How we cut our content model from 12 types to 6
We consolidated the content model behind wilkesliberty.com from twelve content types down to six — in place, without breaking a single URL — and wrote up how. Here's the short version; the engineering story is in the whitepaper.
The problem: a content model that grew in the dark
Content types accrete. A site starts with a handful and, a few campaigns later, has a dozen — several of which are near-duplicates that differ only in a field or two. Ours had reached twelve. Editors had to guess which type a new page belonged to; the front end carried a branch for each; and the SEO fields were scattered differently across every one. None of it was broken, exactly. It was just heavier than the site it described.
What we did
- Twelve types became six — Basic Page, Resource, Solution, Event, Person, and Career — each with a clear, non-overlapping job.
- Three offering types merged into one. The former Capability, Industry, and Platform types folded into a single Solution type classified by a
solution_typetaxonomy, so "what we do" and "who we serve" share one model instead of three. - Every URL survived. The consolidation happened in place: node identities and path aliases were preserved, so no external link, bookmark, or search result broke — and there is no wall of redirects to maintain.
- SEO became editable. A single structured metatags field replaced the per-type, per-field SEO patchwork, so titles and descriptions are writable in one consistent place across every type.
Why it matters
The payoff is a model that is simpler to author, simpler to render, and cheaper to change — with none of the URL debt a big-bang rebuild would have created. It is a pattern any content-heavy site can borrow: consolidate toward the smallest set of types that still expresses the real distinctions, and do it in place so the migration is invisible to everyone outside the CMS.
For the full engineering story — how we collapsed the types without downtime, kept identities stable, and untangled the field duplication that had built up along the way — read the whitepaper Collapsing a Content Model in Place.