Entities | Minima

What is an entity?

An entity represents something distinct and identifiable in the real world, like a person, a product, or a place.

Each entity has a type, like Product or Person, which determines the properties it can have.

What is a property?

A property is either an attribute, or a relationship.

What is an attribute?

A Person has a Name, and a Birth Date.
A Book has a Release Date, and an MSRP.
An Organization has a Founding Date.

What is a relationship?

A Person is the Author of a Book.
An Organization is the Publisher of a Book.

Defaults

Minima is a content management system, so every entity has some default fields which you don’t need to define.

Name
Slug, a unique identifier for use in permalinks
Status, which is one of Draft, Submitted, Published, or Archived
External URL, to store an official website, product page, or other canonical URL for the entity

How publishing entities works

While articles belong to a single site, entities are a bit different – they belong to your organization.

Why?

A good example is a publisher of multiple sites, including one site about gadgets and another about video games.

Both are likely to cover Sony and/or its products regularly.

It doesn’t make sense for the editors of both sites to have to define Sony, the Organization, as an entity.

That defeats the purpose of having a CMS with a knowledge graph in the first place.

There are two layers of publishing an entity.

Setting the entity status to published

If an entity is published, it can be appear in responses from the public API of any site in your organization.

For example: Sony can appear as the Manufacturer of the PlayStation 5.

Giving the entity a permalink on a site

If you’d like Sony to have a publicly-available URL on a particular site in your network, like https://[site].com/company/sony, you can decide which sites in your network have a permalink for it.