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How to COPE with External Entities

Profile picture for user polynya
Principal developer
Nomensa Ltd
Experience level
20 minutes
3.03 germanium
Starts at
Ends at
Industry track

This session will show how to use the module External Entities to share content between Drupal 8 websites while maintaining a Single Point Of Truth.


Create Once Publish Everywhere (COPE) is a strategy to allow content to be created in one location and published in many places. The term is used to describe the same content appearing on multiple pages within a single website but equally applies to the same content on multiple websites.

Sharing content between Drupal websites if often done by synchronisation, such as using Deploy and related modules to copy entities. This approach means there are multiple copies of the content which must be updated whenever the master is changed.

In this session I will show how to use External Entities to share content between Drupal 8 websites by using a remote data source for content entities.

A simple example is a "teaser" card (showing title, summary and image) which links to the full page on the source website. I will explain in detail how to create the external entity type and how to allow editors to browse a list of external entities to add a card to a page.

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