, and then use it in a URL.
To see the ID for an item:
Note If you don’t see the id column, click View Columns, select id, and then click Apply.
To add the id column if you don’t see it, click View Columns, select id, and then click Apply.
Once you’ve found an item’s ID, use it in the URL.
To specify a particular item:
?id=the-id
For example, example.site.moboom.com/blog-post?id=436e09f7-5427-9567-97a7-544593faa5b2
Okay, so now you can specify a particular item, but the process is a little annoying. Learn some tips that make it much easier.
Now that you know how to build and use content sets, here are some ways to make the process easier.
Creating these links through this manner is time-consuming and error prone. So instead of building the links manually, you have a couple options:
Also, ?id=the-id
is ugly, and Google doesn’t like it. When you opened the Page Settings earlier, you may have noticed a Friendly URL field. This is how you specify exactly what the URL looks like. Read more about creating a friendly URL.
Okay, so you know how to specify one item. But what if you want to use several content sets on the same page? You can only specify one id.
For example, you might want to use one content set for the navigation menu of every page, and put your contact details in the footer of every page.
That’s where the Site Options content sets come in handy. They essentially have one item, but several fields. So use a Managed content set for your blog posts, and various Site Options content sets for simpler content—like your navigation menu, contact details, and so on.