Content Type Inheritance (Like Class Inheritance)

[ZacharyCPC]

I'm submitting a

[x] feature request

...about

[x] edit experience / UI
[x] admin experience UI
[x] Content Types or data management

Current Behavior

Currently, when I need a slightly modified version of an existing content type (i.e. it needs 1 or 2 extra fields), I have to create a completely new content type. The amount of "duplicate" content types tends to add up when building more complex apps.

Feature Request

I would like the ability to create content types that "inherit" the fields of other content types. For the purposes of this request, I'll refer to content types that inherit other content types as "sub-types", and content types that are inherited by other content types as "base-types".

For the most flexibility in building and re-using content types, I don't think base-types or sub-types should be special kinds of content type. Rather, all content types should have the ability to inherit or be inherited by other content types. From an admin perspective, this could be a dropdown in the content type settings that allows you to select an existing content type to be used as the base-type.

When editing an entity of a sub-type, the fields of the base-type and those of the sub-type should appear in separate accordions, similar to how Presentation fields display in their own accordion.

When developing views with a sub-type, all fields from both the base-type and the sub-type should be immediately available within the same entity object (e.g. Content object).

Feature Benefits

This feature would ensure the same fields/features are available anywhere the base-type is applied. Additionally, you wouldn't have to make the same changes to each content type variation as you must today; you could just update the base-type, and the change would reflect across all sub-types.

[iJungleboy]

We're looking into this, as it has been on the back of our mind for a long time now.

But we believe that we'll need to do more than just described here.
Based on our experience with SharePoint, we're pretty sure that we actually need to provide field-inheritance #3196 first.

The reason is that Content-Type inheritance quickly gets complicated, eg. when you want to inherit only some of the fields.

So we're tinkering with this - also in relationship to other things we have in mind.
Don't expect it too soon, but we are working on it 😉

[iJungleboy]

I just finished implementing it, docs are not quite done.

Note that we're doing content-type composition, not inheritance.

This is much more powerful and similar to how other enterprise CMSs do attribute management.

have fun!