# Content Collections

URL: /docs/content/collections/
Section: collections
Tags: collections, schemas, validation

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Content Collections Define typed schemas for your content to ensure consistency and catch errors early. Do I Need This? No. Collections are optional. Your site works fine without them. Use collections when: You want typos caught at build time, not in production Multiple people edit content and need guardrails You want consistent frontmatter across content types Quick Setup bengal collections init This creates collections.py at your project root. Edit it to uncomment what you need: 1 2 3 4 5 6from bengal.collections import define_collection, BlogPost, DocPage collections = { "blog": define_collection(schema=BlogPost, directory="blog"), "docs": define_collection(schema=DocPage, directory="docs"), } Done. Build as normal—validation happens automatically. Built-in Schemas Bengal provides schemas for common content types: Schema Required Fields Optional Fields BlogPost title, date author, tags, draft, description, image DocPage title weight, category, tags, toc, deprecated APIReference title, endpoint method, version, auth_required, rate_limit Tutorial title difficulty, duration, prerequisites, series Changelog title, date version, breaking, summary Import any of these: from bengal.collections import BlogPost, DocPage, APIReference Custom Schemas Define your own using Python dataclasses: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18from dataclasses import dataclass, field from datetime import datetime from typing import Optional @dataclass class ProjectPage: title: str status: str # "active", "completed", "archived" started: datetime tech_stack: list[str] = field(default_factory=list) github_url: Optional[str] = None collections = { "projects": define_collection( schema=ProjectPage, directory="projects", ), } Validation Modes By default, validation warns but doesn't fail builds: ⚠ content/blog/my-post.md └─ date: Required field 'date' is missing Strict Mode To fail builds on validation errors, add to bengal.toml: 1 2[build] strict_collections = true Lenient Mode (Extra Fields) To allow fields not in your schema: 1 2 3 4 5define_collection( schema=BlogPost, directory="blog", strict=False, # Allow extra frontmatter fields ) CLI Commands 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8# List defined collections and their schemas bengal collections list # Validate content without building bengal collections validate # Validate specific collection bengal collections validate --collection blog Migration Tips Existing site with inconsistent frontmatter? Start with strict=False to allow extra fields Run bengal collections validate to find issues Fix content or adjust schema Switch to strict=True when ready Transform legacy field names: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12def migrate_legacy(data: dict) -> dict: if "post_title" in data: data["title"] = data.pop("post_title") return data collections = { "blog": define_collection( schema=BlogPost, directory="blog", transform=migrate_legacy, ), } Remote Content Collections work with remote content too. Use a loader instead of a directory: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9from bengal.collections import define_collection, DocPage from bengal.content_layer import github_loader collections = { "api-docs": define_collection( schema=DocPage, loader=github_loader(repo="myorg/api-docs", path="docs/"), ), } See Content Sources for GitHub, Notion, REST API loaders. Info Seealso Content Sources — GitHub, Notion, REST API loaders

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Metadata:
- Author: lbliii
- Word Count: 455
- Reading Time: 2 minutes