Understanding the Content Area

The content area is where you'd be doing most, if not all, of your day to day work in DatoCMS if you're an editor or on the content team.

In this video we go through a quick recap of what we did in Chapter 2, to remember the models and blocks we made, which we'll be editing throughout this chapter.

The first thing you'd notice in the content area is that all the models we'd created - the people, blog posts, pages, etc., are neatly tucked away in the sidebar for us to start creating content with - but the blocks we'd created, such as the contact info and testimonials, don't show up. This is because blocks are inherently "embedded", or a part of models, and cannot be treated as standalone content records.

You also cannot filter the content view by blocks which are part of the content, which is why it's important to plan ahead and know which pieces of content are most "critical" or "frequent" to your project, and have them as individual fields or models.

You can, however, customize your content view to best suit your workflows! With powerful column configurations, filters, and search, you can tweak your content view to look and feel as you like, and save those filters as custom views for just you, or for your team.