Building Better Drupal Websites Through Structured Content and Collaboration

With the release of Drupal CMS in January 2025, building Drupal websites has become more accessible than ever. This makes it the perfect time to revisit the fundamentals of how a successful Drupal site should be planned and built.

This article covers three main topics:

1. Why structured content is important.
2. Drupal’s strengths in managing structured content.
3. How creating a content model early offers benefits at every phase of site creation.

The Chaos of Unstructured Content

It’s entirely possible to build a website – even in Drupal – where every page is a custom creation, existing in isolation and connected to others only through menus or manually added hyperlinks. Such a website provides no clear distinction between types of content or defined relationships between pages.

This approach may work for a small website, but it won’t scale. As the site grows, consistency falters, content lists become unmanageable, and updates become time-consuming and error-prone. The result is a site that’s increasingly difficult to maintain and chaotic.

The Power of Structured Content

Structured content is information organised in a consistent way using fields, relationships, and metadata rather than written as free-form text.

Content is stored in discrete chunks – such as title, summary, body, image, date, category, and author – rather than as a single block of text. These chunks are defined by a content model, which specifies what fields exist, the type of data each holds, and how content items relate to one another.

A strong content model provides a clear blueprint for building, displaying, and maintaining content. It underpins scalable websites and enables flexibility, automation, and consistency.

Why Drupal Excels at Structured Content

Drupal is designed for structured content. Its administration interface allows site builders to create custom content types, defined by fields for different kinds of data. As many content types as needed can be created and they can be as simple or as complex as required. Vocabularies support strong categorisation, and entity references define relationships between content items.

These content types, vocabularies, and entity references form the basis of content construction in Drupal. They enable consistent display, automated listings, filtering, and related content, with associated changes applied across the entire site automatically.

This flexibility stems from Drupal’s use of entities. Two key entities in this content model are nodes and terms:

• A node is a single piece of content created from a specific content type. For example, each event is a node within an Event content type.
• A term is a category within a vocabulary, part of Drupal’s taxonomy system. For instance, each tag in a Tags vocabulary is a term.

All entities are fieldable, meaning they can be customised with additional fields. Fieldable entities bring flexibility while maintaining consistency. The data held within fields can be accessed through Drupal’s APIs, enabling Drupal to act as a back end for headless websites, a content repository for multichannel publishing, or used to train custom AI agents that understand and can act directly on the site’s content.

This combination of fieldable entities and an API-first architecture is what makes Drupal such a powerful, extensible platform when paired with a well-defined content model.

Describing the Content Model in detail

Creating a content model is something experienced Drupal site builders do instinctively. Incorporating this in a formal document called the Drupal Content Architecture, or ‘DCA’, offers significant advantages, especially during the build phase of site creation.

The DCA acts as a blueprint for the website. At its core it includes:

• Defined content types.
• The vocabularies used for categorisation.
• The fields each entity contains, including data type and broader requirements.
• Entity relationships defined through entity reference fields.
   

The first draft of a DCA often begins with a simple list of content types gathered from early discussions. It’s then refined throughout the project. While it is primarily a build document, starting it early benefits every stage of development and the following sections illustrate how this is achieved.

The Immediate Benefits of Collaboration

Developing the DCA early and collaboratively creates a shared language between strategy, design, and development teams. It aligns priorities, reduces misunderstandings, and prevents costly rework.

A DCA that evolves throughout the project:

• Encourages shared ownership and alignment.
• Strengthens teamwork and cross-discipline collaboration.
• Smooths transitions between teams and phases.
• Acts as a single source of truth for decisions.

Investing time early to establish the DCA pays dividends: it streamlines project management, reduces over-engineering, promotes skills sharing, and maximises Drupal’s content management strengths.

These benefits add value not only to the current project but to every future one. They are felt by individuals, within teams, and across the entire organisation. Partnering with a full digital experience and build agency such as Zoocha enhances outcomes by harnessing the power of collaboration.

The UX Design Phase

The UX phase focuses on understanding stakeholders and users to define goals and success metrics. Early collaboration between design and build teams ensures that Drupal’s capabilities are recognised and leveraged from the outset.

The refinement of the DCA during this phase helps enrich the final solution.

Key opportunities:

• Identify content types to inform the information architecture and user interactions early.
• Map relationships between content to enhance navigation and filtering.
• Allow design and build team feedback to shape ongoing user research.
• Share discovery tools (e.g. Miro boards) and reports for transparency in decision making.
• Surface technical possibilities early – many “complex” requirements are simple in Drupal.

• Balance ongoing research and estimated implementation effort to maintain project viability.

   

The UI Design Phase

The design phase translates research insights into tangible page layouts that reflect the client’s brand and project design principles. Ongoing collaboration ensures the designs stay true to the outcomes of discovery, and take advantage of Drupal’s capabilities, rather than working against them.

The DCA helps streamline build effort by providing an opportunity to refine design implementations with reference to the content model and Drupal’s capabilities.

Best practice includes:

• Using the content model to guide consistent layouts.
• Creating reusable components.
• Sharing prototypes early for feedback on feasibility.
• Providing open access to designs for discussion and clarification.
• Ensuring designs align with Drupal’s capabilities to avoid rework and delay.

It can be tempting for developers to review designs quickly and approve them as ready to build. However, comparing the evolving content model with the visual designs provides a valuable opportunity to critically examine every aspect of the page designs before development begins. These discussions represent a significant opportunity to clarify understanding, ensure requirements are fully detailed and reveal where small design adjustments can save significant effort without compromising quality or functionality.

When reviewing designs, developers might ask questions such as:

• Do the fields shown in the design for each content type exist in the content model?
• When a list is presented, what content type is it based on? What is the default order, and can users change the order or filter content? If the design shows three example items, how many should actually be displayed per page, and how will users access additional items — through pagination or another mechanism? What does the pager look like?
• Do designs work across different break points to ensure responsiveness?
• Where does each link go? If a link points to existing content, could an entity reference field provide a more robust solution than manual linking?
• When dates appear across different page designs is there a preferred and consistent format? Is the date shown at the top of content the creation date, the publication date, or the date of the last update?
• A featured item is shown — how is that chosen? Would a simple boolean ‘featured’ field on the content type allow easy display of the most recent featured item?
• When components look similar or serve the same purpose, can they be merged? If differences depend on a specific field or content type, could a technical variation be implemented instead of separate components to help maintain design consistency and avoid technical debt?
• Some fields have multiple options — are these static, or will more be added later? If additions are frequent, would linking the field to an editable vocabulary via an entity reference field be a better approach?
• Related content cards appear at the bottom of a page — how are these determined? Could a site-wide tagging vocabulary be used to associate related items? If so, what content types use that tagging, and do corresponding card designs exist for each?
• Is there anything in the design that looks simple but is technically complex? Could minor design changes achieve the same outcome with less effort?

It’s advisable to carry out an internal review before presenting finalised designs to the client, as it can be difficult to reverse decisions once designs have been shared. Throughout external design discussions, make it clear that designs could evolve, particularly when a more efficient solution is identified that maintain functionality while reducing effort and complexity.

The Build Phase

The build phase brings the research and designs to life. By this stage, the DCA should be finalised, queries resolved, and a clear understanding of requirements agreed across all teams.

The DCA results in a robust final product delivered faster and with fewer surprises.

A strong DCA supports:

• Efficient creation of content entities and relationships.
• Junior developers working independently with confidence.
• Focusing senior developers on complex areas.
• Clear sequencing between back-end and front-end work.
• Early preparation for testing.

• Future support of the product post-launch.

   

The Test Phase

Testing validates that the website meets both design and functional expectations. Testers benefit from early access to the DCA, which provides clarity on what to expect and how to verify it.

At launch, the result is a well tested high quality Drupal site.

A DCA enables:

• Early test planning with defined validation points.
• Provision of meaningful test content aligned with real structures.

• Efficient verification of relationships and workflows.

   

Beyond the Model

The DCA can evolve beyond simply detailing the content model to incorporate other valuable information:

• A project summary and links to key documents.
• Descriptions of the wider purpose of content types and vocabularies.
• Path definitions for each content type for clean URLs.
• Expected vocabulary values.
• Content dependencies to guide smarter planning decisions.
• API and integration definitions.
• Editorial workflows, and permissions for maintaining content types and vocabularies
• Design references and supporting links (Figma, Storybook).
• Views, filters, and pagination settings.
• Other functional requirements not covered elsewhere.
• Migration requirements when this is a site rebuild.
   

Anything clarified early helps prevent delays later in the build.

Summary

The Drupal Content Architecture is not bureaucracy — it’s the foundation of efficiency and creativity, especially for larger teams.

A well-documented DCA reinforces Drupal’s strengths in structured content management, enabling websites that are powerful, robust, flexible, easy to maintain and extensible.

Start every project by defining and documenting the content model. Collaboration around a DCA builds alignment, accelerates delivery, and results in Drupal websites that truly fulfil their potential.