Intro to Content Channels

Rock's static content tools are great. We've already seen how we can customize our messaging using the HTML editor. Sometimes though, you still need the ability to add structured dynamic content to your site. In the old days that meant firing up a development tool and writing your own code. While custom coding is certainly an option in Rock, in many cases it's simply not needed.

Let's take a look at how Rock's dynamic content tools can have you extending Rock in no time (and without learning C#). Here are the three main components we'll review:

  1. Content Channel Types - Channel types define the structure for the dynamic content tools. They define what attributes are available on both the channels and content items. Rock ships with several content channel types ready to use out of the box.
  2. Content Channels - Content channels are implementations of the channel types. For instance, because there is a channel type of Blogs, you can make blog channels for the organization's website, a specific person and/or a specific area of your organization.
  3. Content Items - These are the specific data elements that make up a content channel. For a blog channel these would be the specific blog posts; for the website ads channel these would represent the specific promotions.