DDEV is the official local development tool of Drupal. And like Drupal, DDEV depends on the support of the open source community.1.5. Concept: Types of Data
Last updated on
14 April 2025
The data and information on your site is divided up into four types, which are edited, translated, and stored differently. These four types are:
- Content
- Information (text, images, etc.) meant to be displayed to site visitors. This type of information tends to be relatively permanent, but can normally be edited.
- Configuration
- Information about your site that is not content, but is also relatively permanent, and is used to define how your site behaves or is displayed. It is sometimes also displayed to site visitors, but tends to be smaller pieces of text (like field labels, the name of your site, etc.) rather than larger chunks that you’d normally think of as Content.
- State
- Information of a temporary nature about the current state of your site, such as the time when cron jobs were last run.
- Session
- Information about individual site visitors' interactions with the site, such as whether they are logged in and their cookies. This is technically a subtype of State information, since it is also temporary.
Attributions
Adapted by Jennifer Hodgdon from "Overview of Configuration (vs. other types of information)", copyright 2000-2025 by the individual contributors to the Drupal Community Documentation
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