What are the types of data?
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.
Related topics
- Section 2.3, “Concept: Content Entities and Fields”
- Section 13.1, “Concept: Cron”
- Section 7.1, “Concept: Users, Roles, and Permissions”
- Section 2.7, “Concept: User Interface, Configuration, and Content translation”
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
